Why Newspapers Were Vulnerable

The monopoly mindset

The business model that the owners of the metro dailies gravitated toward in the decades after World War II was this: 1) establish monopoly, 2) milk that monopoly. The monopoly was on the delivery of printed advertising messages into homes in a given city or (better) metropolitan area: department store ads, supermarket ads, car dealer ads, and, most of all, classifieds. Notice that I didn't mention news. That's because, once a monopoly was established, the editorial content of a newspaper had no detectable impact on its financial success.