Newspapers’ New Owners Turn Grim

Critics of newspapers say that part of the problem is that the industry has lost its ability to surprise. Tell that to the guys who have just bought in. “The news business is something worse than horrible. If that’s the future, we don't have much of a future,” Sam Zell, who bought the Tribune Company last year, said recently in The Baltimore Sun. “I'm an optimist, but it is very hard to be positive about what’s going on,” said Brian P. Tierney, who bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News in 2006. “The near term and medium term at the paper is more negative than what we expected,” said OhSang Kwon of Avista Capital Partners, which bought The Minneapolis Star-Tribune in late 2006. These are all smart businesspeople, with significant success in other endeavors, who took a hard look at the wave-tossed publishing sector and appointed themselves as life savers. And very soon after jumping in, they too began foundering in the tall waves.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/business/media/24carr.html?ref=todaysp...
(requires registration)