What is it about the media business that reduces otherwise gimlet-eyed journalists to hopelessly romantic idealists?
The announcement that CEO Tony Ridder had dutifully hired Goldman Sachs to begin looking around prompted those newly romantic journos to suggest nominating a slate of their retired colleagues to the board or inspiring communities to buy their local papers, as if they were Green Bay and Knight Ridder were the Packers. They have nothing but disdain for PCM, the institutional shareholders who care about nothing other than the share price, and the Wall Street analysts who approve of radical cost cutting to justify the deal. (Morgan Stanley’s Douglas Arthur, whose “scorched earth” recommendation would pare $350 million in costs, was denounced in the pages of Knight Ridder’s Philadelphia Daily News, which under Arthur’s plan would be the first thing to go.) Of course, if these same journalists were writing about any industry besides newspapers, they might be less soft-hearted and more hard-headed. They’d point out that newspapers are losing their main reason for being in business — their re
