No Blood in Ants – W. Bunch

Been holding this post for a week, waiting for more information. Another newspaper, Minneapolis Star Tribune, lurched into bankruptcy last week. The Seattle Post Intelligencer is in trouble. Gannett plans a one-week furlough for all employees.

Will Bunch at Attytood makes the connection - you can't sell what nobody's buying.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo notes the money problems stem from owners " who insist on making a annual profit margin that was just never sustainable ..."

Don't blame the journalists, I say. As we've seen during the past eight years with an MBA president, business smarts just ain't what they used to be.

But is somebody buying the Mt. Airy paper? Rumor has it there's someone negotiating a deal - a newspaperperson, at that. We're waiting to hear more.

UPDATE: Go to this JRC doings site to read updates from around the nation.

UPDATE 2: First Draft offers common sense information on advertising income, most notably why the old business model for newspapers fails. "The advertising revenues that newspaper Web sites generate are not enough to sustain robust news coverage. Though The New York Times Web site attracted 20 million unique users in October, Web-driven revenues support only an estimated 20 percent of the paper’s current staff." Perhaps the deep-researching Task Force could check out how a study is done correctly. A link is in the story.

Scott Alloway