The Tribune Co. has declared bankruptcy – to no one’s surprise. That’s what makes the demise of one of the great U.S. news companies so tragic, in the Greek sense. The seeds of failure were set a decade ago with a misguided focus on acquisitions and local market monopolies across media. Community interests, journalistic passion and purpose gave way to corporate strategies, an impractical obsession with growth and clever financing that ultimately crumbled when the economy soured.
Tribune’s survivors and victims can take heart. Times are tough all over. It’s hard to find a U.S. media company that isn’t in the midst of layoffs. Even Google is said to be expecting a tough 2009 and has reduced its contract workforce.
Yet the news industry, which has ignored warnings and sown the seeds of its downfall for at least a decade, remains unchanged in one key respect: its leadership. Tina Brown, the former Vanity Fair/New Yorker editor who recently launched an online magazine called The Daily Best, echoes, with more verve, a conversation I’ve had repeatedly over the past couple of years with a variety of executives, analysts, journalists and ex-news employees. When will the CEOs get the boot?
We’re in the middle of a volcanic realignment that’s overdue; but as Big Media fights for its life, are the right people leaving? As great newspapers, magazines, TV networks, and publishing houses dismember themselves around us, it would be marginally consoling if the pink slips were going to those who contributed so vigorously to their companies’ accelerating demise—the feckless zombies at the head of corporate bureaucracies who cared only about the next quarter’s numbers, never troubled to understand the DNA of the companies they took over, and installed swarms of “Business Affairs” drones to oversee and torment the people “under” them. There are floors of these creatures in any behemoth media company, buzzing about each day thwarting new ideas or, worse, having “transformative” ideas of their own when what is usually required is to revive, with a bit of steadfast conviction, the originating creative purpose of the enterprise. It’s the same with the auto companies.
Ditto, she says, for the U.S. auto manufacturers that are also gasping for life.
What do cars, debt risk, and collapsing television networks have in common? The suits running them all lose sight of what they condescendingly call “product”—i.e., whatever it was that motivated the company’s spirit of excellence in the first place. The trouble is, those guys and their appointees don’t seem to be the ones who are leaving, do they? Indeed, the recession is giving many of them air cover. “It’s not my fault, it’s the times we live in.
Damn, she’s good.
Will corporate boards and investors step up to the challenge? Will 2009 bring not only new ideas but new leadership for the news industry? Or is that leadership already emerging – in the hundreds of smaller companies seeking to fill every media niche under the sun?
More from Tina Brown here.
