Jack Shafer

The Passive Voice linked the other day to yet another Amazon-punisher: Jack Shafer, posting at Reuters, writes about the many ways Amazon has enmeshed their hooks into his life—Prime membership, Kindle ownership, magazine subscriptions and so on, all of which he used and enjoyed quite happily. And then! Amazon is Evil Overlording Hachette! You can’t […]

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Jack Shafer, the Reuters columnist, wrote last year that Graham family should spin off the Washington Post newspaper from the company of the same name. As the buyer he suggested Michael Bloomberg. “Not so crazy an idea,” I said on the Solomon Scandals site and in the Georgetown Dish. Now the spin-off will become a reality, except that the billionaire is instead Jeff [...]

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The news that Penguin and Random House will merge into one large frankenpublisher sent shockwaves through the book industry as the frankenstorm lashed the northeast. The move is motivated by bad news—declining sales and troubled chains—and has inspired fears that there will be more bad news to come for the publishing industry.

But could there be a glimmer of hope in all of this pessimism? Gavin James Bower, editorial director at UK independent publisher Quartet Books, offered a positive spin on , speculating that the merger might offer opportunities for indie publishers.

On Reuters, Jack Shafer ponders the question of who was the first company to abandon ship when the newspaper industry first began to founder. As far back as 1991, Warren Buffett had warned that newspapers were no longer the value proposition they had been, and he would not be buying any more of them. But [...]