Warren E. Buffett isn’t letting one troubled newspaper color his view of buying what many media experts consider the dinosaurs of the news business. Mr. Buffett said he still planned to buy newspapers, even though he recently announced that he would be shutting down one that he recently bought by the end of the year.
“I hope we have a lot more,” said Mr. Buffett about his newspaper portfolio while he attended a party Monday night for his longtime friend Carol Loomis, a writer for Fortune who recently published “Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012.”
Mr. Buffett went on a newspaper spending spree this year by buying more than 60 newspapers from Media General and a small stake in the newspaper company Lee Enterprises, a chain of mostly small dailies based in Iowa. At the time, he stressed that he had great confidence that newspapers would continue to be solid investments for decades to come.
“I think newspapers in print form, in most of the cities and towns where they are present, will be here in 10 and 20 years,” Mr. Buffett said. “I think newspapers do a good job of serving a community where there is a lot of community interest.”
But this month, Doug Hiemstra, president of the World Media Enterprises, which is a Berkshire Hathaway Company, sent a letter to his staff saying that the company would shut down The News and Messenger in Manassas, Va., by year’s end. Mr. Hiemstra wrote in his Nov. 14 letter that “The News and Messenger has lost money for a number of years under the Media General ownership, and after our team made an exhaustive review of The News and Messenger, we were unable to come up with a scenario that would result in a likelihood of profitable operations there.”
The company announced it would cut 105 positions, mainly at The News and Messenger.
According to public filings, Berkshire Hathaway also cut back its stake in Lee Enterprises.
Mr. Buffett said at Monday night’s reception that the cuts at Media General were focused on one troubled paper. He said he planned to share more of his thoughts about newspapers soon and was working on a section about them in his annual letter to shareholders.