Big newspapers are having a tough time these days and in most cases, it’s their own fault.

The Tulsa World recently got sold again. Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway sold the paper because it didn’t make as much money as they thought it would. That was indicated by the sales price.

Buffett, a financial genius, sold his 31 daily papers and 49 paid weekly papers in 10 states. Buffett forecast doom for the industry, with only a handful of big papers surviving.

The Tulsa World has been losing circulation for years.

Why?

Reading habits have shifted. Young people get their information on the Internet, not from printed newspapers.

As their circulation shrank, the Tulsa World upped the cost of a subscription. In 1999, it cost less than $160 a year to get a paper delivered every day of the year. Now, the cost of seven days a week delivery is $60.66 a month – or more than $700 a year. You can get four days a week (Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday)  for $43.33 a month and two days (Sunday and Wednesday)  for $34.67 a month.

You get unlimited digital access to their website but why would you need that if you are getting a copy of the paper delivered?

But more important than the high price of a subscription, is how out of touch the paper is with the people of Tulsa. Tulsa is still mostly conservative and mostly Christian. That’s really the biggest problem for corporate-owned papers in big cities – they think they are delivering what the consumer wants but they are not.

McClatchy, which owns the Miami Herald and Kansas City Star and a lot more newspapers, filed for bankruptcy last month. Company officials pledged to keep all of their 30 papers running while they are under Chapter 11 and with a $50 million loan in place.

If the company survives, it will no longer be a family owned corporation but will be owned by a hedge fund. The newspaper chain has been in that family for 163 years.

Part of the plan is to dump the pensions by turning that over to a government agency.

Big newspapers have tried to offset the lack of advertising revenue and the loss in circulation by selling more ads for their websites. So far, it’s not working. The big problem is companies like Google and Facebook are getting most of those ads.

Last year, Gannett, which publishes USA Today, was bought by GateHouse, which is managed by a private equity company with a big loan from another financial giant. Gannett is perhaps the largest paper chain in the nation. MediaNews, another chain, is also owned by a hedge fund.

A lot of big newspapers have filed bankruptcy.

Big daily newspapers in Seattle and New Orleans have stopped putting out a print edition every day of the week. That’s a sign of trouble.

Here in Oklahoma, the slump has hit the entire industry. Newspapers have been shut down in Broken Arrow, Jenks, Bixby, Glenpool and Pryor. The Tulsa World stopped publication of the Tulsa Legal News.

(You have to wonder if the new owners of the Tulsa World will continue to publish weekly papers in Sand Springs, Owasso and Wagoner. They may be next on the chopping block.)

In 1992, the Tulsa World bought out the Tulsa Tribune and closed it. That’s when the World took a big turn to the left.

 I felt there needed to be a conservative voice in opposition to secularism and progressivism of the Tulsa World. In April, the Tulsa Beacon will celebrate our 19th anniversary. We started the paper in April of 2001.

We have a stable circulation base and our legal notice business has increased since the World shut down the legal news. We have very loyal readers and financially, we in fine shape.

Only the Good Lord knows what will happen. Our plans are to keep publishing for at least several more years. We see our role as sort of a Christian ministry – a newspaper that promotes Biblical values and flies in the face of political correctness.

There is a bigger problem. And that is corporate ownership of the media – newspapers, TV stations, etc. It’s not a healthy trend. Local owners have a better grasp of the market for news than corporate bean counters on the coast.

And finally, America’s colleges and universities aren’t producing very many conservative journalists. The vast majority of graduates entered college as pie-eyed liberals and came out even more biased.

A conservative college graduate has a tiny chance to find a media outlet where he or she can buck the progressive environment.

You would think that the newspaper bigwigs would learn their lesson from the bankruptcies, closures and downsizing but they haven’t.

They blame the readers, not themselves.