As new owners innovate, GCI left in the cold?

Gannett and other private newspaper publishers sold shares to the public during the 1960s in a wave of sellouts that turned once-innovative companies into handmaidens of Wall Street. GCI has been at that game longer than any other major publisher, Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur says. Gannett went public in 1967, so has spent 40% of its years in business doing Wall Street's bidding.

"In the last five decades," Alan says, "newspapers came to be run by bean counters and soothsayers whose idea of leadership was to do everything possible to ensure that the operating performance of their companies never varied from between 9.8 to 10.2 on a 10-point scale of predictability."

Alan's hopeful that new owners like real estate baron Sam Zell (left), now leading a buyout of Tribune Co., and uber-publisher Rupert Murdoch, taking over Dow Jones & Co. this week, will inject new life into the industry. "Get ready to rumble,'' Alan says.

But who will rescue Gannett from its own bean counters?

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[Photo: Bloomberg News]