economics

Newspapers' fall from grace

Forbes has a profile of McClatchy Co. after its absorption of Knight-Ridder that's titled "McClatchy's Fall From Grace." It includes this data point: "The [share price] decline leaves McClatchy, the nation's third-largest newspaper publisher by daily circulation, with a market capitalization of barely $1 billion."

That's about what McClatchy paid for the Star Tribune in 1998.

Selling ice cubes in Antarctica

Fortune has a piece on the challenges facing the newspaper business that asks: "Can newspaper publishers turn the Internet from a threat into an opportunity ...? It's a long shot, but it's their only hope. Their plight is something not often seen in business: Newspapers remain important institutions, providing a valuable public service, but their business model is slowly, or maybe not so slowly, going away."