Thread by @jbenton

With all the layoffs in newsrooms this week, I see a lot of people blaming ownership. And it is certainly true that there are good owners and there are bad owners. In newspapers, the rubric for this used to be "family-owned" vs. "chain-owned."

(Or "corporate-owned" if you liked being imprecise.)

And of course within each category there were good/bad family owners and good/bad chain owners — with the differences usually defined by (a) the profit margin they aimed to hit and (b) how much they were willing to invest in the newsroom.

I increasingly think, though, that the only useful category distinction these days is "owned by someone who wants to make money" vs. "owned by someone who doesn't care if they make money."

A LOT — I'd say most — of news organizations in America today will NEVER AGAIN generate a significant profit at their current staffing levels/cost structures.

99%+ of newspapers in the US are local papers and for the vast, vast majority, their total revenue will never go up again. It'll be lower in 2019, lower in 2020, lower still in 2021. So which owners fall into the "doesn't care if they make money" category?

BILLIONAIRES, for one. Jeff Bezos wants @washingtonpost to be profitable, of course, but if it isn't, his life changes not one iota. Same with Omidyar, Powell Jobs, Soon-Shiong, and a small group of others.

NONPROFIT NEWS ORGS, for another. They need revenue, of course, but the people who fund them are driven by some mix of civic duty, tax benefits, preening for peers, or partisan interest. Not cash flow to be returned to investors.

PUBLIC MEDIA or PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS — often intertwined, with many public radio stations attached to public universities. They have the mission-driven structure (and, often, diffuse revenue streams) to consider news a public, even educational service.

ENTITIES THAT WANT TO INFLUENCE POLITICS OR SOCIETY. Parties, PACs, unions, trade associations — they're all aware of the impact media can have on their various causes and can lump journalism into their marketing budgets.

Don't get me wrong — there will be news companies that can survive and be (in some cases very) profitable. The NYT has real differentiation and very desirable audience; Bloomberg and Politico Pro have valuable data that rich people are willing to pay through the nose for.

And there will still be opportunities at both the cheap-and-mass and expensive-and-elite ends of the national market — though there will definitely be more blood on the floor there too.

But those guys aren't most news media. Most news media is local; most news media is owned by companies that see losing money for the broader civic good as, well, not their line of work. And losing money for many years is what they're staring at.

The new divide isn't going to be the "good" owners who care enough about journalism to settle on a 10% margin vs. the "bad" ones who want to draw every last drop of blood from the operation. It's going to be the care-about-profits vs. the don't-care-about-profits.

Needless to say, there are some very bad things about this shift! "Not being interested in profit" ≠ "caring about quality journalism," for instance. There are only so many beneficent rich people to go around. (And lots of not-so-beneficent ones!)

But either way, I think this is the world we're heading to, and quickly. /fin