I won’t buy newspapers ‘at any price’ today: Warren Buffett

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5 May 2009

Warren Buffett may have sagely advice on investment in any number of fields, but one area he says he won’t touch these days is the newspaper industry.

‘The Oracle of Omaha’ made these remarks at the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholder meeting last weekend.

Though his Berkshire Hathway still owns Sun Newspapers and the Buffalo News, the world’s top money manager views the future of the newspaper industry dismally.

“For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price,” the world’s second richest man was quoted as saying. ” They (newspapers) have the possibility of going to just unending losses,” said Buffet.

As long as newspapers were essential to readers, they were essential to advertisers. But now news is available in many other venues.

Referring to the Washington Post, Buffet said “the company has a solid cable business, a good reason to hold on to it, but its newspaper business is in trouble,”.

Charles Munger termed newspapers’ woes “a national tragedy.” “…these monopoly daily newspapers have been an important sinew to our civilization, they kept government more honest than they would otherwise be,”

One of Buffett’s first jobs as a child was delivering newspapers, the journal said of his old links to the media industry. “An Omaha newspaper Berkshire owned, Sun Newspapers, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 based in part on a tip Mr. Buffett provided.