>> Exactly how do dying newspapers fit that requirement???
Factor in Buffett’s gray matter, which is also dying.
“Factor in Buffett’s gray matter, which is also dying.”
Indeed. Buffett is now simply another fool, you know the type: there’s no fool like an old fool.
The one-time genius investor has lost it. He’s still living in the era of iron-horses and rotary dial telephones, or perhaps he’s simply lapsed back into living in that era as his brain fails from old age.
Investing in newspapers is like investing in buggy-whip makers: “Wow, look how cheap they are! And small-town communities are still going to need buggy-whips, er, I mean newspapers!”
What Warren obviously fails to realize is that, with the advent of the Internet, there’s essentially no such thing as an isolated locality in terms of information access and exchange. As long as some form of high-speed Internet access is available, a person living in DipShite, Wyoming has the exact same access to information as someone living in NEW YORK CITY. There’s no such thing as local information anymore, and for that reason, local newspapers are hemorrhaging subscribers at the same rate as the big boys.
For some reason,m it seems to be the thing amongst the octogenarian billionaire set to buy up failing print-media outfits that everyone else knows are in their death throes: first Harmon buys Newsweek and now Buffet buys a slew of dying small-town newspapers. You’d think they might have learned something from Sam Zell’s misadventures.
My guess is that it’s really all about reliving their early youth when they yearned to be William Hearst. Sort of a “Rosebud” kind of thing.