jay fredrickson

LA Times: Zell is Not the Problem

I believe comparing newspapers to Fannie and Freddie and Lehman is nonsense. They have absolutely nothing to do with each other. There are some good, well written newspapers that do a fine job of covering local local local news and they are struggling too, so thats not the answer, and wasn't 10 or 20 years ago.

The reason newspapers have failed is the classified revenue that ran page after page after page, and funded the entire fixed cost structure of every newspaper has moved to other venues. Google, CraigsList, career builder, you name it, classified ads are a perfect match for a quick searching world.

You can blame management, editors, writers, whoever. The real fault lies with the newspaper companies that failed to understand how important the computer and internet was going to be in the movement of classified ads.

Knight Ridder was close, in 1982, with Viewtron. Then they killed the project due to the cost of the computers needed by end users. T.
the rest is history.