The Sad Unwinding of Papers and Broadcasting

[Commentary] With a couple of important exceptions, the major publisher-broadcasters have spun off legacy newspapers holdings into separate companies or simply sold them. The moves have been driven by investors and trustees tired of seeing earnings and margins dragged down by publishing, and management's inability to achieve any kind of cross-media synergy. One of the bigger blows came in 1975 when the Federal Communications Commission banned new same-market newspaper-broadcast combinations to prevent the publishers from becoming too powerful. Things have changed a little since then, but the prohibition remains.