Posted on 02/27/2008 6:17:03 AM PST by abb
'Break down these ... walls," Sam Zell told print and broadcast staff Tuesday at Tribune Co.'s Washington bureau, part of the boss' tour of the company's various media properties, and you can bloody well guess what the ellipsis is for if you've been keeping tabs on Zell's road shows to date.
It wasn't exactly Ronald Reagan at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, but it was close.
Zell, Tribune's chairman and chief executive, wants to unify the company's Washington bureau, and he seems to feel diplomacy has gotten the company nowhere so far.
To Zell, the bureau isn't home to reporters from its Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Newsday and Los Angeles Times. Rather, it's a single, overstaffed Tribune Co. cost center that doesn't produce any revenue. According to several in attendance, Zell said the competing "fiefdoms" are an embarrassment.
Repeating recent comments about how the media business is in crisis, Zell said he recognized the importance of national news and news from Washington, but the bureau's structure is "unsupportable," and its "bloated" size is "unequivocally economically unjustifiable." And he singled out the Los Angeles Times' contingent.
"Sam thumped them pretty hard," one attendee said.
The grilling over Washington staffing is emblematic of a debate raging in media circles. Declining revenue is forcing outlets to reconsider how they allocate dwindling resources, what coverage is vital as opposed to a luxury and the price of sharing content.
Zell noted the Chicago Tribune has greater cash flow than the Times, but the Times has more than twice the number of staffers in the capital, at 54. Times bureau chief Doyle McManus corrected him, pointing out Los Angeles' number is actually 47. ( Chicago, it turns out, has 16.)
snip
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
ping
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/davidhorsey/archives/132826.asp?from=blog_last3
Liberty, journalism and Sam Zell
Who is Sam Zell and why should you care? The answer to the second part of that question is easy: the health of our nation depends on an informed electorate and an informed electorate depends on an unfettered news media willing to tell people more than what they want to hear.
The answer to the first part of that question is that Sam Zell is the most vulgar embodiment of a pervasive bean counter mentality that is threatening the best of American journalism.
At the end of 2007, Zell concluded a sweet deal to take over the Chicago-based Tribune Company — sweet, because he did it with a small amount of his own money. He leveraged the deal by borrowing billions of dollars from the Tribune employees retirement funds (how this is legal, I cannot fathom). Now he is master of a media conglomerate that reaches 80 percent of Americans through 23 televisions stations and 11 daily newspapers.
What does Zell know about journalism? No more than any other billionaire real estate mogul. But that hasn’t stopped him from telling off journalists at some of the country’s best newspapers — the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Hartford Courant, the Baltimore Sun and, finest of all, the Los Angeles Times. Zell has told these new employees of his that they are practitioners of an arrogant kind of journalism that doesn’t give readers what they want and fails to make increasing company profits a key objective of news gathering.
As I detailed in my cartoon, Zell has delivered his message on a grand tour of his properties, dropping F-bombs all along the way. Worse than his crude language, though, is his vision of the future of journalism. Apparently, foreign coverage and reporting from Washington, D.C., will be discounted. Stories that seek to protect the public interest by tackling tough, important subjects will be frowned upon, unless they can somehow be shown to enhance the bottom line.
Yes, Zell wants to give people what they want. That’s not such a radical idea. From comics to horoscopes to gossip columns, newspapers have always done that. But Zell’s diatribes imply that should be the only way to define news. He seems to believe it is arrogant to say people don’t always know what they want or need to know. I’d argue that is not arrogant, it is a simple fact of communication. None of us — journalists included — know everything we need to know. We depend on people who are better informed to tell us many important things. It has always been the job of reporters to inform themselves and then to pass on that information to readers in an intelligent, fair way. It has also been the vital role of newspapers to act as watchdogs, to let corrupt politicians or corporate crooks know they are being observed by people who buy ink by the barrrel. I’m sure Zell would deny he is undercutting that role of the media outlets he now owns, but the fact is, the job cannot be done by newsrooms without the manpower to do it and without the assurance that traditional journalism will be honored rather than derided by the man at the top.
No one would dispute that newspapers are in dire trouble. Profits and readership are falling fast. But publishing pap will not bring them back. People still value serious and substantive information. Newspaper web sites are booming. What is missing is a new economic model for the news business. That’s what a smart businessman like Zell should be working on. Sure, journalists need to adapt to new ways of delivering information to an audience that can access a world of information with a few clicks of a mouse. But dumbing down the news product is the dumbest idea of all. It won’t bring in the profits wheeler-dealers like Zell crave. It will, however, imperil our free society.
There is a reason Thomas Jefferson said, if given the choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he’d opt for the latter. Jefferson knew there was nothing less at stake in that equation than our very liberty.
Waiting For Sam: Zell Hovering As Newsday Shakes
by John Koblin | February 26, 2008
This article was published in the February 27, 2008, edition of The New York Observer.
Sam Zell.
William Couch’s Flickr
Off the Record
*
Tell the Truth, But Slant, While Web Trolls Rant
It’s been a jittery two weeks in Melville.
Over the next week, Newsday reporters and editors are expecting an announcement about job cuts. Even veterans of the Vlad the Impaler year of 1995, in which Times Mirror ordered the elimination of 800 jobs from a payroll of 3,200, contemplate the coming week with dread.
“To be honest with you, it’s really grim here,” said James Bernstein, a business reporter and 30-year-veteran.
“It’s very bleak, and everyone is totally absorbed in it,” said another reporter.
“It really wears you down,” said William Murphy, a reporter on the Long Island desk.
On Feb. 13 Sam Zell—who bought Newsday’s parent company for $8.2 billion in December—wrote in an e-mail that there would be job cuts at every Tribune paper. The L.A. Times made its announcement the next day—100 to 150 jobs would be lost—and the Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant put their estimates at about 45 jobs. Newsday has yet to make its decisions on job cuts.
“First you’ll hear the rumor that it’s seven positions, then 40, then 10, then you hear the newsroom will be spared, then it won’t, and there’s just all these e-mails back and forth and no one knows what’s happening,” said Mr. Murphy.
“It’s difficult to work ’cause one second you’re on the phone and then somebody comes in and screams, ‘I heard the latest!’ And then you tell the guy on the phone, ‘Wait, I’ll be right back with you,’” said Mr. Bernstein.
And the latest is still little more than: The decision is coming.
“We’ve gotten the sense that it will be this week,” said Zachary Dowdy, a reporter and editorial vice president of the Local 406 that represents Newsday employees.
It’s an exacting time at papers nationally—The New York Times announced earlier this month that it was cutting about 100 newsroom jobs this year.
But at Newsday, there is no jobectomy left that won’t take out some bone.
Since the 1995 purge that eliminated the paper’s New York edition, the paper has steadily cut positions, generally in increments of 50.
Thirteen positions in the newsroom have been vacated in the last year, and have not been refilled; it’s not clear whether those will even count toward whatever cuts Newsday will have to make. (L.A. Times publisher David Hiller announced in his job-cuts e-mail that all open positions would be eliminated.)
In one demoralizing memo back in December, editor John Mancini announced that four star reporters were leaving: Matthew McAllester to Details; Katie Thomas to The Times; Tom McGinty to The Wall Street Journal; and James Rupert to Bloomberg News.
Mr. Murphy, the Long Island reporter, felt that Newsday got beat badly on a story in its own backyard—the story of the three children found dead in their Garden City apartment on Feb. 24—because the paper hasn’t replaced its social services reporter after Lauren Terrazzano died last year.
But what gets really depressing are the small-ticket items that are being slashed: Can the scale of Newsday’s current expenses really make the cancellation of staff subscriptions to the New York Post, the Daily News and USA Today seem worth the candle? Who’s going to bust ass on a story after they’ve initialed the pass-around chit on the single copy of The Times and two copies of The Wall Street Journal that wend their way among the desks of 26 reporters and editors?
“You get accustomed to opening newspapers at Newsday, it’s been like that for 30 years,” said Mr. Bernstein. “Now it’s like working blind!”
The environment like this one leads to all sorts of speculation: One reporter grumbled about the cafeteria shortening its hours after the paper replaced contractors late last year; another said that reporters are being discouraged to taking sources out to lunch.
The paper’s summer internship program, one of the most popular nationally with college seniors and J-school grad students since it offered up to 25 internships, a cushy $523 weekly salary and a job offer for two interns, will be cut this year. Two reporters said that word around the newsroom is that it will save the paper a little more than $100,000.
The paper’s spokeswoman, Deidra Parrish Williams, described the cut this way: “What I can tell you is that the summer internship is on a hiatus, but we will still have academic interns. With regards to your question about whether those interns will be offered jobs, that is still taking shape.”
http://www.observer.com/2008/waiting-sam-zell-hovering-newsday-shakes
They haven't done this in a long time.
After listening to the question on the video, by a male, ‘ the women are offended!’
I have to ask are they in a sheltered workshop?
Our high and mighty journalist sorely needs intervention to break free from his MSM koolaid drip.
A bunch of Luddites acting like winos passing around a bottle.
Pure arrogance,....we are the gatekeepers of truth.....barf!
And I do think the people ought to know that....Global Warming may rapidly turn to Global Cooling!
What arrogance!
‘Chicago Tribune’ D.C. Bureau Chief Welcomes Zell “Challenge”
By Joe Strupp
Published: February 27, 2008 12:40 PM ET
NEW YORK Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau Chief Michael Tackett welcomed new Tribune Company Chief Sam Zell’s challenge to reorganize the D.C. bureau and said his staff is “locked, loaded and ready to change.”
But Tackett, a veteran D.C. journalist and bureau chief since 2004, also said he would fight to keep each of his 16 bureau staffers. “I am going to defend every position that I have on their merits as productive, flexible, adaptive people who want to compete and win.”
Tackett’s views followed Tuesday’s visit by Zell and Tribune Vice President Randy Michaels to the Tribune D.C. bureau, which houses the Washington bureaus of each Tribune newspaper. During that meeting, Zell made clear he did not like the current staffing levels or the separate coverage approach from each paper.
“He clearly sees bloat and status quo. He wants change,” Tackett said about the visit, which included a clear request by Zell for a new operational plan for the bureau. “He said, ‘you come up with a plan to fix things or I will fix it for you.’ I look at that as an opportunity. It is time to take it to the next level.”
Tackett said bureau staffers are working on a reorganization plan that they will offer to Tribune executives, but had no specifics or timing yet.
“Let’s say I am not going to waste a lot of time,” he added. “It is a blaring grasp of the obvious what he wants.” Tackett said it is not clear if each Tribune D.C. bureau would formulate its own proposals or work together for a united plan: “That is still being decided, this is all fairly fresh.”
Frank James, a Chicago Tribune D.C. reporter since 1995 and lead contributor to “The Swamp,” the bureau’s popular blog, called Zell’s views, “a hard reality.”
“It is like learning you have cancer,” James explained. “What are you going to do about it? Give up or figure out how to deal with it?” He said most staffers are taking the approach of offering a solution. “They came in and gave us a dose of the new reality,” he added. “The new reality is that revenues are eroding faster than anyone had forecast.”
Tackett said he appreciated the positive comments from Zell and Michaels about “The Swamp,” which launched in January 2006 and has seen a 40% page view increase since December 2007, with expectations for 2 million page views for February, its largest ever.
Tackett said he proposed ideas for a possible Swamp television show and a likely expansion of the blog to Zell and Michaels. “They said, ‘we think The Swamp is a great feature’,” Tackett said. “That is good stuff; that is about what we can do.”
Other Tribune Company D.C. bureau staffers were either unreachable or unwilling to comment Wednesday morning. Tackett said the impact of Zell’s views “was pretty dramatic, but no one’s knees are knocking.”
Still Tackett made clear that his bureau understands the need to change and is willing to work toward a new approach. “It is a new day and we are kidding ourselves if we don’t think the business is in a fundamentally challenging time,” he stressed. “The time for standing on ceremony is over.”
Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.
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So the long-time presstitutes are unhappy with Zell? That’s a huge plus in my book.
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