Douglas Adams, Wired, 1995 (I think) http://yoz.com/wired/1.01/adams.html:

..Over the last few years I've regularly been cornered by nervous publishers or broadcasters or journalists or film makers and asked about how I think computers will affect their various industries. For a long time most of them were desperately hoping for an answer that translated roughly into 'not very much'. ('People like the smell of books, they like popcorn, they like to see programmes at exactly the same moment as their neighbours, they like at least to have lots of articles that they've no interest in reading', etc.) But it's a hard question to answer because it's based on a faulty model. It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply..

..Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programs to their audience, they're in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers. (This is why the BBC has such a schizophrenic time - it's actually in a different business from all its competitors). And magazines are very similar: each actual sale across the newsagent's counter is partly an attempt to defray the ludicrous cost of manufacturing the damn thing but is also, more significantly, a very solid datum point. The full data set represents the size of the audience the publisher can deliver to its advertisers...

..Now I regard magazine advertising as a big problem. I really hate it. It overwhelms the copy text, which is usually reduced to a dull, grey little stream trickling its way through enormous glaring billboard-like pages all of which are clamoring to draw your attention to stuff you don't want; and the first thing you have to do when you buy a new magazine is shake it over a bin in order to shed all the coupons, sachets, packets, CDs and free labrador puppies which make them as fat an unwieldy as a grandmother's scrapbook. And then, when you are interested in buying something, you can't find any information about it because it was in last month's issue which you've now thrown away. I bought a new camera last month, and bought loads of camera magazines just to find ads and reviews for the models I was interested in. So I resent about 99% of the advertising I see, but occasionally I want it enough to actually buy the stuff. There's a major mismatch - something is ripe to fall out of the model...

Then he starts to go downhill in the same way that most people do/did when they were framing the question wrong. DNA was the best at seeing if the question was framed wrong, but even he apparently fell for it sometimes. Basically he predicts unobtrusive, helpful ads on digital magazines & micro-payments for content.

It's all very well to say that papers should have seen this all coming a long time ago and we can have a great time talking about it. I think the reality is that see it, don't see it.. it wouldn't have mattered in most cases. They aren't Microsoft missing out on tablets carriage makers that should have started making auto parts. They were horse breeders. The fanciest breeders probably though they were safe at first. No Lady is going to travel to London in one of those crazy horseless carriages. Local donkey breeders too. Horseless carriages are hardly going to plow a field?

Content for readers was never the business they were in true. But it was always their core competency. They were never experts in advertising that could have figured out how to keep delivering to their real customers regardless of the medium. Pre web print was a major channel through which one can do quality advertising. Now it is a small channel that one can do poor advertising, one step above mailbox spam. If you are looking for a camera you're not going to look in a magazine.

I've heard that the terms of this deal make the investment more like a loan. Maybe it is. But if Buffet is buying these newspapers thinking they have a long profitable future ahead, I think he's wrong. They're rivers in the ocean, camel trains in the age of railroads, pick your metaphor.