The web came of age with no-holds-barred finance capitalism,
so it’s hard to decide which of the last twenty years’ worth of changes
are the result of the tech industry, or of financialization, or a toxic
mix of both.
In an exhaustive and fascinating article in the American Prospect,
Robert Kuttner and a psuedonymous editor at a hedge-fund-owned community
paper make a compelling case that the acquisition of community papers
by private equity firms from their retiring, patrician family owners
destroyed the news: mass newsroom layoffs, centralized decision making
and design, pay-cuts and pay-freezes, and the kind of petty,
short-sighted penny-pinching that is hard to believe (editorial staffers
at the papers owned by Gatehouse don’t get free subscriptions to the
newspapers they contribute to).
Now, it’s obvious that the web has been hard on the advertising market
for print periodicals, but the hedge-fund-crapification of newspapers
started before the web did, and had already degraded and weakened the
news market, leaving it vulnerable to disruption (not least because
private equity’s favorite play is to sell off a business’s real-estate
and physical plant and load it up with debt, leaving it in fragile
straits should its fortunes change).
And the increased weakness of newsmedia has only accelerated the process. In Canada, a group of US private equity vultures
are publicly choking one of the national newspaper chains to death. The
web is certainly not helping these papers survive, but there’s a lot of
talk about Craiglist’s impact on classifieds, and a lot less on whether
a newspaper that loses 70% of its newsroom and then raises its prices
can be said to be well-managed or even worth saving.
