Two Insightful Analyses of the Newspaper Industry

“The economic fundamentals of the newspaper industry are no longer present.”                       

— Warren Buffet, May 2007 

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 “I tell you I have been in the editorial business going on 14 years and it is the first time I ever heard of a man’s having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper. 

“Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries who know just as much about good acting as I do about farming and no more. 

Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up the heavy leaders in finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it. 

“You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business. Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha and I tell you the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands. Heaven knows but that I had been ignorant instead of cultivated and impudent instead of diffident I could have made a name for myself in this cold, selfish world.”

                                     — Mark Twain, How I Edited an Agricultural Paper, 1870