Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway held their annual meeting last weekend in Omaha, and today, I’m reading a few notes passed along from the talk. Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t allow anyone to record the meeting, but a friend passed along some handwritten notes from the talk. And reading through it, I’m struck by one quote from Buffet:
What are we learning that is most wrong? Efficient market theory. If everything is priced properly, what do you do for the next hour?
That’s as good a commentary as any on what newspapers did wrong in the ’90s. Profits were up, but newspapers didn’t innovate. And when we shifted from print to digital, newspapers weren’t ready.
Buffet closes with a quote from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck, who said, “Science advances one funeral at a time.”
Insert the word “technology” for “science,” and you’ll have summed up the newspaper industry’s last decade.