San Jose

Former Mercury News editor Susan Goldberg on her bailing out of San Jose last year:

“I just wanted to get out of the whole situation,” she says now. “It was just very unhappy. I didn’t see where it was going to end.”


That's leadership!

 

I don't see anything wrong with her wanting to get out. I've seen this kind of thing take its toll on top editors' health. Some don't give a shit, but it tears some of them up. And good people are going to get screwed whether they stay or go.

Back in the early 1980s, I left a dying paper shortly after the editor did, and about a year later I was visiting and went to see him at his new paper. He's a very tough guy and didn't let us see him sweat, and when we were talking about the old place, I mentioned that maybe they knew what they were doing since they were still alive, incredibly. He said, "Are you out of your fucking mind?" Said the place still gave him nightmares. Now he loved that paper -- he had started as a muni reporter out of school and became editor -- but he could not take the dismantling anymore.

I don't blame anyone for not wanting to do that kind of stuff.

 

Would you rather work for an editor who was just going through the motions?

Sheesh. At least Goldberg was honest.

 

Good for her.

 

She has skillz and numerous attributes. But I wouldn't confuse frankness for honesty.

One of the journalists who has closely observed her management style wrote this devastating take a while back on a Cleveland Scene story:

As a former Mercury News reporter under the queen of mediocrity, I can report, you are about to spend months or years with the lamest manager you have ever worked for.

Goldberg added nothing to the Mercury News and lied at every turn. She's doing the same there. In the PD's story announcing her hire, she claimed to have instituted hires that boosted circulation at the Mercury among women and minorities. Well, circulation went down some 30 percent in her seven years there, so you can do the math.

She talked about being the smartest person in the room in a profile. Only if the room had George Bush in it. Her main news interest, besides chunky bits, is shopping for the trappings of the rich: her convertible Mercedes; her $1,000 a night spa treatments; her boring but expensive outfits.

She's the George W of news, all style, no content.

Her news judgement can be described this way: she responds well to the last call of complaint she got.

You will never see her hang with reporters or have a real human interaction. She's too afraid to be unveiled as not as bright as she thinks she is.

In her memo leaving the Merc, she thanked Managing Editor David Satterfeld .... who, like anyone who succeeded under her, spent too much time kissing her ass --for "teaching her to be human." She's the only one who thinks she learned the lesson.

Much of her management style was a series of personal vendettas, and moving up writers who had flash and no substance. She promoted a music writer who spelled notable acts Beetles and Bob Dillon in a Grammy story, and didn't have a clue who they were, but could crank out plenty of chunky bits.

Just seeing that phrase sends a chill down my spine...

She will do what she did here: try to make the paper appeal to people who don't read with lots of pictures and graphics and idiotic drawings, and no real substance.

Then she'll hide in her office and bad talk everyone behind their backs, while anything with real personality, information, risk, and style, gets sanitized through her prudish Victorian lens.

Guys, you better stay anonymous. She'll be relentless in her revenge if she knows who you are.

Posted at: September 29, 2007 1:18 PM
anonymous says:

Among Susie's other great moves in san jose: When she married a guy with a kid, she decided that families were more important than entertainment, so buried the Wednesday entertainment section behind a new family section.

OF course in the country's fourth biggest entertainment market, where the San Francisco Chronicle covers entertainment hugely, and has twice the circulation, this wasn't the brightest move.

She followed that failure with a great idea for saving money: getting rid of the local section and combining it with the A section.

Reader complaints fixed both these errors. In another business, the manager who came up with this crap would have been fired.

Instead, Susie runs off to Cleveland, where rumor has it, she's hoping to leverage her editorship into running one of the company's New York fashion mags.

That is if the Peter Principle doesn't catch up to her and have her running away with her tail between her legs.

Posted at: October 1, 2007 7:55 PM

 

OK. I get it now.

 

OK, I get it now too:

Nice new $1,000 clothes, Emperor! (Empress?)

That is one great vivisection, MMatt60.

 

It is great stuff ---- and dead-on --------- but not written by me. It was taken from a blog in Cleveland.