GAMCO Chairman and Chief Investment Officer Mario Gabelli shared his thoughts about the media — particularly broadcasters and newspapers — with Reuters reporter Herb Lash on Friday. GAMCO has investments in several media companies, including Milwaukee Journal Sentinel publisher and broadcaster Journal Communications. It also owns shares in Richmond, Virginia-based Media General, which publishes the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Tampa Tribune , and runs several TV stations in the southeastern United States.

Gabelli said the do-it-yourself content and low costs of YouTube are unnerving old-fashioned broadcasters:

Now the pamphleteers of this era are everyone. Everyone can log in, create their own blog, create their own news, get in the chat rooms.

He also said media companies with broadcast operations generate good cashflow and don’t need large capital expenditure outlays. But newspaper publishers, meanwhile, will have to merge to claw their way out of their death spiral:

Unfortunately, these stocks are going down and they will continue to go down.”

Automated algorithmic trading plays a role there:

They sell something short to buy something long. So what goes up they want, what goes down they continue to sell.

Earlier in the day, I published the results of conversations I had with some analysts and investors about the state of newspaper stocks in the coming year. You can read the story here. The short take is: If you’re willing to ride it out more than a year, and maybe even hang on for a couple years, steady cashflow and cheap share prices may reward you.