That’s what the Philadelphia Daily News did when Morgan Stanley’s analyst Douglas Arthur suggested that Knight Ridder could make a lot more money if they shut down the paper and chopped a bunch of other jobs.
“I’m sure Arthur’s a good guy who’s nice to dogs, yadda, yadda, yadda,” wrote Will Bunch. “But he’s like any Wall Street analyst, in that he’s paid a lot of money, and when it comes to the real world, he has no idea what the hell he’s talking about. In Arthur’s report, he predicts that any new buyer will close the Daily News, a bold prediction from a man whom I can almost guarantee you has never actually read the People Paper.”
“The hilarious thing is that most newspaper analysts know very little about actual newspapers. What they do know about is the buffoons who try to make millions of dollars by investing in them.”
You really have to admire a paper whose motto is “Covering Philly and the world like Cheese Whiz.”
Read Bunch’s Attytood column here.