Munger Tells His Newspaper Company That Papers Are Finished
Munger Tells His Newspaper Company That Papers Are Finished
(Bloomberg) -- Charles Munger, who’s a
newspaper company executive as well as a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. vice chairman,
said U.S. newspapers have no future.
“Technological change is destroying the
daily newspapers in America,” Munger, 96, said Wednesday in Los Angeles at the
annual meeting of Daily Journal Corp., the publishing company where he is
chairman. “The revenue goes away and the expenses remain and they’re all
dying.”
Berkshire, the conglomerate controlled by
Warren Buffett, announced last month that it would sell off its newspaper holdings.
BH Media and the Buffalo News will be acquired by Lee Enterprises Inc. in a
rare divestiture for Buffett after he spent years snapping up local newspapers.
Buffett, a fan of newspapers since he was
a boy, has lamented the decline of the industry as it suffered plummeting
readership, ad competition from the web and newsroom cutbacks. He said last
year that most newspapers are “toast.”
“They’re all going to die,” Munger said
Wednesday. “It’s a sad thing.” He named some exceptions, saying the New York
Times and Wall Street Journal are likely to survive.
Any pain that the Daily Journal faces
from the decline in newspapers can be mitigated because it owns a bank-heavy
portfolio of stocks, Munger said. The company also sells software and other
tools to U.S. courts.
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