Three cheers for Tina Brown! In her column in The Daily Beast this past week, she nailed the media business’s problem on the head: “The carnage in media jobs accelerated last week with hundreds getting whacked at Viacom, NBC, Time Inc., and my own esteemed publisher Doubleday. . . . 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.” I remember a decade ago when I was at Time, the head of Time Inc. Don Logan imposed a hiring freeze, all because he wanted to continue to rack up double digit increases for his shareholders. That’s a fine goal, but in the processed, he exhausted his journalists, and deprived his magazines of infusions of talent and creativity at a critical time, and they have yet to recover. Bureaucrats, stifling, expensive and clueless, are crushing the business.
