Chicago Sun Times Files For Bankruptcy

http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2009/03/31/chicago-sun-times-files-for-bankruptcy/

by keltecp11 • 17 years ago

12 19 17 years ago

cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com

tptacek2• 17 years ago

Yeah, and? Raise your hands if you didn't already know newspapers were in trouble. Flagged; this isn't Hacker News, it's just plain news.

unalone4• 17 years ago

The Chicago Sun-Times is a huge paper, though. I found it pretty damn interesting that it's not just medium-to-small papers. This is the paper that houses Roger Ebert.

tptacek2• 17 years ago

The Chron is about to go under; Seattle is losing a daily; the NYT may run out of operating cash in May. Is there a trend story out there about the newspapers that would be Hacker News? Sure. But this kind of isn't it.

(I'm more worried about where Jim DeRogatis is going to land than about Ebert, who can obviously just retire now).

electromagnetic• 17 years ago

IMO News shouldn't be a for-profit industry. For-profit news encourages poor journalism as you can make more money selling lies than selling the truth.

henning• 17 years ago

so should the USA have something like the BBC?

jwilliams• 17 years ago

Alternatively, the USA has PBS.

biohacker423• 17 years ago

It's not that simple.

While there is a very large market for silly lies - tabloids. That market also has a very low barrier to entry.

There are market segments happy and able to pay for quality, try The Economist. Those markets are much smaller but also have a much higher barrier to entry, and a very affluent audience.

I think what's killing the newspapers is that they tried to sit on two chairs at once. Trying to be both informative and popular.

Without competition that might have worked, but it's over now.

Because for pay news like the AP and Bloomberg and magazines The Atlantic Montly, etc, are doing just fine, and because tabloids are also fine, I don't think many will miss those going out of business.

But I also agree with you, the non profit newspaper is a good option. I believe The Irish Times is a grant based non-profit.

anamax2• 17 years ago

Most people lie for free so it's strange to suggest that profit is the problem.

unalone4• 17 years ago

It's not about lying. It's about sensationalism.

Either you tell in-depth news for a small group, or you go sensationalist to go after the masses. News groups increasingly tilted towards the latter for all of the last two decades.

byrneseyeview• 17 years ago

http://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NYSE:SSP

Take a look at that trend! (Switch to the 'annual' view). The free-market response is that the company turns around or goes bankrupt. If they were nationalized, you'd expect them to keep losing more and more money, until finally, someone had to take action -- by taxing blogs.

I really don't think that competing for thousands of advertisers is going to make people more honest than serving a single owner with an infinite budget. They'd end up being even less honest than the average Fortune 500 company's internal newsletter.

Chicago Sun Times Files For Bankruptcy

Related Stories