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Kill the Media Zombies
The great media companies are laying off employees by the truckload. They ought to start with the feckless bureaucrats who are running the place.
The carnage in media jobs accelerated last week with hundreds getting whacked at Viacom, NBC, Time Inc., and my own esteemed publisher Doubleday. One of the runners-up in the Person of the Year award by the industry website IWantMedia.com was The Laid-Off Journalist. We’re in the middle of a volcanic realignment that’s overdue; but as Big Media fights for its life, are the right people leaving?
As great newspapers, magazines, TV networks, and publishing houses dismember themselves around us, it would be marginally consoling if the pink slips were going to those who contributed so vigorously to their companies’ accelerating demise—the feckless zombies at the head of corporate bureaucracies who cared only about the next quarter’s numbers, never troubled to understand the DNA of the companies they took over, and installed swarms of “Business Affairs” drones to oversee and torment the people “under” them. There are floors of these creatures in any behemoth media company, buzzing about each day thwarting new ideas or, worse, having “transformative” ideas of their own when what is usually required is to revive, with a bit of steadfast conviction, the originating creative purpose of the enterprise. It’s the same with the auto companies.
There are floors of feckless zombies in any behemoth media company, buzzing about each day thwarting new ideas or, worse, having “transformative” ideas of their own.
The public rage towards the Big Three reflects in part the rage many employees feel today about the way their own companies have been so messed up already they were in no shape to survive a market collapse. Only now are we hearing how the innovative engineers who wanted to get into hybrids and electric cars were cut off when the accountants decreed that there was more and quicker profit in churning out gas guzzlers. Same story with Moody’s rating agency dissected in Sunday’s New York Times by Gretchen Morgenson. Her interviews show how a company built on assessing risk for lenders became more concerned with serving itself. In the pursuit of ever higher profit margins (like 48 or 53 percent, for instance) it forsook its role as a watchdog to become a lapdog yapping for a bite of the master’s sirloin.
What do cars, debt risk, and collapsing television networks have in common? The suits running them all lose sight of what they condescendingly call “product”—i.e., whatever it was that motivated the company’s spirit of excellence in the first place. The trouble is, those guys and their appointees don’t seem to be the ones who are leaving, do they? Indeed, the recession is giving many of them air cover. “It’s not my fault, it’s the times we live in.”
In all these big, lumbering companies every effort at innovation or practical efficiency gets strangled by something called “the process,” that long death march from an initial promising convergence of minds, not to rejection—rejection would be easier—but to indeterminate stasis. The cast of characters needed to reach a conclusion is eternally changing. One of the ironies of instant communication it seems is that no one is ever available to talk. Joe’s at an offsite but he’s on his BlackBerry. Karen’s at a sales meeting but she’s on a conference call. What happened to Kevin? Oh, he’s no longer officially around, but yeah, he’s still “in the mix.” You bet he is.
When a meeting finally convenes, there are still more people. Tramp, tramp, tramp—in they come with their laptops and their forecasts of why it’s not going to work. There’s usually one eager newcomer at any PowerPoint presentation who has a small speaking part before the graphs and arrows appear on the screen. “Will somebody please dim the lights?” Nobody notices that in this behemoth they’d been dimmed sometime before the meltdown. Meanwhile, inside the company a “major restructuring” is announced and heads start to roll. That skill that took a lifetime to acquire—can he or she please cost it out on an hourly basis? Do we really have the time to slog through the details of a project that might, incidentally, save this company?
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Paul Schrodt is a writer living in New York City. He has contributed to New York magazine, Radar, and Esquire.com.
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Tina Brown is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. She is the author of the 2007 New York Times best seller The Diana Chronicles. Brown is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines and host of CNBC's Topic A with Tina Brown.
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geeess
A small organization can take things as they come. It needs little if any process.
A big organization with too little process will burn itself out, run off a cliff, or wander into a quicksand. With too much process, process becomes an end in itself, and the big organization will stop moving and die.
Indeed the Big Three car makers seem to be failing because of too much process (some of which, perhaps, is imposed by the government). Otoh, apparently the rating agencies deliberately dismantled legitimate functional processes which they had in place.
jackieleo
As usual, Tina is right on target. The war between critics and creators, ideas and "i don'ts" is partly responsible for the downfall of companies that have been managed by people who care more about quarter by quarter accounting than accountability.
Donegal
All true, but if one of those Pulitzer Prize winning reporters came to The Daily Beast, how much would you pay for a story? $300? $400? Is this how you're staying solvent--by not paying correspondents (who could get minimum $2 and $3 a word and more in a magazine so they can actually survive in a freelance career)? Is this the wave of the future--"We don't have to buy paper and we can get content for practically nothing! Yay!"?
LazyTrainer
The media is definitely in for some interesting times. I recently saw a show about beer and how the big brewers took over and ruled until the 1980's. At that time microbrewers began appearing and have prospered. The big guys are still there but those who like their beer tend to patronize the microbreweries.
I see the media of books and news in much the same position. The small regional publishers are begining to find their place. People who are seriously interested in good reading and news are increasingly looking to these small presses to fulfil their needs.
The internet is also changing how we get our news and entertainment.
In ten years it will be interesting to see where all these changes have led us.
As for those big bottom-line guys, maybe they need to re-think what the bottom-line really is as they lose market share.
kcbrady
great piece ... and lets not forget how many of these companies would be profitable if they hadn't been saddled with debt through ill-advised mergers and acquisitions. All in the name of synergy.
finderj
Hear, hear!!! Mot of us out in the hinterlands, well away from the hub of modern American life as stated in the big cities where the suits live, can clearly see that big management is interested in sustaining only itself, at the cost of all others. There's a Biblical injuction aboiut binding the mouths of the cattle that grind the grain that 'suits' would do well to heed. Or if religion has no relevance in your life, try PT Barmum, who said that if you just take off the wool and leave the skin, you can shear the sucker regularly, but if you take off the skin too, you'll kill him and have to find a new sucker. Many conglomerates have fogotten that axiom, and have skinned not only their employees but the customers as well. And now the entire country is reaping what they have sown for us.
metheringtonsmith
Hurrah! TINA IS TALKING NON-MANAGEMENT-CONSULTANCY-M & A-SPEAK SENSE!
Synergy via mergers & acquisitions will never replace core creativity.
RemoteOutpost
Yes, let the good times roll. But lest we forget, the good times last only for a while before many of those "good timers" become very self-conscious about their own survival. It's all very exciting in the beginning with exploring new ways and discoveries but eventually the nothing-to-lose mentality wakes up along the way and becomes serious about maintaining whatever standing has been achieved or at the very least a generous savings account. That survival of course often shows itself in the desperate and overly cautious attitude of those in prominence to not rock the boat - especially their boat. Inevitably the result is that the peaceful ponds of some are the stagnant pools to others.
Will there ever be a time when the old and the new effortlessly segue into one another and it's sunshine, lollipops and rainbows all around? Well, that will take one heck of a cultural change and from what I see going on in the world it's going to take some time before that.
Yes, let the new throw out the old. There will be some figurative carnage but hey, it'll provide for some dark humor along with the innovation. Historically, it's right on schedule.
retired92
Why has everyone ignored the fact the BIG name TV reporters (?), i.e., Katie Curic, etc. receive anywhere from $10 MILLION to $20 MILLION per year to look good and impress all. DO you realize the extra cost to everything that is advertised on these programs is passed on to the consumer!
NYCrex
When counting beans becomes more important than that which sows and reaps your beans, it won't be long before you have no more beans to count. Hopefully, our businesses will realize that bean counters don't make the beans!
ventnornj
The most important sentence in this right-on piece refers to "the DNA" of the enterprise. If bean counters don't understand the true soul of the business (and most often they don't), it is only a matter of time before if founders -- even in a growth economy. In a down economy, that bell rings sooner rather than later.
CathyK83
Coming from one of, what is considered, the best journalism schools in the country, I couldn't breathe for a good year when told by a professor who ate, drank, slept journalism to "get out while you can", that "there are no more jobs", and "no matter how much you and i love the industry, it's just plain stupid to not have a back-up-plan".
Maybe I should've heeded that advice...
milkbone
The time when recover fro this mess is when people start believing again, it's not CEO's, bean-counters or the 100 story building that they call headquarters. It's the PRODUCT!
kluivertus
I hate to say it, but: I think the next wave of the future is in the blogs. And, of course, delightful news sites like the Beast, Amy Siskind notwithstanding.
It's going to start as people do basic work for small pay, but they're doing something they love. Then, as demand for said sites ramp up, because the newspapers are too expensive for terrible news (coming from Chicago, the new Tribune looks like USA Today. It's an embarrassment), more and more reporters are going to be fleeing to the sites, and more sites will pop up.
It's a generally ugly time in the world, but things will get better.
NinaMiller
You rock, Tina.
Thank you.
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