By Kevin McCauley
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett expects to buy more newspapers following this month’s deal to acquire 63 daily and weekly papers from Media General.
The company will focus on newspapers in cities with a strong sense of community, he wrote in a letter to the BH editors and publishers that is posted on the site of the company’s Omaha World-Herald.
“If a citizenry cares little about its community, it will eventually care little about its newspaper. In a very general way, strong interest in community affairs varies inversely with population size and directly with the number of years a community’s population has been in residence. Therefore, we will focus on small and mid-sized papers in long-established communities,” explained Buffett.
Newspapers that intensively cover their communities have a good future, according to Buffett. “No one has ever stopped reading when half-way through a story that was about them or their neighbors.”
The business must charge for its content on the web. “We must rethink the industry’s initial response to the Internet. The original instinct of newspapers then was to offer free in digital form what they were charging for in print.
“This is an unsustainable model and certain of our papers are already making progress in moving to something that makes more sense. We want your best thinking as we work out the blend of digital and print that will attract both the audience and the revenue we need,” wrote Buffett.
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