Via Al Poynter, Laura Frank has nailed it about as well as anyone: greed.

The news industry's profit margins have remained consistently above 15 percent to 20 percent for at least the past quarter century. Even in the last recession, the industry averaged an 18 percent return.

But the industry's relative monopoly until now has meant that it doesn't really know how it makes money, contends [Esther] Thorson, who developed the profit formula. And so, she says, the industry continues to do the exact opposite of what her data shows it should be doing: producing in-depth, accurate, fair, issues-oriented, enterprise reporting.

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"The place you invest your dollar to get the most bang for the buck is in the newsroom," Thorson said. "And that's where they're cutting the worst. They've done exactly the very thing that guarantees that circulation and advertising will follow each other down the ever-speeding death spiral.

"And that's what's happening to them."

We who have lived in Jackson most of our life can remember when the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News played—for better or worse—a far more prominent place in the mindscape of central Mississippi than the crippled Gannet cash cow to which the Clarion-Ledger has been reduced in the last 20 years. I picked up an issue the other day at Primos on Lakeland Drive and was treated to columns by right-wing radical Ann Coulter and a mindless column by David Broder of the living dead, sandwiched between wire service reports that substitute nowadays for investigative journalism.

There are still a few fine reporters on the staff of the Clarion-Ledger, but they are becoming a rare breed. Charles Overby, where are you?

Read the article on the PBS web site:

Laura Frank: The Withering Watchdog. What really happened to investigative reporting in America.

I’ve spent a number of weeks in Eastern Europe and then was knocked for a loop on my return by a heartbreaking family event. There’s much going on and much to comment upon. Stay tuned.