“The average 2004 operating margin of publicly owned newspapers — that’s the profit margin before such items as taxes, interest and depreciation — was 20.5%, according to the industry analyst John Morton. That’s roughly double the average margin of the Standard & Poor’s 500.” LA Times Nov. 24 2005.
See, the way you make newspapers with declining readership even better is by slicing their staffs even more.
Who doesn’t know that? Can’t put anything over on those cool cats at Knight Ridder, eh?
And Knight-Ridder is one of the good chains.
Imagine the bad ones.
It’s what big conglomerates do best…suck all the cash out until there is nothing left.
It makes me wonder how good the media might be if they were employee-owned (not likely, but one can dream) or self-contained, not part of the bottom line of a bigger company.