I haven't yet seen a startup tackle that aspect, of producing some kind of local information source that people will want to read. It's at least a demand-side problem, in that a lot of people want that information, and current information providers are producing a fairly low-quality version of it. Whether it's monetizable, I suppose, is another story.
And the people who look at that info have zero intent to spend money, so advertisers have zero interest in appearing alongside it.
The other thing is that the bigger newspapers made a lot of money through national advertising, sales sections and deceased notices. These things are becoming less relevant. With Craigslist and Facebook etc.
He's probably hoping that investors dump their whole newspaper portfolio and he can pick up all the profitable smaller papers while selling the bigger ones such as the Tampa one at a short term loss as part of the long term plan.
He wrote a good article about end of life businesses and how they can be a good investment, but not to reinvest money into them. I'll have a look and see if I can find it. Local newspapers
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-17/why-warren-b...
"As recently as six years ago, newspaper companies sold for more than 9 times Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Stephen Weiss writes today that Buffett’s company paid around 4 times Ebitda for the Media General assets."
I suppose you could say he's buying a very sick golden goose. He may not be able to save the goose, but at 4 times Ebitda he only needs to collect a few last eggs to get his money back. And who knows... maybe the goose can be saved.
Buffett is a hands off manager, and if he started tinkering with editorial policies, word would get around. He's no Murdoch.
If these businesses are able to survive the next few years and get to grips with all the new mediums of publication then Ebitda may well return to the levels of 6 years ago and then Mr. buffet would be sitting very pretty indeed.
Does anyone have the comparative Ebitda figures?
Banks seem to be in the same boat. Has the bidding war for programmers at startups and major tech companies made it impossible for these companies to hire anyone good?
New AWS features often hit the front page as well, so I'm not too worried that there is a Parse conspiracy at play. :-)
[1]: http://www.freep.com/article/20120517/NEWS09/205170633/Faceb...
The only counterpoint is that the departing co-founder really didn't live up to his end of the bargain. Work was low output and quality and this isn't in retrospect. It was like the fellow started crumbling almost from day one & then, the obvious inadequacy of his efforts just sort of piled back on in feedback loop.
So while I feel sorry for the fellow, honestly I do, I also don't really in any way feel that he lived up to any spirit of his commitment to us and his non-performance has hurt us in material ways.
It sort of feels like a choice of either being a jerk or a patsy.
I recently spotted this blog post written by a team trying to fund the development of an iPhone app:
http://famnerd.com/2012/02/update-famnerd-rejected-by-kickst...
That's a great point.Are there any startups tackling the local news problem?