More Buffett on Newspapers

Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post mines more of Warren Buffett's negative comments about the newspaper business:

[from Buffett Pessimistic About Newspapers]

As early as his 1991 letter to shareholders, Buffett recounted, he warned of looming problems in the industry: For the first time, he wrote then, newspapers no longer held a monopoly on news and information.

In today's economy, Buffett wrote: "Simply put, if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the Internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed."

Average daily newspaper circulation in the United States has declined each year since 1987. At The Post, print advertising revenue decreased 4 percent in 2006 from the year before.

And for newspapers that have pinned their revenue hopes on their Web sites, Buffett had a sobering prediction: ". . . the economic potential of a newspaper Internet site -- given the many alternative sources of information and entertainment that are free and only a click away -- is at best a small fraction of that existing in the past for a print newspaper facing no competition."

The Oracle of Omaha is dead on, in this time and place.

tags: warren+buffett, the+coming+death+of+newspapers, frank+aahrens, social+media, old+media, mainstream+media

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