I assume you are being serious with these comments so I'm just curious...what's your problem with Diane Rehm?

It is a potentially big big revenue source for the liberal rags. I can't believe I am giving this idea away for nothing.

NPR is cutting 7 percent of its staff, suffering from a crash of the stock market that has significantly hurt its endowment and from a noticeable decline in corporate underwriting

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To the quicker, in which this organization stumbles off the horizon into, into political obscurity, the better off we will all be.

There is no room, no reason, no financial justification to keep a government-run news organization on the air.

Here in the States papers have delusions of grandeur.

If the major metro papers collapse, I expect that we'll see a resurgence in small community weekly and daily papers, except that there is one serious caveat; can they wrest that classified stream back from Google and Craigslist? If they can't we will have to hope that blogs, with their miniscule costs, can somehow pick up the slack, or our democracy will be poorer for it.

I couldn't agree more with you. I think that there is a place for local journalism. Revenue streams need to be creative to solicit readers/buyers, but also cheap enough to make it worth investing/selling.

I have personally contemplated starting a local newsletter/weekly reader because I believe I could do a better job. I can only conclude that the massive hemorrhage of mass media is because they advertise like the common spammer, and leave readers without meaningful content.

You've got to disaggregate the problems that newspapers are having (which are real) from the problems caused by acquisition.

This brings up another question I've had for a long time--Why do European papers seem to be thriving?

I have no expertise in how the newspaper business is run--however, I travel to London at least four times per year and am always struck by the sheer amount of newspapers.

Granted, London is a metro area of about 7 million people, but they must have at least 8 or 9 newspapers. When you go on the Continent, as well, major European capitals all seem to have at least 3 dailies, sharing space on the newsstand with the Interantional Herald Trib and the FT.

As an aside, the British press seems to be out front on marketing. Many of the papers give free DVDs out as premiums. For a sucker like me I always wind up buying a paper that gives away a free DVD. I've got a stackful of DVDs on "The British at War" and somesuch topics. I had to buy a damn region-free DVD player for the suckers!

I have never seen this done in the US.

Thus, you have insane things like Zell's buyout which was a windfall for former Trib stockholders, required very little investment on the part of Zell, but was financed by leveraging employee pension plan.

The reason for the Trib's current bankruptcy is directly because of the risky financing scheme--not because of the papers profitibility.

That's right. You've got to disaggregate the problems that newspapers are having (which are real) from the problems caused by acquisition.

NPR’s Dian Riehm

I hope NPR lays off this old bag of bones. They should put her in a kayak, drop it into the Potomac and send her off to sea to be devoured by sharks.

Also: on papers. The Trib, for instance, makes money. The problem began a decade ago when ownership moved from privately-held, largely family orgnizations to public conglomerate corporations.

Stockholders of major media conglomerates like the Tribune company demanded massive profit percentages and were not really concerned with the public obligation of journalists (which family firms tended to honor).

Thus, you have insane things like Zell's buyout which was a windfall for former Trib stockholders, required very little investment on the part of Zell, but was financed by leveraging employee pension plan.

The reason for the Trib's current bankruptcy is directly because of the risky financing scheme--not because of the papers profitibility.

How? By not letting our news product atrophy. By making sure we were number one in our market for news. By making sure we were number one in our market for presentation and quality. By understanding that our market was a regional one and not just one particular community. And by zealously protecting our classified ad base. We did all this in the face of tough competition from other overlapping papers and local radio. And guess what? They all manage to stay in business too, in more or less the same kind of way. Of course, we all had another in-built advantage. Every one of the key players in this market is privately held, either as an independent business or as part of a small regional chain.

Most of the MSM in the print world have conspicuously failed in all of these areas. Pap and filler are served up as news, whether one-source stories generated by their own "reporters" or pablum masquerading as "world news" downloaded from the AP. Newspapers are constantly redesigned but never better organized. Most newspapers have shrunk their market to their home town rather than reaching out to neighboring ones that are economically connected for economies of scale. They have given up their classifieds to Google and Craigslist. And after making all these mistakes they're still expected by the stock market that trades their publicly-listed shares to produce profit margins that are only sustainable on a short-term basis, through shredding quality and customer value. It is simply not a sustainable business model.

If the major metro papers collapse, I expect that we'll see a resurgence in small community weekly and daily papers, except that there is one serious caveat; can they wrest that classified stream back from Google and Craigslist? If they can't we will have to hope that blogs, with their miniscule costs, can somehow pick up the slack, or our democracy will be poorer for it.

Local journalism is very important. The reason is the same as can be illustrated by the electoral college. You don't want large conglomerate news orgs to be the only place where news is published. You lose objectivity, independent investigative reports, and many people just want to know what's what with local news.

While I believe the typical news org has been shooting itself in the foot by not vetting journalists with plagiarists , fact checking etc, there has to be a successful model in running a money making newspaper.

To lose local news media isn't a bad thing as long as it's replaced by something more efficient, more open, more honest.

But there's a third thing: newspapers have been conglomerated through leveraged buyouts in which the entities being purchased were burdened with the debt incurred by the purchase. I've always thought that was foolish in an industry with structural problems. I think that particular business model has collapsed from bad assumptions.

Before we can decide what the solution for the newspaper biz is, we need to disaggregate the effects of the various different problems. I think there's probably room in the new media picture for traditional newspapers—just not with all the debt from decades of leveraged buyouts.

Until that happens I'm not sure we can draw any conclusions about economies of scale.