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Rick Edmonds chronicled the media business with savvy, care and wit

Poynter · Kristen Hare · last updated

The business reporter began his story with a simple question.

“Who, or what, is Charter Media Co., the firm that agreed yesterday to buy the Bulletin?”

Then, Rick Edmonds answered it, cutting through spin, jargon and numbers with vivid detail.

“The company is so new that the signatures were drying yesterday morning on legal papers defining its financial structure, even as the deal to buy the Bulletin, which will be its first newspaper holding, was announced.”

It’s an approach journalists and media watchers are used to from the Poynter Institute’s longtime media business analyst. That story, though, ran in The Philadelphia Inquirer in April 1980.

Edmonds, who died Sunday at 78 after internal injuries following a car accident, made a career out of making sense of things.

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