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Sam Zell Has a Plan

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Michael_ Gee, Jun 5, 2008.

  1. Italian_Stallion

    Italian_Stallion Active Member

    If you didn't see this shit coming around the bend, you're blind. A few people here have championed Zell as some great innovator. Bullshit. When you throw an ice skater into the boxing ring, he gets knocked cold. I've hated this guy from the start. When I heard what he told that photog at the Sentinel, I knew Zell's whole story. The only person he cares about his himself, and he has some serious lapses in judgment.

    As so many have explained, this is the race to the bottom. Three years ago, I went to work for a small paper that had this same philosophy. They weren't willing to commit to journalism. They thought they'd sell more papers if grandma stopped by the office to pick up 10 copies of the paper with the photo of her grandson playing in the park. After a year, though, 200 subscribers had canceled their subscriptions because they were tired of "puppies" instead of the news photos and stories that once filled the paper. I tried like hell to provide both news and BS, but it's tough to do that when you're farting around on the pier looking for some little girl eating an ice cream cone or some old wrinkled guy at the park walking his poodle.

    The net result? We sold 190 fewer papers each day, and their answer was to print two grandson photos in each issue and pretend that the 10 extra papers sold was a net increase in circulation.

    Then they scratched their heads when advertising dropped. Their answer was to reduce quality, and it just spiraled downhill from there. A few days ago, they taped a note to their front door to announce that the paper, which had been in existence for nearly a century, is no more.

    There are lots of answers to the problem. Cutting quality isn't one of them. I wrote business stories for magazines for five years. I interviewed all sorts of successful business owners. The key to success for every one of them was to deliver value to the customer. Circle that word: value. And, to be specific, perceived value. The customer has to believe he's getting something valuable, something he can't get anywhere else and something he needs. It doesn't matter if you're selling handfuls of diamonds for a $1. If the customer isn't interested, your business fails.

    So along comes Sam Zell with this BS about how we're not giving the customer what he wants. It's horseshit. He's just trying to justify giving the customer less, and the part where his plan is flawed is in assuming that readers are stupid, that he can feed them horseshit and call it foie gras. You can probably fool people into buying cheap toys made in China that fall apart while you're trying to get them out of the damn plastic packaging. But the average newspaper reader is college-educated, curious by nature and generally intelligent. He's not going to buy Zell's BS. He's going to cancel his subscription.

    It's a race to the bottom, and everybody finishes in last place.
     
  2. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    Yeah, I didn't bother to say anything, the whole thing is getting so ridiculous, but the idea that reporters' productivity hadn't been measured before shows just how clueless some of these people can be.

    They were talking about byline counts at the K-R paper I was at in ... 1978. Other than that, it's a brand new idea.
     
  3. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    Oh, one other thing ... when Zell first showed up, I opined on here that perhaps a fresh look from an outsider would shake up the industry, lead to innovative solutions and maybe start the process of saving the print business.

    I highly regret these thoughts today, and my apologies.
     
  4. Ben_Hecht

    Ben_Hecht Active Member


    Too bad, because the best thing the Trib has going for it are its features, and this plan is going to dispatch the bulk of such efforts straight to Shitcan Alley.
     
  5. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

    It is a perfectly logical thought, and it could still happen. It just won't be him.
     
  6. SockPuppet

    SockPuppet Active Member

    SF: No apologies needed. We're all hoping that somebody was gonna lead a cavalry charge. Sadly, it's more like the Little Big Horn.
     
  7. OwlWithVowel

    OwlWithVowel Member

    Some of my favorite quotes from the Tribune stories...


    Judy Berman, senior vice president of marketing at the Baltimore Sun Media Group, confirmed yesterday that The Sun will be "enhancing its design by the end of September."

    "The new customer-centric design will focus on relevant content in a more graphical format," she said.

    *****
    Randy Michaels:

    "You find out that you could eliminate a fair number of people, while not eliminating much copy," Michaels said, without offering other specifics. He acknowledged that investigative projects take more time to report and write than ordinary articles.

    "All I'm saying is if you're working hard and producing a lot of output for us, everything's great," he added.

    ***********

    Industry analyst John Morton:

    "Whenever somebody who has no background or fundamental understanding of the newspaper business takes over a newspaper company, I worry—and I worry about the Tribune Co."

    "There's always a problem with trying to measure journalists' output by quantity when what matters most is quality."


    ****************
     
  8. chigurdaddy

    chigurdaddy Guest

    Zell Alert:

    It's full speed ahead on the Highway to Hell as Zell vows to step on the accelerator as his rig nears a steep plunge. He even chides a top henchman for ``underestimating the level of aggressiveness with which we are attacking this whole challenge.''

    Zell Gone Wild is in today's NY Times story and internal memo on Poynter Online, via Reporter-G:
    http://reporter-g.blogspot.com/2008/06/on-their-pale-horse-sam-zell-and-randy.html#links
     
  9. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    [​IMG]

    "This is the end. Beautiful, friend."
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  10. WriteThinking

    WriteThinking Well-Known Member

    Yes, and is this not the most blatant, outright admission that a company is not caring about its people that we've ever seen?:

    (From the link above, as pulled from the N.Y. Times): Mr. Michaels said that, after measuring journalists’ output, “when you get into the individuals, you find out that you can eliminate a fair number of people while eliminating not very much content.”

    And the fact that these things are being decided, and will be carried out, by a radio/TV guy who knows and cares nothing about newspapers doesn't exactly make this go down any more easily.

    It's sickening.
     
  11. Joe Williams

    Joe Williams Well-Known Member

    The fact that he says "you can eliminate a fair number of people" rather than "fair number of positions" (which would be bad enough) is indicative of what WriteThinking is saying.

    These are Barbarians Inside the Gates. What a horrible, horrible shame that the billionaire who stepped up to meet the challenges facing Tribune Co. is a complete ruthless, tone-deaf jackass. If he truly was an innovator, a visionary, a thinker, and if he valued other people for their talents in a worthwhile field, maybe there'd be a chance. But with Zell and his quick-hit, highly paid squad of assassins, it's game over.

    (I can't get over the feeling, meanwhile, that decades of having newspapers owned and run by folks who weren't anywhere in the same zip code as the best and the brightest let the industry get into this predicament. Really, seriously, how many journalists -- on the biggest stages -- ever have stood up successfully to the bean counters in any sustained way, even in happier times? With rare exceptions, they mostly cowered and caved, from small matters then to huge fundamental issues now.)

    I never have seen an industry with leadership less worthy of the mission.
     
  12. STLIrish

    STLIrish Active Member

    How are they supposed to? The bean counters hold pretty much all the cards, and any top editor knows that.
    So he's got a choice: Stand up to them nobly, as did a string of LA Times editors, and nobly get fired and replaced with someone more pliant. Or play along, i.e. "cower," and fight the small battles to keep your newsroom intact, but inevitably lose more than you win. It's a shitty game either way, but it's not really the fault of the editor.
     
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