mcuban said:
thats a leadership issue.
And THAT is a newspaper issue, one of the worst-managed industries I have ever worked in, studied or covered.
They recruit vast staffs (well, back in the day the staffs were vast) of questioning, skeptical people capable of bringing down corrupt politicians and exposing multi-national corporations, then require those same people to STFU within the paper's walls when it comes to decision-making.
They are ridiculously susceptible to promoting folks who a) brown-nose, or b) buddy up in Fredrick's notorious 10 a.m. meetings, because staffers' output is so damn subjective. They overvalue the opinions of people who are constantly in the office, and undervalue those of the staffers who are out on the front lines, working the streets -- they certainly don't promote those people as often in the aforementioned decision-making jobs. They fall in love with the work of the people they put into position to do that premium work, and take for granted those who are doing nitty-gritty work that keeps the joint afloat (especially if they were hired by a predecessor).
They pick-and-choose the windmills they want to tilt at in their editorial agendas, giving passes to certain sacred cows. They talk about having big balls in pursuing tough stories, but go gelding when an advertiser shakes his wallet at them. A lot of them don't even have balls big enough to run a staff meeting with a free exchange of ideas out of which -- through that collaboration -- some better ideas might come, because they fear that, other than their title, they don't have much reason to be holding down their "positions of authority."
They puff up in making sure their reporters don't accept a free steak dinner from a source, but they are happy to plant their people in choice real estate at games, in seat locations that would normally cost thousands of dollars, or gladly accept the discount hotel rate by being on the team's rooming list. Ethical lapses apparently only matter if they benefit the staffers, not if they benefit the newspapers.
They behave like children in demanding more and more from staffers without any concessions in $ or time or duties dropped, unilaterally changing terms of employment, always for the worse. They fail badly at managing senior staffers, in both challenging them and in utilizing their expertise. There are very few industries that treat aging staffers quite like the navel lint that this one does.
They suck up, in salaries and bonuses, amounts four, five or 10 times what a typical reporter or copy editor makes, yet they couldn't write a 15-inch gamer in 45 minutes or put a proper headline on it at deadline if their Granny's eyeballs depended on it.
These are our leaders in the news industry. Many of them, anyway, morons who could get away with being lousy when times were flush and newspapers had virtual monopolies. Now they've been exposed, and the worst of them are trying to hide behind the overall poor economy for cover.
