1918 lessons and what not to learn about it

There is a great post in Slate magazine by Jack Shafer(ht-Adrian Monck)in which the writer looks back to 1918 when there was another crisis in the newspaper industry.

In his much remarked-on obituary for the dead dailies in the January 1918 Atlantic Monthly, Oswald Garrison Villard described the passing of these papers in language that could have been lifted from the recent eulogies for the shuttered Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News. Villard, editor and publisher of The Nation, called the Boston Journal's demise a "tragedy of journalism"—one that could potentially slay democracy, too, because multiple news sources were required to present "both sides of every issue" to the citizenry.

Then it was as today a profitabilty issue with owners unwilling to sustain losses but these were caused

not by vanity purchases by outsiders but poorly timed investments by newspaper insiders

It used to be says Shafer

that no price was too high if it laid claim to the dominant daily in a market.