Local newspaper ownership rocks
Thus speaketh Gene Hall of the Charles City Press, as quoted in Rural Blog:
Hall notes that he was “a corporate officer in a publicly traded media company for more than 15 years.” His piece doesn’t name the companies, but he told us that they were, in succession, Hollinger, Liberty Group and GateHouse Media. “Never was there a meaningful discussion about the product being germane to the community. Never a sentence about putting something back into the product or community,” he recalls. “What has and is ruining American media is that, like even baseball, it came to be run solely as a business. Newspapers are more than a business. They have obligations and responsibilities far beyond what a big box retail store or a widget manufacturer has. … Big business has corrupted a sacred covenant. Care must be taken with a commodity so central to democracy.”
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
