Diane Mermigas this morning on the Tribune bankruptcy:
Tribune is a classic textbook case on how not to take a media company private, especially in hard times. But the real tragedy will be if Zell adds insult to injury by failing to use Chapter 11 restructuring to give it a new lease on life. Undertaking a dramatic digital reinvention of its diverse operations would provide a template to other media companies that desperately need to transition into new infrastructures to survive.
But as Clayton Christensen told us over a decade ago, such dramatic reinventions of established companies — public or private — rarely succeed. The more I think about the plight of newspapers, the more I fear many of them will have to start over: file for bankruptcy, sell off the assets and a small group of the newspaper’s best former employees (and a few others) regroup in a startup, designed from the ground up as a low-cost digital operation with a small print extension. This is much more likely to succeed than a newspaper completely reinventing itself from the inside.
No related posts.
“dramatic digital reinvention” so far has added up to nothing more than wall-to-wall redesigns of online properties(which only get trashed by current users who have grown accustom to the previous “reinvention”). whoopie!
although, i do see a few “rebrands” coming that seem to ditch the dial position in favor of a geographic one.
that’s at least a positive step as ‘the dial’ is rapidly being replaced by ‘the keyboard’.
don’t cry for mr. zell, he’ll do fine.
no matter how bad things get and for whatever reason, media companies can’t stop bad habits.
they also can’t thinking like they used to.
Everybody knows what’s going on and what they should / need to do, but no one will step up and do it, because they don’t want to be the fall guy.
Instead, they choose to ride it out and make a small step here and there that they can hold up in front of the company leadership and say “See we’re trying!”
small moves will get you small progress and that = too slow to survive.
Zell took a major gamble, which might–might–have paid off if the economy had remained relatively strong.
But it didn’t, and now many, many Tribune employees, from the papers to TV, are paying the price for Zell’s failed gamble.
Of course, Zell himself isn’t hit so hard personally as the people he lead into unemployment. That’s the nature of being wealthy.
i’ll disagree that it might have paid off if the economy remained strong.
that’s like saying detroit wouldn’t need a bailout if the economy remained strong.
i did term paper after term paper on detroit’s woes… back in 1980 when i went to school in hawaii.
what we’re seeing in alot of industries is the last 20 years of technology coming home to roost.
bailouts won’t set back the clock.
btw- somebody’s shares are getting crushed today, i’d rather not name names though.
Sam Zell made his billions using leveraged asset flips. He tried to do it with a media company. (He referred to the Tribune deal as 300 ways to get lucky). OOOPPS. Here’s my point, there is nothing to suggest Sam Zell know anything about operational pioneering or vision. Nothing. He’s has never shown to have one ounce of leadership that would make Clayton Christensen proud. We’ll see.
They had too many sucky businesses. Insert coin.
Insert coin is what got them there probably. Game over.
The problem facing newspapers — and I’ve been neck-deep in them — is that no one writing or editing at a newspaper has any incentive to change the way the do things.
All incentives now are just as they were 15 years ago: create and product content that generally appeals to OTHER journalists — because that is how you get your next job or a promotion or pay raise.
It has to be changed to focus on areas that are trackable and measured….
But no one wants to do that — it would run up against their entire way of thinking.
Sad.