As e_bourne wrote, the Blethen family owns the Seattle Times. Some years ago, they spent a few hundred million dollars buying a chain of small newspapers; they're now probably worth about $30M, and the debt service is bleeding them. As a result, the Times is probably doomed too, even though its operating losses are pretty small. With the subscriptions they'll pick up when the P-I stops printing, they might have a chance to operate at a profit. But there's no chance that their operating profits will ad up to an overall profit; loan payments are going to kill them.
Source: I'm paraphrasing an NPR story from memory. Their journalism is probably better than my memory.
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Date: Sat, Mar. 14th, 2009 10:49 pm (UTC)Source: I'm paraphrasing an NPR story from memory. Their journalism is probably better than my memory.