Excellent Book: Charlie Munger For All Seasons
On Newspapers Business
(i) So we had this newspaper which formally had monopolistic qualities, and like many newspapers, it was a fine business. Now it is tough, shrinking.
(ii) We had more than 80% of the foreclosure notice business, and it was like being an undertaker in a plague year. It provided huge prosperity for us, coming at a time when everyone else was in total agony. Well that gave us a lot of money and we used that money to buy securities at low prices during the panic.
(iii) Aided by that peculiar response to the deterioration of our newspaper business we have entered the software business. And that has been a slow expensive troublesome thing. Now we have written off practically everything we spent on it. And we had plenty of taxable income to do that with. What’s happened now is that we now have more software revenues than we have print revenues.
Ref: http://latticeworkinvesting.com/2016/02/13/charlie-munger-transcript-of-daily-journal-annual-meeting-2016/