Newspaper owners and Tolstoy's bon mot

That bon mot I refer to comes from "Anna Karenina":

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

And, this applies to newspaper owners how?

Rich newspaper owners are all alike in being rich, but they're all cheap in their own ways.

The big chains reward top management with bonuses for slashing salaries, workers or both. The bonuses they make would actually pay for most of the workers they fire.

Privately held chains, like Hearst, don't have to disclose what they pay top brass, but I'm sure it's the same. So, whenever you see a columnist at a paper like the Houston Chronicle criticize management at other newspaper companies, ask them to reveal how much THEIR ownership and C-suite management make.

Smaller, so-called "family" chains, usually not owning any seven-day dailies and more and more, not owning dailies period, are cheap in different ways.

With them, it's usually failure to keep machinery and supplies updated for modern times and needs.

I've worked at more than one paper with Macs years out of date. Ownership hadn't even considered the option of joining the PC world, where even with a semi out-of-date computer, your browser software and some other things will still be newer and faster than on a pre-Mac operating system 10.7 or newer. (More and more, I refuse to use the Ohhh Esss Echhhs branding, as Mac went to OS 11 at that point, among other things, but cult groupies still drink the Kool-Aid.)