Newspapers Shrink, But Investors Line Up

As Industry Struggles, Multimillionaires Are Eager To Become Newspaper Barons

(CBS)  At the rate newspaper circulation is falling, your paperboy could be out of a job soon, CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason reports.

So why did public relations executive Brian Tierney pay half a billion dollars this summer to buy the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, even though both papers have steadily been losing readers and ads to the Internet?

"We didn't buy it to cut it. We didn't buy it to manage the decline of an enterprise," Tierney said at a news conference.

Tierney's not alone. Wall Street may have soured on the newspaper business, but multimillionaires seem to be lining up at the chance to become newspaper barons.

Former General Electric chief Jack Welch is interested in buying the Boston Globe. Media mogul David Geffen is looking at the Los Angeles Times. Billionaires Eli Broad and Ron Burkle have made an offer for the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune.

What's the attraction?

"It's kind of like owning a sports team," says Phillip Mayer, author of "The Vanishing Newspaper." "A lot of owners aren't in it for the money. They're in it for the best seats in the stadium — and for a newspaper owner, it's sort of the best seat to what's going on in that town."

But across the country, circulation has been in freefall. In just the past six months, the L.A. Times lost 8 percent of its readers. The Inquirer lost more than 7 percent, and the Globe lost more than 6 percent.

"The last few months have been worse than anybody thought it was going to be," Tierney says

In his book, Mayer charts the steep circulation downfall and sees a vanishing point in 2043.

"Because if you extend the line on the chart the readership disappears," he says. "And without readers you can't have newspapers."

In Philadelphia, Tierney plans to invest more in the Inquirer. He doesn't think newspapers are dinosaurs. "I think papers — newspapers — are the past," he says.

Now, he says, they need to deliver news in print, online and over the phone. But with the latest erosion in readers, Tierney has told his employees that more job cuts could be coming.

"There's a business challenge, so nobody's doing the happy dance around here," Tierney says. "We got a lot of work to do."

If newspapers don't enter the new era, they could be writing their own obituaries.

[mjv2944]

How else can a poor little ole millionaire get his story told about how he needs more tax relief, and how that will help us peasants, The media is a very biased group, whether left or right in the political arena. It is hard to find someone who just states the news and not their opinion on what it means. Read the news and let us makeup our on minds.

[perception5]

People want to own newspapers or anyother media outlet so they can put their own spin of the facts-of-the-day. Look at the NYTimes the rich liberals that own that paper have for decades contaminated folks with their own "left tilt" on the news. They are anti GOP and did in fact not endorse any GOP candidates this time around.
NYTimes = Zero creditability

[sjsuprofbr]

We teach in quality journalism schools that biased should be kept out of news reporting. But media execs, business people looking to attract an audience and big buck advertsing dollars, want controversy which bias enables. So they build their media enterprise around a viewpoint, attitude or bias. They can get richer that way.
Jouralists sometimes must toe the line or get the boot. If the public would complain about bias MUCH MORE the bottomline dollar would be threatened. Change happens! When people just check it all out and say nothing,
you simply feed the beast you hate.