“ If newspapers had protected the public interest like they were meant to, they would be more profitable. Everyone would be better off today — including newspapers — if newspapers had chronicled this transfer of value. Yet, by failing to protect the public interest, they helped create the conditions for the transfer of value away from people who do stuff, to people who speculate on stuff. These are the poor choices of management, who committed strategic seppuku by trading near-term profit for long-run prosperity. Newspapers are full of awesome journalists who are deeply ethical people who chose journalism exactly because they want to do meaningful stuff that matters. But newspaper management — like the management of nearly every other industry under the sun — traded tomorrow for today. And that’s the problem that nichepapers — just part of a larger generation of “M” organizations — are solving.
