To illustrate the last point, a lot of journalists love the explanation that what is happening now is a result of the change in ownership that happened 15-25 ye

To illustrate the last point, a lot of journalists love the explanation that what is happening now is a result of the change in ownership that happened 15-25 years ago away from families. They wanted to increase margins by reducing costs (journalists, etc.). The lower quality has finally caught up with these. For example: It was a time of “greed is good” in American capitalism, and newspapers were still profitable in those decades. The old family owners were bought out by chains that sought returns of 10 to 15 percent a year, far more than the former owners had ever expected. The new owners’ first priority was to keep the share prices up, so they had to keep the profits high, so they started cutting costs–and the biggest cost in running a newspaper is the journalists. There are few newspapers in the United States that employ even half as many journalists as they had 15 years ago. Yet news-gathering was and remains a highly labour-intensive business. In effect, the new owners and managers gutted the content in order to maintain their high profit margins. Now, most of them are out on golf courses, and the newspapers they ran are on the rocks. The normally insightful Gwynne Dyer: http://www.straight.com/node/246627 http://www.straight.com/node/246627 I have heard variations of this reasoning a few time in the last month or so.