🔗 More than 75 Lee Enterprises newspapers affected by cyberattack - U.S. Press Freedom Tracker:

Dozens of newspapers owned by Iowa-based news media company Lee Enterprises were affected by a cyberattack starting on Feb. 3, 2025, disrupting the publication of print and e-editions.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch — one of Lee Enterprises’ more than 400 daily, weekly and specialty newspapers across 24 states — reported that the media conglomerate had experienced a “cybersecurity event.” The company alerted its newspapers that it had been working with third-party specialists to investigate the disruption and restore the systems

My first thought upon reading this story was “Maybe it’s not a good idea to have so many newspapers owned and run by a single company?” There are obviously a lot of reasons that is a bad idea, but the bigger a company grows, the richer a yea get it becomes for this kind of stuff. And the wider the impact when this kind of stuff happens. And the harder it is to recover.

But the thing is, while these sort of corporate conglomerations are cloaked in talk of scale and efficiencies, they have nothing to do with better products or service for customers. It’s about financiers finding way to extract wealth. They don’t give a shit if consolidation and centralization increases the risk that the customers who depend on their product or service get screwed, as long as they can suck out more money on the margins.

I am increasingly coming to believe that there is a pretty good argument to be made that just about all of the good and interesting stuff we have—helpful technology, art, music, people-centric tools—has come to be in spite of capitalism rather than because of it.

Capitalism is a wealth generation and accumulation machine, and that’s what it will do at the expense of everything else. In previous eras, people were able to make space in the fringes to do cool and interesting stuff—stuff that actually matters to humans—but now that the machine has gotten more efficient, those fringes are being eaten away.

None of these companies that sell the stuff we all use give a crap about us. They don’t care whether the thing they sell falls apart, makes people sick, or destroys the fabric of society, and they will never care unless they are forced to.