The return of the moguls how Jeff Bezos and John Henry areremaking newspapers for the twenty-first century (PDF) (Print)

Over the course of a generation, the story of the daily newspaper has been an unchecked slide from record profitability and readership to plummeting profits, increasing irrelevance, and inevitable obsolescence. The forces killing major dailies, alternative weeklies, and small-town shoppers are well understood--or seem obvious in hindsight, at least--and the catalog of publications that have gone under reads like a who's who of American journalism. During the past half-century, old-style press barons gave way to a cabal of corporate interests who were unable or unwilling to invest in the future even as technological change was destroying their core business. The Taylor family sold the Boston Globe to the New York Times Company in 1993 for a cool $1.1 billion. Twenty years later, the Times Company resold it for just $70 million. The unexpected story, however, is not what they sold it for but who they sold it to: John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox.