As I was lining up items to potentially blog about this morning, I noticed this WSJ article by Dennis Berman and Sarah Ellison about who was looking into getting a piece of Tribune Co., who is looking for interested bidders at the moment. Then, my colleague Chris Thilk pinged me with a couple of items I hadn’t seen, namely this posting from Ben McConnell, who makes the most clear statement that we should all be paying attention to - that this is, indeed, the “end of traditional media ownership.” Well, at least in Chi-town. It’s most surely a bellwether for things to come, but not one that we haven’t seen coming already, right? As much as I try to factor out the Internet and newsreading (and gathering) in general, it’s pretty clear that scaling up (or down) is not the same as it used to be.
In addition, Chris pointed out to me that the Trib was reporting that another Chicago paper, the Sun-Times, is looking into financial difficulties of its own. I don’t know if I really want to go down a road like this, but are we seriously in a time where, aside from places like Seattle, joint-operating agreements are potentially keeping a publication alive at the cost of another, that some serious, long-time-lived publications, whether weekly or daily, could bite the bullet because there was no other option?
Now, don’t get me wrong - this has happened before, for years and years. I mean, the Star-Ledger from here in New Jersey is named that because one day, a long, long time ago, the Newark Star-Eagle merged with the Newark Ledger. There are plenty of other examples of that. But if mass-media companies are seeing that scaling up and mergers aren’t making their jobs any easier, will those massive publications fade away?
