I just finished the wonderful "The Day the Cowboys Quit" by Elmer Kelton, a Western writer who has been around for a long time, but whose work I didn't discover until Louis L'Amour died and I had to find somebody I liked as well. It is set in the Texas Panhandle of the 1880s, when cattle ranchers who started out as cowboys and built their herds up slowly were starting to be pushed out by big Yankee ranchers who flooded in after the Civil War and knew nothing and cared less about the rich and intricate history of ranching; to them, cattle were just figures in a ledger, the more the better.
It's not hard to see a parallel between the cattle ranches of that era and the newspapers of today. "Local journalism imperiled," the headline on Dan Neuharth's USA Today column drily but accurately sums it up. Note the vast distance between this statement of Jack Knight's, describing how he told Wall Street he was not going to be its prisoner . . .
I told them that as long as I had anything to do with it, we were going to run the papers, and we were going to spend money sometimes that they wouldn't understand why we were spending it, and we did not intend to be directed by them in any way."
. . . and this bleak aknowledgement of what actually has come to pass:
Knight Ridder tried to please investors for years, yet it still lost at the hands of institutional shareholders who make little distinction in product, be it newspapers or hamburgers.
