What Now for Capital News?
The McClatchey chain, which bought The News & Observer from the Daniels family some years back, now has bought the entire Knight-Ridder chain. Knight-Ridder’s biggest paper in North Carolina is The Charlotte Observer.
As they always do, the corporate execs promise that this will mean nothing less than a golden age for readers.
Bull.
The reason for the acquisition is to cut costs and achieve economies of scale: centralized ad sales, newsprint purchasing, etc., etc.
The big question for North Carolina is this: Will this mean less competition for state government and political news in Raleigh?
Will the Charlotte and Raleigh papers start pooling some of their coverage? If they do, won’t that mean an inevitable lessening of competition for news?
That competition is one reason North Carolina has had aggressive press coverage of politics – and, thus, one reason we’ve had relatively honest government over the years.
But the newspapers’ commitment to that coverage has declined in recent years. Not coincidentally, the level of corruption in government has risen.
So I think taxpayers have something to fear here.
What Now for Capital News?
The McClatchey chain, which bought The News & Observer from the Daniels family some years back, now has bought the entire Knight-Ridder chain. Knight-Ridder’s biggest paper in North Carolina is The Charlotte Observer.
As they always do, the corporate execs promise that this will mean nothing less than a golden age for readers.
Bull.
The reason for the acquisition is to cut costs and achieve economies of scale: centralized ad sales, newsprint purchasing, etc., etc.
The big question for North Carolina is this: Will this mean less competition for state government and political news in Raleigh?
Will the Charlotte and Raleigh papers start pooling some of their coverage? If they do, won’t that mean an inevitable lessening of competition for news?
That competition is one reason North Carolina has had aggressive press coverage of politics – and, thus, one reason we’ve had relatively honest government over the years.
But the newspapers’ commitment to that coverage has declined in recent years. Not coincidentally, the level of corruption in government has risen.
So I think taxpayers have something to fear here.