Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book was a disappointment. It suffers from the failings of a collection of short articles written for different purposes by different authors. There is a good deal of repetition and many of the analyses are superficial. The LA Times / Chicago Tribune fiasco is treated in detail but I didn't learn a lot I hadn't seen in press coverage of the acquisition and its sequelae.
The notable exception is the superb essay from 1995 by Elizabeth M. Neiva. She discusses how the introduction of photocomposition reduced the production costs for newspapers and resulted in significantly increased profits. Then the IRS began appraising family owned newspapers on what a potential buyer might pay for the paper rather than book value. The heirs of many publishers found they could not pay the inheritance taxes and sold the papers to publicly held firms. This essay is currently available on the web.
In an industry with declining revenues the only response to Wall Street's pressure for "growth" for a publicly held firm has been to cut costs year after year.
The treatment of possible solutions to our current problems was not convincing. I would like to have read about nonprofit journalism models such as the Poynter Institute's St. Petersburg Times and the new ProPublica project.
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