the sinking of the chicago tribune and other sad tales about newspapers and politics - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 10-07-2010, 11:01 AM

i decided to post the whole of a rather long ny times article here. it's about the implosion of the chicago tribune. i find it kind of interesting to speculate about what the meaning(s) might be behind it's appearance in a competitor newspaper. no matter, i suppose.

i think the "bankrupt culture" or culture of bankruptcy (take your pick) is described in a way that makes of this rather sad situation something more than an isolated factoid....

read on. we'll waiting for you at the bottom.

Quote:

At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture
By DAVID CARR

In January 2008, soon after the venerable Tribune Company was sold for $8.2 billion, Randy Michaels, a new top executive, ran into several other senior colleagues at the InterContinental Hotel next to the Tribune Tower in Chicago.

Mr. Michaels, a former radio executive and disc jockey, had been handpicked by Sam Zell, a billionaire who was the new controlling shareholder, to run much of the media company’s vast collection of properties, including The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, WGN America and The Chicago Cubs.

After Mr. Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night, he sat down and said, “watch this,” and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts. The group sat dumbfounded.

“Here was this guy, who was responsible for all these people, getting drunk in front of senior people and saying this to a waitress who many of us knew,” said one of the Tribune executives present, who declined to be identified because he had left the company and did not want to be quoted criticizing a former employer. “I have never seen anything like it.”

Mr. Michaels, who otherwise declined to be interviewed, said through a spokesman, “I never made the comment allegedly attributed to me in January 2008 to a waitress at the InterContinental Hotel, and anyone who said I did so is either lying or mistaken.”

It was a preview of what would become a rugged ride under the new ownership. Mr. Zell and Mr. Michaels, who was promoted to chief executive of the Tribune Company in December 2009, arrived with much fanfare, suggesting they were going to breathe innovation and reinvention into the conservative company.

By all accounts, the reinvention did not go well. At a time when the media industry has struggled, the debt-ridden Tribune Company has done even worse. Less than a year after Mr. Zell bought the company, it tipped into bankruptcy, listing $7.6 billion in assets against a debt of $13 billion, making it the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry. More than 4,200 people have lost jobs since the purchase, while resources for the Tribune newspapers and television stations have been slashed.

The new management did transform the work culture, however. Based on interviews with more than 20 employees and former employees of Tribune, Mr. Michaels’s and his executives’ use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company. Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the staid company, came to resemble a frat house, complete with poker parties, juke boxes and pervasive sex talk.

The company said Mr. Michaels had the support of the board.

“Randy is a tremendous motivator, very charismatic, but he is very nontraditional,” said Frank Wood, a member of the Tribune board. “He has the kind of approach that motivates many people and offends others, but we think he’s done a great job.”

The company is now frozen in what seems to be an endless effort to emerge from bankruptcy. (The case entered mediation in September after negotiations failed, and a new agreement between two primary lenders was recently announced.) But even as the company foundered, the tight circle of executives, many with longtime ties to Mr. Michaels, received tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.

Behind the collapse of the Tribune deal and the bankruptcy is a classic example of financial hubris. Mr. Zell, a hard-charging real estate mogul with virtually no experience in the newspaper business, decided that a deal financed with heavy borrowing and followed with aggressive cost-cutting could succeed where the longtime Tribune executives he derided as bureaucrats had failed.

And while many media companies tried cost-cutting and new tactics in the last few years, Tribune was particularly aggressive in planning publicity stunts and in mixing advertising with editorial material. Those efforts alienated longtime employees and audiences in the communities its newspapers served.

“They threw out what Tribune had stood for, quality journalism and a real brand integrity, and in just a year, pushed it down into mud and bankruptcy,” said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst with Outsell Inc., a consulting firm. “And it’s been wallowing there for the last 20 months with no end in sight.”

Mr. Zell has acknowledged that the deal has not turned out how he hoped. But noting a recent upturn in results, he said through a spokesman, “Tribune has made significant strides in becoming a current, competitive and sustainable media company. The measure of management’s performance is reflected in the increased profitability of Tribune’s media properties.”

The Purchase
An Innovative Deal for Little Cash

When Mr. Zell purchased the Tribune Company in December 2007, he bought into an industry desperately in need of new ideas. And Mr. Zell, a consummate deal maker, had a barrelful.

Tribune, home to some of the most important newspapers in the country — The Baltimore Sun, The Hartford Courant and The Orlando Sentinel as well as The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times — had been battered by big drops in advertising and circulation. According to Mr. Zell, the company was also suffering from stodgy thinking and what he called “journalistic arrogance.”

“There’s a new sheriff in town,” he said, in speeches that were peppered with expletives, as he toured the Tribune’s offices.

It was a message that some within the company initially welcomed.

“Sam Zell was sort of a rock star when he went around and toured the various properties,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, the former editor of The Chicago Tribune who left less than a year after the takeover. “People had been living with uncertainty for so long and they hoped something good would come from an owner with a proven track record of success in other businesses.”

Mr. Zell’s first innovation was the deal itself. He used debt in combination with an employee stock ownership plan, called an ESOP, to buy the company, while contributing only $315 million of his own money. Under the plan, the company’s discretionary matching contributions to the 401(k) retirement plan for nonunionized Tribune employees were diverted into an ownership stake. The structure of the deal allowed Tribune to become an S corporation, which pays no federal taxes; its shareholders are responsible for all taxes.

The $8 billion in new loans used to finance the deal left the company with $13.8 billion in debt. But Mr. Zell was convinced that by quickly selling the Chicago Cubs and other assets while improving operating margins, the company could emerge as a valuable property. It was typical Zell: a risky approach to gain control over a large, distressed asset while minimizing his own exposure, something he acknowledged in a company newsletter:

“I’ve said repeatedly that no matter what happens in this transaction, my lifestyle won’t change,” he wrote to his combination employees/shareholders. “Yours, on the other hand, could change dramatically if we get this right.”

His second innovation was bringing in a new management team, largely from the radio business, that, like Mr. Zell, had little newspaper experience, which constituted more than 70 percent of the company’s business.

Mr. Michaels, who was initially in charge of Tribune’s broadcasting and interactive businesses as well as six newspapers, was a former shock jock who made a name for himself — and a lot of money for Mr. Zell — by scooping up radio stations while at the Zell-controlled Jacor Communications. Jacor was later sold to Clear Channel Communications for $4.4 billion.

In turn, Mr. Michaels remade Tribune’s management, installing in major positions more than 20 former associates from the radio business — people he knew from his time running Jacor and Clear Channel — a practice that came to be known as “friends and family” at the company.

One of their first priorities was rewriting the employee handbook.

“Working at Tribune means accepting that you might hear a word that you, personally, might not use,” the new handbook warned. “You might experience an attitude you don’t share. You might hear a joke that you don’t consider funny. That is because a loose, fun, nonlinear atmosphere is important to the creative process.” It then added, “This should be understood, should not be a surprise and not considered harassment.”

The new permissive ethos was quickly on display. When Kim Johnson, who had worked with Mr. Michaels as an executive at Clear Channel, was hired as senior vice president of local sales on June 16, 2008, the news release said she was “a former waitress at Knockers — the Place for Hot Racks and Cold Brews,” a jocular reference to a fictitious restaurant chain.

A woman who used to work at the Tribune Company in a senior position, but did not want to be identified because she now worked at another media company in Chicago, said that Mr. Michaels and Marc Chase, who was brought in to run Tribune Interactive, had a loud conversation on an open balcony above a work area about the sexual suitability of various employees.

“The conversation just wafted down on all of the people who were sitting there.” She also said that she was present at a meeting where a female executive jovially offered to bring in her assistant to perform a sexual act on someone in a meeting who seemed to be in a bad mood.

Staff members who had concerns did not have many options, given the state of the media business in Chicago, the woman said. “Not many people could afford to leave. The people who could leave, did. But it was not in my best interest to have my name connected to an E.E.O.C. suit,” she said, referring to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Indeed, there are no current E.E.O.C. complaints against the Tribune Company.)

There have been complaints about Mr. Michaels in the past, however. In 1995, Mr. Michaels and Jacor settled a suit brought by Liz Richards, a former talk show host in Florida who filed an E.E.O.C. complaint and a civil suit, saying she had been bitten on the neck by Mr. Michaels and that he walked through the office wearing a sexual device around his neck.

“They were like 14-year-old boys — no boundaries at all — but with money and power,” Ms. Richards said in an interview.

During and immediately after Mr. Michaels’s tenure at Clear Channel, three lawsuits were filed contending sexual harassment at the company. One plaintiff, Karen Childress, a senior executive, said she was fired after complaining about receiving lewd e-mail from senior company executives. In her complaint, Ms. Childress also stated that women who slept with male executives at the firm were promoted. The cases were settled out of court. Clear Channel declined to comment on the lawsuits.

On Dec. 11, 2008, the Tribune board was made aware that not everyone appreciated the new cultural dynamics at the company. The board received an anonymous letter detailing a hostile work environment and a pattern of hiring based on personal relationships and suggested that the company was leaving itself open to “potential litigation risk.”

The letter also suggested that a senior executive and a female employee had been discovered by a security guard engaged in a consensual sexual act on the 22nd-floor balcony. The board took the allegation seriously enough that it hired an independent law firm to investigate it. A company spokesman said the investigation found that the executive and the woman denied the incident and the inquiry could find no evidence that such an incident had occurred or that any harassment had taken place. But a person who worked in security at the time confirmed to The New York Times that a security guard reported seeing the incident. That person declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

By September 2008, the historic Tribune Tower had someone new in charge of security: John D. Phillips, a former traffic reporter who had previously worked for Mr. Michaels. In June 2009, a party for management was held in the former office of Col. Robert R. McCormick, the newspaper baron and grandson of the founder, on the 24th floor of the Tribune Tower. Smoke detectors were covered up and poker tables were brought in.

Mr. Phillips posted pictures of the party on his Facebook page, showing Mr. Michaels and Mr. Chase, along with Lee Abrams, a former radio programmer who had joined Tribune earlier that year, playing poker and drinking in the ornate office. The Chicago media writer Robert Feder first reported about the Facebook photographs.

“We are in the office of the guy who ran the company from the 1920s to 1955,” Mr. Phillips wrote on his Facebook page. “It’s normally a shrine. We pretty much desecrated it with gambling, booze and cigars.”

A New Culture
Staff Cutbacks and Promotions

While the new owner and managers went about changing the corporate tone at Tribune, they were also under pressure to service the enormous debt. In his initial tour of the company, Mr. Zell promised there would be no job cuts. But like other media companies caught in the downdraft of advertising revenue, the company was forced to cut staff and slash budgets. Elsewhere, the company introduced promotions that seemed to have been drawn from the radio playbook. At four of the company’s television stations, an event called “CA$H GRAB,” in which a viewer was led into a bank vault and allowed to scoop up dollar bills, was inserted in the middle of the station’s newscasts. At WPIX-TV in New York, the viewers were cheered on by clapping Hooters waitresses, giving the station the appearance of televised shock radio.

Mr. Abrams, who describes himself as an “economic dunce,” was made Tribune’s chief innovation officer in March 2008. In his new role, he peppered the staff with stream-of-consciousness memos, some of which went on for 5,000 typo-ridden, idiosyncratic words that left some amused and many bewildered.

“Rock n Roll musically is behind us. NEWS & INFORMATION IS THE NEW ROCK N ROLL,” he wrote in one memo, sent in 2008. He expressed surprise that The Los Angeles Times reporters covering the war in Iraq were actually there.

James Warren, the former managing editor and Washington bureau chief of The Chicago Tribune, said: “They wheeled around here doing what they wished, showing a clear contempt for most everyone that was here and used power just because they had it. They used the notion of reinventing the newspapers simply as a cover for cost-cutting.” (As a contributor to the Chicago News Cooperative, Mr. Warren writes a column that appears in the Chicago edition of The New York Times.)

In Chicago, Ms. Lipinski said, it became clear that Mr. Zell was not above using the newspaper as a tool for his other business interests. In June 2008, Mr. Zell approached her at a meeting, saying that The Chicago Tribune should be harder on Gov. Rod Blagojevich. She reminded him that the newspaper had aggressively investigated the governor and that its editorial page had already called for his resignation.

“Don’t be a pussy,” he told her. “You can always be harder on him.”

In a news meeting later the same day, she found out that Mr. Zell was in negotiations to sell Wrigley Field to the state sports authority.

“It was hard to avoid the conclusion that he was trying to use the newspaper to put pressure on Blagojevich.”

Through a spokeswoman, Terry Holt, Mr. Zell denied he used the newspaper to business ends. “From Day 1, Sam vowed never to interfere with the editorial content at any of Tribune’s media properties, and he has always honored that commitment,” Ms. Holt said.

In a criminal complaint, federal authorities accused Mr. Blagojevich of trying to trade public financing of the stadium for the dismissal of some members of the Tribune’s editorial board. An aide to the governor charged with pursuing the matter reported back that Mr. Zell “got the message and is very sensitive to the issue,” according to a criminal complaint filed by the United States attorney’s office for the Northern District of Illinois. (In August, Mr. Blagojevich was convicted on one of the 24 felony counts he faced, lying to F.B.I. agents about his involvement in campaign fund-raising.)

Ms. Lipinski said it was that episode and other conflicts with management that prompted her resignation in July 2008, just one month after Scott Smith, the paper’s longtime publisher, left.

“I was plenty used to crisis, in many ways thrived on it,” said Ms. Lipinski, who had joined the newspaper as an intern in 1978. “But this nonsense was a form of intentional man-made distraction that made the work impossible. I couldn’t protect my staff from what they could see plainly with their own eyes.”

Mr. Zell’s various approaches didn’t slow the company’s decline. In the third quarter of 2008, the company posted a loss of $124 million, and the recession made it difficult to sell the Cubs. His purchase of Tribune became, as even he described it, “the deal from hell” and the company filed for bankruptcy on Dec. 8, 2008.

It wasn’t simply the huge debt that burdened the company; the performance under new management continued to slide. While its television division has since done well in the advertising rebound — over all, the 23 stations are on track in 2010 to pass $1 billion in revenue for the first time since 2007 — Tribune’s newspapers have continued to underperform the rest of the industry.

Advertising has been inserted into The Los Angeles Times in new and unsettling ways. In March, an ad mimicking the front page for Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland” was wrapped around the first section and in July, a fake version of the newspaper’s section for late breaking news, called LATExtra, was wrapped around the real one, promoting Universal Studios’ King Kong attraction, with a lead “story” that read “Universal Studios Partially Destroyed.” In April 2009, an advertisement posing as a news article about NBC’s new show “Southland” appeared on the front page.

In July, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the governing body of the county of Los Angeles, sent a letter of protest, saying that the use of advertising disguised as news “makes a mockery of the newspaper’s mission.”

The ads do not seem to have helped. The Chicago Tribune’s circulation continues to slide, with weekday circulation down 9.8 percent in the first half of 2010. The Los Angeles Times is in worse shape, having lost 14.7 percent of its weekday circulation in the period. (Over all, the industry lost 8.7 percent weekly circulation in the period.)

Radio, which was the core expertise of the management, has had a mixed record since the takeover. After bringing in many longtime associates of Mr. Michaels, WGN-AM, the company’s well-known talk radio station in Chicago, lost market share in 2009. The station manager sent a note last month to Tribune managers, asking them to call in to one of the new hosts, because few actual listeners were. But a company spokesman said that ratings in the morning were up 20 percent for the month of August.

In an effort to shake up the station, the management jettisoned a sports talk show at night and installed someone with no radio experience, Jim Laski, an Illinois politician who had been convicted of a felony.

Steve Cochran, a longtime midday host who has said he was dismissed as he was walking out of the bathroom this summer, said the changes seemed aimed at destroying WGN.

“This was supposed to be their comfort zone, what they were good at, and they have ruined a radio station that has had an 80-year relationship with its listeners,” he said.

“This is a collection of carnival workers who are only looking after their friends, giving jobs to their buddies. Blagojevich is on trial and you bring in a politician who has done time in jail?”

The Bankruptcy
Creditors Lose, as Do Workers

More than the Tribune’s creditors took a haircut: the shares that about 10,000 nonunion employees received in the ESOP deal are now worthless as a result of the bankruptcy, although at the beginning of this year, the company replaced the ESOP plan with a cash incentive contribution. But if and when the Tribune exits bankruptcy, the value of the company will be worth substantially less than when Mr. Zell bought a controlling interest. Under a proposed settlement filed recently with the court, senior lenders, including the Angelo Gordon hedge fund and Oaktree Capital Management, would receive $5.5 billion, while other lenders with less priority would receive far less. The case is in mediation.

“How can anybody say that they have done a good job?” said Henry Weinstein, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who filed a lawsuit, still pending, that contends that the use of employee pensions to finance the deal was illegal.

“Anybody can make money when you are not servicing the debt and cutting people. Zell and the people he brought in had no idea what they were doing.”

And Mr. Zell? On Aug. 13, his lawyers suggested that if other junior creditors were paid, he should get his money back as well.

Until the bankruptcy is resolved, Mr. Zell’s handpicked team will continue to run the company, but it is frozen out of any large strategic alliances or purchases. The issue of who will run the company will remain unsettled until the bankruptcy is resolved. Mr. Zell remains the chairman of the board and is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company.

Despite the company’s problems, the managers have been rewarded handsomely. From May 2009 to February 2010, a total of $57.3 million in bonuses were paid to the current management with the approval of the judge overseeing the bankruptcy. In 2009, the top 10 managers received $5.9 million at a time when cash flow was plummeting.

Mr. Wood, the board member, said, “We think they earned those bonuses. They’ve done a fabulous job in very difficult circumstances.”

At the time, the court-appointed trustee in the bankruptcy case filed an objection, writing that while the current owners argued for “shared sacrifice,” they “fail to understand what the concept means when it comes to compensating their management,” and then added, “now is not the time for yet another round of bonuses.”

Other proposed bonuses on the table for 2010 could bring the figure for management pay enhancements to more than $100 million, and those bonuses are heavily weighted to top management. (Earlier this week, management announced that beginning in 2011, it would begin awarding merit raises to nonunion employees of about 3 percent.)

“You have advertising wrapping around sections and being disguised as news and empty desks all around you, and then you read about these ridiculous bonuses and feathering their nests with severances, you want to scream,” said Steve Lopez, a longtime columnist at The Los Angeles Times.

The creditors, which also include JPMorgan Chase and the Deutsche Bank Trust Company, have acquiesced to the lucrative bonuses in part because they fear that antagonizing management could further hold up the company’s emergence from bankruptcy, according to two lawyers representing creditors who did not want to be quoted publicly during bankruptcy negotiations.

“No one is in charge there,” said an adviser to one of the senior creditors, who declined to speak on the record because it was not in his business interest to be in conflict with the current board or management.

Mr. Michaels suggested in public statements that his current team was very much in charge. According to the company’s monthly statements, cash flow is on the rise and the company has $1.6 billion in cash on hand, about half of it from the sale of the Cubs, which Mr. Zell eventually managed to sell. “We are just getting started,” he said in the announcement.

And management still is confident that the new thinking has Tribune on the right track. The company recently announced the creation of a new local news format in which there would be no on-air anchors and few live reports. The newscasts will rely on narration over a stream of clips, a Web-centric approach that has the added benefit of requiring fewer bodies to produce.

“The TV revolution is upon us — and the new Tribune Company is leading the resistance,” the announcement read. And judging from the job posting for “anti-establishment producer/editors,” the company has some very strong ideas about who those revolutionaries should be: “Don’t sell us on your solid newsroom experience. We don’t care. Or your exclusive, breaking news coverage. We’ll pass.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/bu...omepage&src=me

hello again. that was a long drop, wasn't it?

so...

first off this is obviously a piece about the ongoing problems that newspapers are confronting as media (rather that Newspaper confronts as a Medium...but that sounds funny). crunched by the net on the one side and the 24/7 cable streams of one-dimensional idiocy, newspapers across the board find themselves with disappearing advertisers, dropping circulations and precious little in the way of obvious alternatives. personally, if this were to affect rags like usa today or the washington times, i wouldn't care. but the tribune was once a good paper. and good newspapers have an important role to perform in the civic lives of cities in particular.

it's the disappearance of the medium and its effects on civic life that make of this a political matter, it seems to me.

but what are the alternatives?

if you look at newspaper publisher/publishing organization websites, there's all kinds of stuff about "monetizing" the web. but nothing seems to quite work, not even the limitations on non-paying access/subscription model.

there's eulogies proffered here and there for reading and how passé it is in the brave new-ish world of monitors and memes. but i dunno.

this seems to me yet another area where a government industrial policy on the japanese model might be useful. less a "bailout" than a use of federal monies that would enable newspapers to buy themselves time away from bankruptcy specialists to explore alternatives....or maybe newspapers could be defined as important enough to civic life that they should be state-funded at least to some extent...

what do you think?

b) another dimension of this article has to do with the culture imposed on the tribune by the yahoos who now run the show there. if this portrait is accurate (i have no reason to doubt that it is...) then these people remind me a bit of the people in i-banks and insurance houses who award themselves vast bonuses as the ship they are piloting sinks at speed.

do you think the behavior of these people indicative of general tendencies?
what do you make of it?

it's almost like there's some kind of millennarian thing happening--the world's gonna end soon anyway so let's plunder what we can get and screw everyone and everything else....

Baraka_Guru · 10-07-2010, 11:21 AM

There is some parallel between the issue with newspapers and the issue with books, of which I play a part as an editor for a small press in Canada.

One way to look at it is that the digital age has shifted our perceptions of certain cultural products, namely, music, news media, books, magazines, and the like. What this has meant is a shift from a physical-oriented product to a more content-oriented product. The music industry was the first to experience this shift, so it helps to look at that.

For example, one of the best initial shifts in mindset is to get it out of your head that you're in the business of selling pressed plastic discs, folded newsprint, paperbound books, etc. What you're selling is content. So the music industry learned and is learning how to "monetize," as you mentioned, certain things such as the Web and the culture surrounding music. So with music you get new revenue streams such as digital downloads of mp3s and ring tones, new models surrounding performances and other media, etc.

With books you get new revenue streams via e-books. Libraries, for example, are snatching up digital products like crazy, and e-book readers are finally hitting the mainstream. But there is still a lot of work to be done. In some ways we're just behind newspapers, who are struggling with the models you've mentioned: how to monetize the Web via ads or subscription models.

It's messy. But I think the whole deal needs to come back to the idea of content and how to monetize it. 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. The focus needs to remain on the quality of the content. There needs to be a market and the market needs to be served. If this means diversifying or focusing, then do it.

The Globe and Mail recently invested in newfangled, multimillion-dollar German printers to come up with a full-color, mixed glossy/matte product on overall higher-quality paper. It's reorganizing its content, mixing it up with info and editorial. They're emphasizing the quality of journalism and the overall experience of delivering what readers want. Of course, they also revamped their online presence too.

And the Globe's circulation has actually been increasing lately.

It's about knowing your market and giving it what it wants. I think there are still enough people out there who want quality journalism—actual journalism. It's too bad the Chicago Tribune didn't make the transition to the newer models.

roachboy · 10-07-2010, 12:11 PM

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)

Quote:

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.

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.

roachboy · 10-11-2010, 11:01 AM

these from today's guardian:

Quote:

British media join forces against Murdoch takeover of BSkyB

Letter to Vince Cable signed by many of UK's leading news providers warns £8bn deal would damage democratic debate

Fleet Street's highly factionalised newspaper industry today set aside historic differences to join forces in an unprecedented assault against the power of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

The companies behind the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail - both supporters of the Conservatives - united with the owners of the Guardian and the Labour-backing Daily Mirror to petition Vince Cable, the business secretary, to consider blocking News Corporation's proposed £8bn full takeover of the satellite broadcaster BSkyB, which trades under the name Sky.

Fearful of the combined might of an integrated News Corp-Sky operation, which would include the Sun, the News of the World, the Times and book publisher Harper Collins, the complainants said the "proposed takeover could have serious and far-reaching consequences for media plurality".

The letter, signed by Murdoch MacLennan, chief executive of Telegraph Media Group; Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror, owners of the Daily Mirror; and Andrew Miller, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, was sent to Cable today. The signatories argue against a combined Murdoch multimedia empire that would have a turnover of £7.5bn compared with the BBC's £4.8bn.

They are joined by Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC; Ian Livingston, chief executive of BT; and David Abraham, chief executive of Channel 4. Thompson was the first to publicly call for Cable to review the deal "given the scale of the potential ownership in UK media", in an interview last week with Charlie Rose on the PBS channel in the US.

The document is also backed by a memo prepared by the City law firm Slaughter & May, which sets out legal arguments for the minister to intervene.

It presents a political headache for David Cameron's coalition government. His Conservative party came to power with the help of an enthusiastic pre-election endorsement from the Sun - Britain's bestselling newspaper - and other Murdoch titles, but Cable's Liberal Democrats enjoyed no such support.

Cameron also employs the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his director of communications. Coulson, whose editorship of the Sunday tabloid remains mired in controversy about phone hacking, is close to key figures in News Corporation's newspapers, led by News International's chief executive and former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks.

The submission is made all the harder to dismiss by the fact that its organisers include Lord Black, the well-connected former director of communications of the Conservative party who now works at the company behind the Daily Telegraph; and Paul Dacre, veteran editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, whose newspaper is regarded as the authentic voice of middle England.

Over the past week, both the Telegraph and the Mail have been critical of the government's plans to cut child benefit for higher rate taxpayers, in a sign that relations between the two right-of-centre newspapers and Cameron's government are already strained.

Although Murdoch is closely identified with Sky, which is chaired by his son James, he does not own all of the fast-growing satellite broadcaster. In June, News Corporation proposed an £8bn, 700p-a-share buyout out of the 61% of the company it does not own.

Before it can go ahead, the deal must be approved by regulators. News Corporation is expected to file for regulatory approval with the European commission on competition grounds, but Cable would then have 25 days to decide whether to order an inquiry into the transaction on public interest grounds, as defined by "media plurality" being compromised.

The business secretary is expected to make his ruling within 10 days of the European commission being notified, and his decision will have to be rubber-stamped by Cameron. The media plurality test - which would be carried out first by the communications regulator Ofcom and then by ministers - is a loosely-defined concept by which Cable would have to be convinced that rival newspapers and broadcasters were at risk of closure or cuts that would damage democratic debate.

British media join forces against Murdoch takeover of BSkyB | Media | The Guardian

and this:

Quote:

Turning the heat on Rupert Murdoch

Media groups must raise the political temperature if they are to halt News Corp's bid to take full control of BSkyB

Dan Sabbagh

It is March 2015, a couple of months before the general election. One media company bestrides British politics – spanning television, newspapers and the internet. It is more than twice the size of the BBC, with a turnover of £9bn. Controlled by Rupert Murdoch, it is called News Corporation.

Bound by none of the BBC's tradition of impartiality, the Murdoch family is deciding whether to endorse David Cameron for a second term. They meet in the knowledge that behind them lies the support of a company whose Sun and Times titles account for two fifths of all newspapers sold in Britain and whose broadcasting operation is larger than the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 combined.

This vision of financial and political power has so terrified rivals that they are already ganging up in alarm. From the Daily Telegraph to the Daily Mirror, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail, a joint letter has been prepared for the business secretary, Vince Cable. Sent today, the purpose of the memo is simple – to persuade Cable to block News Corp's proposed £8bn bid to take full control of BSkyB.

Some have called it Britain's "Berlusconi moment". Yet even in Italy, it could be argued that Silvio Berlusconi's dominance of the media is less complete. The Italian prime minister controls three mainstream television channels through his company Mediaset, but he is not allowed to own any newspapers in the country (although one small title is controlled by his brother).

Berlusconi or not, what the protest does present is an unexpected headache for David Cameron and the coalition government. The prime minister's natural supporters in Fleet Street are split. Leading the rebels is Lord Black, the Conservatives' director of communications under Michael Howard, who is now an executive director at the company behind the Daily Telegraph – with close support from Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief at the Daily Mail.

And while Cameron's party owes much to pre-election support from the Sun and the Times, including an endorsement from Simon Cowell in the red-top paper, the Liberal Democrats have no such debt.

What so frightens Britain's newspaper owners today is what would happen when the profits of Sky are aligned to the power of the Sun and the Times, creating a media company whose size and scale is unheard of in British history. Sky is already larger than the BBC today, with a turnover of £5.9bn, while News International turns over £1.7bn. The BBC, by contrast, has a turnover of £4.8bn – but its licence fee income is widely expected to be cut, amid what BBC insiders describe as "neo-con" political pressure from Murdoch's newspapers.

On its own, Sky has the ability to outbid rivals at will. When the broadcaster snatched the rights to the next two seasons of Mad Men earlier this month, it offered £225,000 an episode. The BBC had been paying just £65,000. It spends more than £1bn a year on sports, this season sweeping up the rights to every single Champions League game, except for a single match a week that Uefa reserved for ITV.

Yet today, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp only owns 39.1% of the business, meaning that the majority of profits leak to outside investors, British and American pension funds. Sky's cadre of independent directors, whose ranks included Tony Blair's publisher Dame Gail Rebuck, the former Royal Mail chairman Allan Leighton and Jacques Nasser, who was chief executive of Ford, help ensure Sky's cashflows are directed to all of its shareholders' benefit.

If News Corp were to wholly own the company, it would control a profit flow of £626m as measured at the last set of accounts, rising to £1.4bn by 2015. That's according to data prepared by the investment bank Nomura, which also predicts that Sky will have a turnover of £7.8bn on that date, nearly £2bn more than today, and a £1bn marketing budget, which could be used to help promote its newspapers as well as the broadcasters.

What the newspaper groups fear is that News Corp could use its extra wealth to cross-promote television and newspapers, a simple concept known in the media industry as "bundling". Lord Puttnam, the filmmaker who is now deputy chairman of Channel 4, says: "Not only could it be possible for Sky subscribers to be offered print copies of the Sun or the Times cheaply – but there is the scope for massive discounts on electronic services that you or I haven't even thought of."

Sky has taken advantage of bundling in the past to grow at the expense of competitors. The company has long been the leader in pay television – its market share is 80% – but four years ago the company decided to get into broadband. It did so by undercutting BT, offering a basic service for free to existing subscribers, at a time when regulations prevented BT selling at a loss.

Sky's broadband service quickly grew, with half the customers taking the free product – and while the free offers have largely stopped, the company now has 2.6 million customers. Yet, when BT tried to complain about Sky's predatory pricing, the communications regulator, Ofcom, didn't investigate.

Murdoch has long pursued a strategy of price cutting at the Times and the Sun, which this year has been sold as cheaply as 20p. Accounts filed at Companies House suggest that already some of his British newspapers are having to be supported by other parts of the company. The loss for the Times and Sunday Times was £87.7m in the year to 28 June 2009, a level described by the Times's editor, James Harding, as "unsustainable" – and was partly supported by a £40.3m profit at the Sun and the News of the World.

Competition lawyers say Sky exhibits what is known as "increasing dominance" – a virtuous circle in which its financial success allows it to spend more money to bring in more customers, and in turn generate more profit. Sky's financial strength allows it to outbid rivals for an ever-increasing range of sports rights, and now it is moving into buying up US programming. There is technological innovation: this month it became the first broadcaster to launch a 3D channel, with coverage of the Ryder Cup. With a better service it wins more customers – a momentum that is hard to stop.

Over the past two decades, the growth in Murdoch's economic power went unchecked. Labour politicians were reluctant to take on the media mogul, partly because of the fear of losing the support of his newspapers but also because, in the words of one former minister, "it wasn't preordained that Sky would succeed – so why should they be punished?"

The fact, though, of a specific transaction – the £8bn attempt to buy Sky outright – does give competition authorities and politicians an opportunity to intervene. However, the problem for the anti-Murdoch camp is that competition authorities see television and newspapers as two separate markets, even if they are related. Anti-Murdoch lawyers concede that it would be hard to block the deal on pure competition grounds because Sky is getting no bigger in television and News Corp no bigger in newspapers as a result.

Cross-media ownership has instead historically been a matter for primary legislation rather than competition law, but today's rules lag behind the economic reality. So the only clear-cut rule is that preventing News Corp or Sky owning more than 20% of ITV. But after a share raid back in 2006 designed to prevent ITV falling into the hands of Virgin Media, Sky owns 7.5% – taking advantage of a loophole that allows the Murdoch family to have a crucial say in ITV's future if a foreign media company tried to mount a bid.

That is why any appeal to Vince Cable has to be made on the woolly grounds of "media plurality". The argument is that News Corp and Sky together are so large relative to rivals that their combined financial muscle will lead, inevitably, to the gradual erosion of the positions of rival newspapers. "If they cut the price of the Times, I think it would be the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph that would suffer first," said Puttnam.

Yet the plurality argument relies on an impossible-to-prove notion that other newspapers could be harmed or even collapse from some as yet unspecified cross-promotion or subsidy. It means that in reality, Fleet Street's most unlikely alliance has to raise the political temperature if it is to have a chance of succeeding. By coming together in this fashion, the Mirror, Mail, Guardian and Telegraph might just do that.

Turning the heat on Rupert Murdoch | Media | The Guardian

nothing like this has yet happened in the united states.
perhaps we've already passed a "berlusconi moment"....

working...more on this later.
what do you think?

Seaver · 10-11-2010, 08:19 PM

The cat's out of the bag. No one I know my age reads newspapers that aren't already available for free, and no one will pay subscriptions to re-read press releases with 0 research done by the "author" at the newspaper.

The only way is to break down the massive infrastructures and decentralize. A news agency which provides free, in-depth coverage online can easily gain the market share where it's currently divided 1,000 different ways. Decentralized semi-professionals working from a home computer, spread around the various cities of the US all feeding news to a small office of a half-dozen editors is the only way I see it working.

It must be fast-acting, efficient, and low cost. Unfortunately the days where Newspaper was the most respected news source disappeared back when the news was a 5min segment on the 5-Cent movies. Now they get it effectively on demand and for free, why spend the $1.25 to shift through 9 pages of coupons and irrelevant adds?

roachboy · 10-12-2010, 03:49 AM

there's two or three different things there, seaver...

1. the expectation that's been created via the net that information is free. personally i am all for that in principle. in fact too, really. this is the problem that most newspapers and newspaper publishing organizations place at the center of their seemingly endless discussions about how to "monetize" the web.

2. problems within the existing newspaper model.
i like newspapers. i should say that i like more what newspapers were before employing researchers and writers became an externality, so before wire services became ubiquitous in the ways they are now, so before so much information was the same information--factoid format, no context or research, no critical perspective. infotainment. press releases reprinted as news because it's cheaper.
but this is a delegitimation from within, as a function of the marketization of newspapers. it seems to me that the web is only an aspect of this.

3. i understand the logic of moving into a blog model, but it seems to me the consequences of that are not good at all. total parochialization. loss of common reference-points, so a fragmentation of baseline culture. more bothersome, an amateurization of journalism.
what are the consequences of the erasure of journalists as professionals?
to what extent is the blog model itself enabled fundamentally by the existence of these professional sources of information?

another way: who vets blog information? there's an obvious lack of transparency in the form that is not in any way compensated for my it's immediacy (push a button and it's up). if in the present newspaper model there's already a problem of wire-service infotainment and press releases bouncing around in a hall of mirrors....it seems to me that this kind of decentralization would only make that worse.

thinking about this, though.

when you think about a more amateur-based blog-oriented journalism, what do you think of that enables you to see positive possibilities?
i know of some very good blogs, but they're more academic or more art/design oriented.
what about more journalistic ones?

are there emerging forms that are past blogs, that may supplant newspapers but which aren't mutant tv forms?
or is this a problem for print media as the primary medium for information relay.
or is it a problem for paper media as the vehicles for print? (the web is print)...

10-07-2010, 11:21 AM	#2 (permalink)
Baraka_Guru warrior bodhisattva Super Moderator Location: East-central Canada	There is some parallel between the issue with newspapers and the issue with books, of which I play a part as an editor for a small press in Canada. One way to look at it is that the digital age has shifted our perceptions of certain cultural products, namely, music, news media, books, magazines, and the like. What this has meant is a shift from a physical-oriented product to a more content-oriented product. The music industry was the first to experience this shift, so it helps to look at that. For example, one of the best initial shifts in mindset is to get it out of your head that you're in the business of selling pressed plastic discs, folded newsprint, paperbound books, etc. What you're selling is content. So the music industry learned and is learning how to "monetize," as you mentioned, certain things such as the Web and the culture surrounding music. So with music you get new revenue streams such as digital downloads of mp3s and ring tones, new models surrounding performances and other media, etc. With books you get new revenue streams via e-books. Libraries, for example, are snatching up digital products like crazy, and e-book readers are finally hitting the mainstream. But there is still a lot of work to be done. In some ways we're just behind newspapers, who are struggling with the models you've mentioned: how to monetize the Web via ads or subscription models. It's messy. But I think the whole deal needs to come back to the idea of content and how to monetize it. 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. The focus needs to remain on the quality of the content. There needs to be a market and the market needs to be served. If this means diversifying or focusing, then do it. The Globe and Mail recently invested in newfangled, multimillion-dollar German printers to come up with a full-color, mixed glossy/matte product on overall higher-quality paper. It's reorganizing its content, mixing it up with info and editorial. They're emphasizing the quality of journalism and the overall experience of delivering what readers want. Of course, they also revamped their online presence too. And the Globe's circulation has actually been increasing lately. It's about knowing your market and giving it what it wants. I think there are still enough people out there who want quality journalism—actual journalism. It's too bad the Chicago Tribune didn't make the transition to the newer models. __________________ Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot Last edited by Baraka_Guru; 10-07-2010 at 11:24 AM..

10-11-2010, 08:19 PM	#5 (permalink)
Seaver Junkie Location: Fort Worth, TX	The cat's out of the bag. No one I know my age reads newspapers that aren't already available for free, and no one will pay subscriptions to re-read press releases with 0 research done by the "author" at the newspaper. The only way is to break down the massive infrastructures and decentralize. A news agency which provides free, in-depth coverage online can easily gain the market share where it's currently divided 1,000 different ways. Decentralized semi-professionals working from a home computer, spread around the various cities of the US all feeding news to a small office of a half-dozen editors is the only way I see it working. It must be fast-acting, efficient, and low cost. Unfortunately the days where Newspaper was the most respected news source disappeared back when the news was a 5min segment on the 5-Cent movies. Now they get it effectively on demand and for free, why spend the $1.25 to shift through 9 pages of coupons and irrelevant adds? __________________ "Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

10-12-2010, 03:49 AM	#6 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	there's two or three different things there, seaver... 1. the expectation that's been created via the net that information is free. personally i am all for that in principle. in fact too, really. this is the problem that most newspapers and newspaper publishing organizations place at the center of their seemingly endless discussions about how to "monetize" the web. 2. problems within the existing newspaper model. i like newspapers. i should say that i like more what newspapers were before employing researchers and writers became an externality, so before wire services became ubiquitous in the ways they are now, so before so much information was the same information--factoid format, no context or research, no critical perspective. infotainment. press releases reprinted as news because it's cheaper. but this is a delegitimation from within, as a function of the marketization of newspapers. it seems to me that the web is only an aspect of this. 3. i understand the logic of moving into a blog model, but it seems to me the consequences of that are not good at all. total parochialization. loss of common reference-points, so a fragmentation of baseline culture. more bothersome, an amateurization of journalism. what are the consequences of the erasure of journalists as professionals? to what extent is the blog model itself enabled fundamentally by the existence of these professional sources of information? another way: who vets blog information? there's an obvious lack of transparency in the form that is not in any way compensated for my it's immediacy (push a button and it's up). if in the present newspaper model there's already a problem of wire-service infotainment and press releases bouncing around in a hall of mirrors....it seems to me that this kind of decentralization would only make that worse. thinking about this, though. when you think about a more amateur-based blog-oriented journalism, what do you think of that enables you to see positive possibilities? i know of some very good blogs, but they're more academic or more art/design oriented. what about more journalistic ones? are there emerging forms that are past blogs, that may supplant newspapers but which aren't mutant tv forms? or is this a problem for print media as the primary medium for information relay. or is it a problem for paper media as the vehicles for print? (the web is print)... __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite