[lbo-talk] buying a big city daily

Robert Naiman naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
Tue Oct 31 17:55:15 PST 2006


this is the epilogue to the Newspaper Guild-CWA's effort to buy the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Statement by TNG-CWA on the Announcement by the McClatchy Co. Regarding the Sale of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News May 23, 2006 http://www.cwa-union.org/news/page.jsp?itemID=27647149

It seemed in the Spring that they were making a serious go of it, although I never saw anything that allowed one to judge how much they missed by.

Does anyone else have a sense of this? How close did they get? What can one conclude from the experience about future efforts?

It seemed to me that had they succeeded there was a good chance the Inky could have become just the sort of paper Doug was talking about: not a left-wing rag, but a serious, hard-hitting, real journalism, investigative newspaper.

I wish some of our rich lefty friends would organize an investment fund for this project.

Such a fund would sell shares to lefties and left-liberals, and buy investment grade bonds, building up a war chest for the day when the CWA tries again to buy a newspaper. Then it would join in the fray.

If we sold shares for $1000 each, and 10000 people bought shares, that would be 10 million. That wouldn't be enough, I take it, but it would be a significant contribution.

I would buy a share. Maybe two. If the right people were involved you could sell 500 shares without leaving Hollywood.



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