commbasics

Lots of people are wondering what it means for Jeff Bezos to buy the venerable Washington Post Company .  Can he make it profitable again.  I say, that's not the question. there is a historical reality that everyone is ignoring about journalism: it wasn't supposed to be profitable. From the beginning of this country, which was in large part launched by a healthy dose of print journalism , newspapers were money pits.  Their primary goal in life was to support a certain cause.  For example, Joseph Pulitzer was Missouri politician who amassed a significant personal wealth.  He bought an interest in one paper, flipped it quickly to another investor and then used that profit to buy another.  He merged the two papers the St. Louis Post Dispatch supporting Republican causes.  His personal wealth continued to grow so he bought the New York World , which was bleeding cash at the time, and went into a frenzied competition for readers with the N...

A couple of weeks ago I started talking about the changes at UBM which has opened up a torrent of comment and readership on this blog.  Almost doubling the audience.  That's good.     Kevin Morris, nice guy What's even better is that people are really talking about how journalism and Lou Covey, S*** Disturber media is changing.     To be honest, most of the comment has been negative, mostly about UBM, and mostly from competitors and former employees.  Little of that stuff was publishable and after contacting most of them, they all withdrew their comments (Yeah, I'm a nice guy).  But there were some very productive responses and a couple were from Kevin Morris, editorial director of Tech Focus Media .     I emailed Kevin directly and we made a date to talk about it face to face at the Design West Conference in San Jose.  I made my first Spreaker broadcast from it.   And away we go...   Related articles Are j...