"The sky is falling on print newspapers faster than you think"

A correspondent writes regarding the delightful (precipitous!) circulation declines at the propaganda rags:

In the 1978-1983 period, I read up to 7 newspapers a day. They all had the same editorial policy.

We canceled our daily Star-Tribune newspaper years ago. Since then, I do not read newspapers. We did not upgrade to HDTV, either. A while ago, we threw out our old TV.

In the past few years, I have tried subscribing to WSJ, Forbes, Fortune, Wired, and Oil & Gas Investor. All completely worthless. (Of course we know the Economist is worthless.)

Two problems for paper media: one, the annoying leftist bias and ignorance since everything is written by journo majors; two, the information is stale by the time it reaches your doorstep.

Krugman Piece to File Away

This guy just can't resist:

"Realistically, we’re not going to resolve our long-run fiscal issues any time soon, which is O.K. — not ideal, but nothing terrible will happen if we don’t fix everything this year. Meanwhile, we face the imminent threat of severe economic damage from short-term spending cuts.

So we should avoid that damage by kicking the can down the road. It’s the responsible thing to do."

That is going to sound as brilliant as when he said that "Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble" in 2002.

Be sure to watch the 1931 short film that anticipates Krugman.

Amazon and Clothing

Fascinating NYT article:

"Amazon is so serious about its next big thing that it hired three women to do nothing but try on size 8 shoes for its Web reviews. Full time. [...] And it is happily losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year on free shipping — and, on apparel, even free returns — to keep its shoppers coming back. Having wounded the publishing industry, slashed pricing in electronics and made the toy industry quiver, Amazon is taking on the high-end clothing business in its typical way: go big and spare no expense."

Comment on Journal Register Post

From the author of off the beaten path investments:

"your post on JRC was especially interesting to me as I have been watching the larger newspaper stocks for over a year but was not aware of JRC and its problems .....based on your post i am going to do my own work on JRC ....i am thinking about a long short trade ...going short JRC and MNI and long BLC and NYT"

My comment on newspaper stocks:

JRC was definitely the worst of breed. I covered JRC last week in the low 2.20s. I wouldn't want to own it but I would rather be short BKUNA.

I am actually short NYT. You should look into how the dual classes of stock allow the B share holders to finance their propaganda by leveraging capital of the ignorant institutional A share investors. Morgan Stanley recently realized this.

I don't think I would pair newspaper stocks as the entire sector is obsolete. Imagine being paired on adding machine companies when it became clear that computers would replace them.