Josh Marshall: Why the Outlook for Digital Media Behemoths is Worse than You Think: "There are reasons to own a media company that posts consistent if modest profits.... even reasons to own media companies that lose predictable and relatively small amounts of money every year. The problem is that the people who currently own these companies aren’t in it for any of those reasons.... News organization don’t need to be wildly profitable. But the people who own most digital media today are owning for wild profitability or... the credible hope of future wild profitability... to sell the media companies for big returns. That’s a problem...

...You can say... lots of people would be happy to own a big media operation that threw off even modest profits. No doubt. But again, how does it get into those people’s hands? One of the VC’s that currently owns Buzzfeed (and this applies to all these companies) may be happy to hand it off to that kind of owner. But they really want a big return on their investment or at least they don’t want to lose money. And they’re the owners. So it’s hard for me to see how we’re not looking at a near to medium term outlook with accelerating efforts to drive the levels of profitability that can get the exits their investors want...


#noted #journamalism

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