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.
