the ny times piece makes it sound as if the crew that zell brought in with him had neither the interest in transforming the tribune nor the competence to do it. what they appear to have done instead was basically treat the paper as so much investment portfolio meat and in the process fuck over about 10,000 employees by giving them worthless bonds. part of this seems to me to follow from something that's enabled by (or of a piece with--it's hard to say) shift you perform (which i agree with and think interesting)
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book publishers aren't producers of books, they're producers of book-length textual content, so newspapers companies aren't producers of newspapers, they're producers of news content.
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which has that kind of alchemical markety thing happening....which is an inversion of marx's labor theory of value---which tried to account for the consequence of the universalization of price by positing labor as a universal "substance" which he thought logically and critically necessary as an alternative to the effect of a universalization of price (so a universalization of social relations mediated by money on the one hand and the commodity form on the other)----which is that all commodities stand in a kind of relation to each other, can be understood in relation to each other---this despite the fact that it is only the attribution of price that brings this (appearance? relation?) into being. whence for marx the idea of labor power as condensed somehow within a commodity that accounts in some "essential" way for value by being that "substance" that all commodities have in common....
the correlate is in the the notion of "content"---which entails a sense of interchangeability--from which it could plausibly follow that it made sense to bring in a bunch of people who worked for clear channel in the production of "radio content" and set them into motion producing "informational content" in a newspaper context.
but the article says, basically
a) that these people are idiots.
(proof--absence of decorum. inability to recognize social norms. demonstration: sexual harrassment suits at clear channel. allegations of harrassment and impropriety in general at the tribune. the rewriting of the employee manual in order to accomidate their flinstone notion that harrassment is part of some "non-linearity" that's "central to the creative process")
and
b) were seemingly not interested in transitioning the tribune into anything. they were, however, interested in paying themselves giant bonuses.
so what it looks like is that zell is a bankruptcy guy, really. one of those venture-capitalist vampires. the kiss of death for a foundering firm, like a buzzard that circles overhead at the end.
which means that the particular problem with the tribune is both everything you say, baraka, and particular to the tribune---but in a particular way, one that looks a whole lot like other aspects of contemporary end-game fading empire capitalism.
more later perhaps. working. interested in more input tho.