The quaint practice of leveling forests, chopping trees into pulp, making paper and then printing news upon the paper, and trucking the product to neighborhoods for distribution to readers about 12 hours after the news was fresh, is cycling downward. As it does so, some interesting patterns are reappearing from the past. Anyone who has ever seen the movie Citizen Kane remembers the scene of a gleeful Kane, played by Orson Welles, explaining to his banker how many years his inherited fortune would allow him to publish a then—money—losing newspaper. For him, and for many others in the business, newspapers were personal enterprises, intended to express a personal point of view and influence the general public and politics. "You supply the pictures... and I'll supply the war," as Kane proclaimed. For a few decades, newspapers appeared to be going corporate, bought up from founding families, homogenized, cost—engineered, made into cash—generating powerhouses. This...(Read Full Post)