News way of business

For most of the 20th century, any list of America's wealthiest families would include quite a few publishers generally considered to be in the "news business": the Hearsts, the Pulitzers, the Sulzbergers, the Grahams, the Chandlers, the Coxes, the Knights, the Ridders, the Luces, the Bancrofts -- a tribute to the fabulous business model that once delivered the country its news. While many of those families remain wealthy today, their historic core businesses are in steep decline (or worse), and their position at the top of the wealth builders has long since been eclipsed by people with other names: Gates, Page and Brin and Schmidt, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Case, and Jobs -- builders of digital platforms that, while not specifically targeted at the "news business," have nonetheless severely disrupted it.

On the national level the owners of the big legacy news businesses have fought fiercely against the disrupters, often with the effect of a frustrated ocean swimmer flailing against a fierce rip current. But with each digital click upward in Moore's law (processing power) and Metcalfe's law (network power) the tide of technological disruption has only risen, washing many of the legacy swimmers further out to sea, or at least diminishing their financial prowess. Perhaps it is another law, Amara's, that best describes the results. That law states, "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."

To document the transformation of the news business, we created an oral history project, from which this article is excerpted. We gathered the personal recollections of a broad but select group of principals who faced the choices, made the decisions, placed the bets, and now have the benefit of hindsight as to how it could, or couldn't, have played out differently.