Warren Buffett – Newspaper Business Is ‘Toast’

In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Finance, Legendary investor Warren Buffett weighed in on the state of the newspaper business, calling it ‘toast,’ and shared his take on the evolution of how news is delivered and consumed.

H/T Dataroma

Why Warren Buffett Says The Newspaper Business Is ‘Toast’

Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc

Transcript

I want to get back to that trend thing you were just talking about. How do you recognize when a giant trend is over. And you know you’re right obviously that over time things don’t change that much but sometimes they do. Like newspapers was a business that you admired for so long. It’s not a good business for newspapers went.

If you’re the only one in town there were some competitive situations but it was survival of the fattest whichever whichever paper was the fattest one because it had the most ads in it and ads are news to people. I mean they they want to know what what supermarkets having a bargain on Coke or Pepsi this weekend and so on. I mean it it it upsets the people in the NEWSROOM to talk that way. But. The ads were the most important editorial content from the standpoint of the reader over all. And the big deal. I mean if you were looking for a job you had one place basically to look in the classified section if you were looking for a apartment to rent and and those those pages were just dozens and dozens of pages. That’s that’s disappeared. I mean the essential things that are essentially news is what you don’t know that you want to know. And you know what happened in national sports. You know the moment that happens and you can go watch a video of it and so on. You can go to a you know ESPN and see what’s going on. You know what’s happening in politics you know what’s happening in the stock market. I used to look at the stock market because the next morning before I delivered the papers. I checked them out. The world has changed hugely. And it did it gradually went from monopoly to franchise to competitive to toast toast and sodas is kind of like that too.

I mean they’re still around but that’s no they’re disappearing right. They’re going to disappear. Yeah. And so New York Times Washington Post Wall Street Journal.

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