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[QUOTE="bevosu, post: 2920117, member: 46"]
Another factor helping kill local newspapers...

(after mentioning the web and advertising losses)
[I]
This story is all too true as far as it goes. But it leaves out one major player: the private equity industry. Private equity has been gobbling up newspapers across the country and systematically squeezing the life out of them to produce windfall profits, while the papers last. The cost to democracy is incalculable. Robust civic life depends on good local newspapers. Without the informed dialogue that a newspaper enables, the public business is the private province of the local commercial elite, voters are uninformed, and elected officials are unaccountable.

COMPANIES WITH NAMES LIKE Alden Capital, Digital First Media, Citadel, Fortress, GateHouse, and many others that you’ve never heard of have purchased more than 1,500 small-city dailies and weeklies. The malign genius of the private equity business model, of which more in a moment, is that it allows the absentee owner to drive a paper into the ground, but extract exorbitant profits along the way from management fees, dividends, and tax breaks. By the time the paper is a hollow shell, the private equity company can exit and move on, having more than made back its investment. Whether private equity is contained and driven from ownership of newspapers could well determine whether local newspapers as priceless civic resources survive to make it across the digital divide,[/I]

[I][URL="https://prospect.org/article/saving-free-press-private-equity"]Saving the Free Press From Private Equity[/URL][/I]
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