The other day, when I noted that the hedge fund breathing down the necks of the NY Times Company board and management had acquired as much stock as the Sulzberger family, I said that strategic change in the company is inevitable and I asked you what you’d do with the business.
and not for the faint hearted
So I would make the most radical restructuring of a newspaper anywhere in the world and use that as a laboratory for the Times itself and for other newspapers (see how new Tribune Company boss Sam Zell is using his smaller papers as “ petri dishes “).I’d follow Dave Morgan’s advice and cut the newspaper company into four: production, distribution, advertising, and content. I’d sell the first two (getting rid of huge amounts of staff and shutdown obligation) and free up the advertising company to sell any local media, starting with a collaborative, distributed hyperlocal network the Globe must start to complete with the local papers that ring the city and strangle the Globe (papers the previous owners should have bought but didn’t).
This sales effort has to work in radically different ways, setting up high-volume automated systems that members of the network itself can sell into. The old structure of well-lunched sales people who didn’t really sell but just handled lists of inherited clients won’t work anymore; Google is about to eat their lunch locally.
We have written quite a bit about news media here too. The word I think is speed. Which means speed of change. I like the petri dish idea.
No-one has all the answers - but an informed approach to experimentation makes sense to me.
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