Who jumped first from the newspaper sinking ship?

Who jumped first from the newspaper sinking ship?, article.
Even after the Hearst Corp ditched its San Francisco Examiner for a $660 million deal to buy the San Francisco Chronicle in late 1999, more happy talk ensued. If anybody cited Warren Buffett’s 1991 warning that newspapers had lost their special “franchise” value and that he wouldn’t be buying any more of them soon, I missed it.

I'm no investor, I don't have the nerves for it, or the interest, really. But if I were, my motto would be "nobody ever got broke listening to Warren Buffet".
Investors are puzzling creatures. On the one hand, in the nineties you had all those people who thought that anything starting up with a fresh new dot-com was a goldmine*. And that gave us the dot-bomb. On the other hand, many people only smell the sharks when the ship is already three-quarters sunk, if then. Some things don't take a genius to predict. I remember saying to a friend in maybe 1996: "newspapers are going out. More and more, people will get their news on the web".

I guess it depends on your personal life. Me for instance, I never read newsletters in my adult life (as a kid I read those our family got), and I took to the web like a duck to water as soon as I could, mid-nineties. Other people are still to this day very comfortable with their daily, crinkly paper-paper, and only uses the web in areas where they're more or less forced. So the world looks very different from there.


*I remember a young, aggressive webtrepreneur telling me around the millennium that mentioning that he had a dot-com got him girls like he was a rock star.