Read Beat (...and repeat)
If you're like me, you like to know things but how much time to invest? That's the question. Here's the answer: Read Beat--Interviews with authors of new releases. These aren't book reviews but short (about 25-30 minutes on the average) chats with folks that usually have taken a lot of time to research a topic, enough to write a book about it. Hopefully, there's a topic or two that interests you. I try to come up with subjects that fascinate me or I need to know more about. Hopefully, listeners will agree. I'm Steve Tarter, former reporter for the Peoria Journal Star and a contributor to WCBU-FM, the Peoria public radio outlet, from 20202 to 2024. I post regularly on stevetarter.substack.com.
Read Beat (...and repeat)
"Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy"
The past 20 years have not been kind to the newspaper industry. Margot Susca, a communications professor at American University in Washington, D.C. and former reporter, provides details on some of the financial dealings involving newspapers during that time.
Susca outlines the furious activity taken by private investment funds and hedge funds in the past 20 years, outlining practices such as profit overharvesting and debt-based takeovers by companies that have become known as notorious vulture capitalists--Alden Global Capital and the Blackstone Group, to name just a couple.
What these capitalists did was shrink the country's newspaper industry, she said, forcing the closure of papers in many parts of the country while establishing a new category in many other communities--ghost newspapers, papers that look and cost the same as before but have vastly reduced local content due to decimated newsrooms.
"I hope this work further helps shift part of the blame for our local newspaper crisis away from the internet to where it belongs: onto the private investment funds that for years have gutted local newspapers and grown wealthier off the backs of what is left of them," Susca noted.
Susca told Steve Tarter that while the actions taken by companies like Alden and Blackstone were legal, the fact that no efforts were made by the federal government to establish guidelines to aid an industry in distress allowed the problem to get worse.
The end result? "We can and should demand a media system that benefits democracy," she said, pointing to the 400 non-profit news outlets now active in the United States, urging citizens to visit https://www.pressforward.news/ for more information.
