It's one thing to work at a bank or a multinational corporation or a financial media company and advocate global free trade. It's another to be a truck driver for Anheuser-Busch Cos. in St. Louis and hear that a foreign giant with a weird name is taking over your employer. How do you make sense of something like that?
One way is by reading the smart, thorough, fair-minded and exhaustive coverage of this deal in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
This account of InBev SA CEO Carlos Brito's meeting with A-B executives on Tuesday is just the latest example. As you'll see, there are links to many other articles, from a profile of Brito to a look at what happened after other major local companies were bought by outsiders to pieces on employee reactions and the impact on the regional economy. This is a level of coverage that simply doesn't happen anywhere else.
And judging from
trends in the newspaper industry, it's in danger of disappearing. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is owned by Lee Enterprises of Davenport, Iowa, which bought parent Pulitzer Inc. in 2005 for $1.46 billion. At the time Lee -- with 44 papers in smaller markets and the kind of hyper-local strategy that many think is the industry's best hope -- looked like a possible winner. But as of Wednesday, Lee's shares were below a 27-year low, and the
market cap for the whole company was $152 million.
How bad are things for the newspaper industry? So bad that the New York Post and the New York Daily News -- the snake and mongoose of the New York media world -- are talking about
sharing some services, according to this piece in Wednesday's Times. So bad it's getting hard to keep up with the
travails at Tribune Co.
You're hearing this lament from a journalist so, yes, there's some self-interest here. Still. We more commonly worry about cutbacks in foreign and national coverage as newspaper revenues migrate to Google and Craigslist, but the picture is bigger than that. Unless and until somebody figures out a business model that supports the level of local reporting that the Post-Dispatch has mustered on the Bud story, we risk becoming a society that finds it harder and harder to agree on facts and make tough decisions that people accept. -
Kenneth Klee
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Unless and until somebody figures out a business model that supports the level of local reporting that the Post-Dispatch has mustered on the Bud story, we risk becoming a society that finds it harder and harder to agree on facts and make tough decisions that people accept.
Your last paragraph is a succinct and eloquent defense of newspapers. I hope it is not ignored.