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So it seems as though the railroad metaphor in the Economist blog was apt: once the railroads/newspapers could no longer use finance in order to establish monop

So it seems as though the railroad metaphor in the Economist blog was apt: once the railroads/newspapers could no longer use finance in order to establish monopolies and then extract monopoly rents from their customers, it was good old competition that did them in. There was a good article on a New Republic blog examining how Politico has managed to grow and make a profit, even in print, while traditional newspapers have continued to wither: http://www.tnr.com/article/the-scoop-factory?id=82d8d496-d402-4863-b98d-8967de7cc6ab http://www.tnr.com/article/the-scoop-factory?id=82d8d496-d40...

hristov 17y ago
Not sure about that metaphor. I don't know much about the railroad's pricing but it seems to me what did them in was that the government decided to subsidize their competitor. The government poured trillions of dollars into highways and there just wasn't much the railroads could do. The railroad is actually more efficient than the road so it is a very bad metaphor for a paper newspaper. Of course that did not matter once the government started making roads and offering them for free to all car owners.