Mega-investor Warren Buffett once held a big portfolio of daily and weekly newspapers. He specialized in squeezing out competitors so each held a local monopoly. Then he’d chop staff and news content, letting him glean annual profit margins above 30 percent. Alas for poor Warren, along came the internet, allowing people to root around for free to find local information missing from his hollowed out papers. They began losing readers, advertisers, and profits. So in 2020, Buffett sold out his entire portfolio. But rather than concede that maybe his slash-and-burn, profit-maximization approach had produced inferior products, “The Oracle of Omaha” (as Wall Street had labeled him) blasted the whole idea of local newspapers as dinosaurs. They’re “toast,” he proclaimed.

Source: Readers Didn’t Give Up on Local News. Corporations Did. | The Smirking Chimp