CommonWealth Magazine has just posted an article I wrote on alternative ownership models for daily newspapers — including the Boston Globe. And, no, I don’t mean Jack Welch.
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Dan,Great piece on the changing landscape of newspaper ownership. Intriguing as the nonprofit model may be -it seems like a form of triage that may work better in smaller markets or markets where a higher percentage of the population still reads newspapers. I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence that the form functions in Manchester and St. Petersburg.It seems feebly optimistic or hopeful to believe that “deep pockets” will allow the NY Times Company or any other company to survive without inventing a more profitable model of syndicating or delivering content across platforms that continue to gain the larger audience that newspapers can’t seem to stop losing.We might all lament what the NY Times Company is “doing” but I’d rather hope that the papers that still have concentrations of journalistic talent will figure a way to build quality in new platforms (and a way to make money on it)by applying standards of excellence that made the Old Gray Lady the best in class.It’s foolish for any of us to think the newspaper business can recover from a world where private equity monsters figure a way (or through their own arrogance believe they can figure a way) to make the newspaper model even less sustainable than it is by sucking monetary value out of weakening institutions.The numbers don’t lie, younger generations don’t read newspapers for the same reason they don’t watch network tv or the nightly news. They obtain the content they want on the terms they want.