blogue atlântico

Uma perspectiva muito interessante sobre o futuro da imprensa: Murdoch Delivers New News About News. Por Michael Lewis.

But the decline of the newspaper business is a lot more interesting than your ordinary industrial creative destruction because newspapers aren’t ordinary investments. They’re also status goods. People want to own them for reasons other than their discounted future cash flows.

Amazingly, even rich people occasionally need to believe that their lives have meaning. Even more amazingly, owning a newspaper is still seen as one way to achieve that belief. And so the right price to pay for a newspaper company is a bit like the right price for a sports team or a work of art: whatever some rich person is willing to pay. And as profits dwindle, that rich person is paying less and less for the cash flows, and more and more for the cachet.

(…)

But there’s a catch to the status of even great newspapers: When they lose their readers they lose not just their profits but their purchase on the culture, and the source of their prestige. It’s only a matter of time before even Murdoch wakes up and realizes that the Wall Street Journal is not as glorious as he remembers. And what then? He — or his heirs — will want out. They’ll sell it, at a big loss, to some lesser figure. (Inferior status goods attract inferior status-seekers.)

The Bancrofts won’t believe it now but there may come a time when they long for the days when their baby was in the hands of such a fine and upstanding press baron as Rupert Murdoch.