Many enlightened founders will take into consideration the welfare of employees and the public in making decisions. Gouging the last possible dollar is not that important to them.
But professional managers believe their responsibility is to maximize profits. They do not consider it their duty or privilege to do otherwise. And heirs who have never had to scrounge a living but who have been buffered all their lives by wealth and privilege often considers maximizing profits their privilege.
This may go far to explain why LNP professes estimable values in issues not relevant to their investments in Lancaster and act in a scurrilous manner when its interests and influence are at stake here in Lancaster.
It isn’t just the bad things they do. It also what they fail to criticize others because they need the advertising revenue and also to buy their complicity or at last silence.
As a result, the citizenry of Lancaster City and County have been systematically looted over the past decade.
(A billion dollars in Lancaster General Health assets have been given away to the University of Pennsylvania, a quarter of a billion has been wasted on the Convention Center project, at least $50 million was overpaid for the Harrisburg incinerator, and tens of millions of future tax revenue will be diverted as gifts through the CRIZ program to current special interests.)
Subscribers to a newspaper are entitled to have their interests defended. The need for advertisement revenue will always work against this. But when the parent company’s main source of future profit may come from current advantageous real estate investments at tax payer expense, the situation becomes untenable.
The Steinman family is now so conflicted by its downtown real estate investments that it simply is not qualified to be an objective source of news and opinion for Lancaster.
We believe their ownership is both running the newspaper into the ground and impoverishing the City of Lancaster and its residents. The sooner they sell and exit, the better off both they and Lancaster will be.
If the new publisher does little good, at least it is unlikely to do as much harm.
Personally, I think you give them too much credit. I don’t think the professional managers of today have any different sense of priority than the founding owners of the past…the bottom line has always been priority #1.
In most businesses/industries, this is completely acceptable; however, in others, such as the media, there are other duties owed to the public and this organization has violated that public time and time and time again!
I second that motion!!!!
New ownership is the best (only?) hope that Lancaster City and County residents have for a factual, unbiased newspaper that will investigate, report and editorialize for the betterment of everyone.
Current ownership/management focuses far too much on their own well-being; and the well-being of the chosen Power Elite that includes government, industry and the court system.
Enough is enough, long already.