If a newspaper had a monopoly on local news, they could charge. In smaller communities, they do have a monopoly. In any community large enough to have a broadcaster, though, they’re competing against “free news”.
Buffet is wrong, though. Newspapers in most cities saw this coming. They started radio stations in the 1920s, and television stations in the 1940s because they realized it was a lot cheaper to deliver electrons than it was to deliver dead trees. WGN, for instance, stands for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”.
And then the Department of Justice came along and forced newspapers to sell their radio and television stations. I don’t think that’s constitutional. How dare the government deny someone the right to publish a newspaper? But nobody was asking me at the time. Lancaster Newspaper ended up owning Delmarva Broadcasting, which they were allowed to have because the broadcasting stations serve a different local market.
The Wall Street Journal used to be successful in charging for online content, because they argued that reading one story a year, if it’s the right story, could be worth tens of thousands of dollars. They stopped charging shortly before Murdoch bought the WSJ, though.
The only really successful story of a print publication moving online, and being able to charge for content is Jane’s Publishing, the folks that put out “All The World’s Aircraft” and “All The World’s Navies”, etc. I’m not sure if that’s because the defense industries don’t watch expenses very closely, or because nobody else offers anything like what Jane’s offers.
Buffet’s genius has been in tax laws. He finds well-managed businesses and buys them, lock, stock, and barrel, and leaves the successful management in place with less than a dozen people employed at Berkshire Hathaway headquarters. He found a loophole that lets him save on income taxes by sheltering the income from those other businesses with tax loopholes earned by the insurance companies, loopholes that otherwise would go unused. It’s not a big secret how he does it. He is good, however, at picking companies that are doing well, and which continue to do well after they are purchased. Most other conglomerates can’t resist the urge to screw up the companies they buy.
The reason that newspapers were forced to sell their local radio and television stations was to prevent any one company from having a monopoly on the news in any given geographic area.
At one time, Lancaster Newspapers owned the Intelligencer Journal, the Lancaster New Era, the Lancaster Sunday News, the York Sunday News, WGAL-AM, WGAL-FM, WGAL-TV, and the local cable television company (I am old enough to remember this). Many of us have pointed out just how biased the reporting could be in the local newspapers, particularly when they are promoting their own self interests; prime examples would be their support for the hotel and convention center project, and their attacks on the former County Commissioners. Now imagine how much more damage could have been done had Lancaster Newspapers controlled so much of the local electronic media as well as so much of the local media.
There is a precedent: I remember that so many of the reports in the local newspapers AND on WGAL were supportive of the Urban Renewal projects of the 1960s. Had some SERIOUS investigation into the proposals been made by a truly independent media outlet, public opinion might have limited some of the more destructive (and failed) things that were done.