[Brad from Tennessee]

No one, including the Graham family or the New York Times, has figured out how to match the ad revenue of the print edition with an internet edition. I think the big city papers will survive on the internet but they will lose much of the influence they had in print. And they will have to compete with many young entrepreneurs would couldn’t afford the huge operating costs of a traditional newspaper but can afford to create an internet news and advertising organization. In fact these new guys are already in business in many U.S. cities.

[Milhous]

This story's ending portrays Buffett as backing away from his previously held position

Buffett said declines in circulation result from readers turning to alternative sources , such as free Web sites and television. And he said owning the dominant news Web site in a region is not enough to guarantee sustained profitability for newspaper firms.

As an example, he cited Buffalo, where Berkshire owns the Buffalo News and Buffalo.com, which he described as the most popular news Web site in the city. "We've got the best position, but it isn't remotely like owning the paper 30 years ago."

Buffett said buying newspapers was once an excellent investment because the dominant paper in any city could count on steady advertising revenue and could raise ad rates, often as much as it wanted, every year. With circulation dropping, that is no longer the case, Buffett said.

to tout a neoauthoritarian strategy of trying to put the paste back into the tube with media monopoly restoration

Buffett muses out loud: "The ideal combination would be if The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Post had a joint Web site, and you couldn't get any one individually. That, you could sell for a fair amount of money, and it would have one hell of a readership.

Meanwhile USA Today's Chuck Raasch defends MSM opining that supposedly stellar MSM "cargo" outweighs monopoly ownership of information pipes in the politics of news.