Jim Hightower - I no longer receive my local newspaper, the Austin-American Statesman. Oh, the paper still comes, but it’s just paper, minus the news part – news that our community once counted on to keep up with local government doings, corporate shenanigans, citizen actions, and other critical features of our city’s democratic life. What happened? Wall Street profiteers swept in a few years ago to conglomeratize, homogenize, and financialize, the Statesman. It’s now a money cog in the Gannett/USA Today chain of some 200 major dailies that the syndicate seized. Indeed, Gannett itself is wholly owned by SoftBank, a Japanese hedge fund. Those distant bankers are not interested in local news, but in slashing news staffs to fatten their profits. In Austin alone, Softbank has cut two-thirds of the paper’s journalists since taking over – and coverage of local stories has also plunged by two-thirds.
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