Lauren’s article:  Sure, Newspapers Could Just Die A Painful Death; But Here’s Another Option appears on washingtonpost.com.  She proposes the old idea of turning a for-profit newspaper into a non-profit news organization.  There are some fundamental problems with this, the least of which is that by definition:

“…the objective [of a non-profit] is to support or engage in activities of public or private interest without any commercial or monetary profit.”

With that in mind, the current owners and stakeholders would never get their money back.  MNI is in the hole for $1.9Billion plus another few billion in lost market capitalization.  Sam Zell is personally in the hole for $8.5Billion on his purchase of Tribune. His personal “investment”.

This sentence, “While converting to a not-for-profit won’t improve the financials…” is where the non-profit option fails for companies already drowning in debt.

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