Dean Baquet and Donald Rumsfeld....
Lose their jobs on the same day. Rumsfeld earned it the old-fashioned way, by being incompetent. Baquet followed a different but also time-honored path to unemployment; he was insubordinate.
Baquet was the editor in chief of the LA Times, and the Tribune Co., the parent company of the Times, had to fire him--they had already fired the publisher of the Times--after he refused to make staff cuts. More staff cuts, one should say; the Times had already bled plenty of newsroom workers. The Tribune Co., though, answers to shareholders and has the Chandler family on its ass, and so demands a high profit margin from its properties--in the neighborhood of 20%, well above the average return for Fortune 500 companies, and certainly extravagant for a prestige newspaper in a shrinking industry.
Rumsfeld, on the other hand, did everything he was asked; he's taking the fall for an incompetent boss (Dick Cheney). The failures of his outfit have been spectacular. How did he stick around so long? Loyalty? Hm. Tell that to Colin Powell. Will he have interesting stories to tell?
It is tempting to draw a comparison between Iraq and the news industry. In both cases, leaders don't seem to have grasped the kind of struggle they're involved in. The Tribune Co. at least seemed to understand that it's long-term future depends on cultivating a new generation of newspaper readers--or at least that was the cover story for their experiment with the RedEye, which they appear to have declared a success. Rumsfeld too, though, consistently talked up his mission to modernize the military. In both cases, though, the technocrats are out of touch with their troops.
There's the blogospheric equivalent of dancing in the streets about Rumsfeld's departure. My joy is tempered. The mainstream news media continue to slide in terms of enterprise reporting; the explosion of voices in internet-land depends for its daily grub on the product of especially newspapers like the LA Times. The plankton are dying, my friends. Though I'm glad we retired a bullfighter, that's a small victory for the animal kingdom.
Lose their jobs on the same day. Rumsfeld earned it the old-fashioned way, by being incompetent. Baquet followed a different but also time-honored path to unemployment; he was insubordinate.
Baquet was the editor in chief of the LA Times, and the Tribune Co., the parent company of the Times, had to fire him--they had already fired the publisher of the Times--after he refused to make staff cuts. More staff cuts, one should say; the Times had already bled plenty of newsroom workers. The Tribune Co., though, answers to shareholders and has the Chandler family on its ass, and so demands a high profit margin from its properties--in the neighborhood of 20%, well above the average return for Fortune 500 companies, and certainly extravagant for a prestige newspaper in a shrinking industry.
Rumsfeld, on the other hand, did everything he was asked; he's taking the fall for an incompetent boss (Dick Cheney). The failures of his outfit have been spectacular. How did he stick around so long? Loyalty? Hm. Tell that to Colin Powell. Will he have interesting stories to tell?
It is tempting to draw a comparison between Iraq and the news industry. In both cases, leaders don't seem to have grasped the kind of struggle they're involved in. The Tribune Co. at least seemed to understand that it's long-term future depends on cultivating a new generation of newspaper readers--or at least that was the cover story for their experiment with the RedEye, which they appear to have declared a success. Rumsfeld too, though, consistently talked up his mission to modernize the military. In both cases, though, the technocrats are out of touch with their troops.
There's the blogospheric equivalent of dancing in the streets about Rumsfeld's departure. My joy is tempered. The mainstream news media continue to slide in terms of enterprise reporting; the explosion of voices in internet-land depends for its daily grub on the product of especially newspapers like the LA Times. The plankton are dying, my friends. Though I'm glad we retired a bullfighter, that's a small victory for the animal kingdom.
posted by jnerone at 7:57 PM
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