Are newspapers the new rich man's plaything?

No one owns a sports team to make money, ex-Gannetter Kevin Maney says. "Sports teams are a vanity purchase. They give a person stature in the community and, in a sense, a rich-person's hobby. Newspapers are about the only other type of entity in the same category,'' Maney writes on his technology blog at Portfolio magazine. "So let local tycoons buy local papers and run them as their fiefdoms. The era of corporate newspaper ownership may be done for."

Gee, whiz! Can't we find a better ownership model than that -- say, a not-solely-for-profit one? After all, newspapers play an irreplaceable role in our democracy. Do we really think penny-pinching tycoons like former General Electric CEO Jack Welch (left) view newspapers that way? Here's my model: the St. Petersburg Times, entrusted by Nelson Poynter at his death to what is now the Poynter Institute. The New York Times wrote about that Florida newspaper's history here.

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