Suicide By CEO
It isn’t just in the US, newspapers around the world are being bled to death by their management. The ABC comments on the decline of the Fairfax newspapers, which have fallen on hard times.
As pointed out, when you view the content as an expense, rather than the product you are selling, the death spiral begins. The process is really simple and straight-forward: people subscribe to newspapers for their content; advertisers pay for ads to reach the subscribers. You get more subscribers by improving your ‘product’, the reporting. People subscribe when they can’t get that product anywhere else. If you slash your newsroom staff, you degrade your product, lose subscribers, and lose advertisers.
This particular corporation was an early adopter of the Internet, but failed to take advantage of that facet of the business.
The Internet isn’t responsible for the decision to destroy the company, that decision was made by the management.
2 comments
Yep. Borrowing a sh*tload of moolah to buy a paper…then saddle the paper with all the debt…say the product is faulty….then let it bleed to death…and die. Then…repeat the process with another paper…company…
It is psychopathic, really. And people want want one of these bottom feeders (apologies to catfish) to be President? Geez. We ARE pooched.
The entire concept that the CEO doesn’t have to know about the major products that a corporation sells to be in charge is brain-dead. You have to know your products and your markets to be successful, otherwise it’s the underwear gnomes writ large. Most of the CEOs of major corporations these days are concerned with the stock market and share price, not their customers and sales.
They keep destroying profitable companies, and then get huge severance packages. This is no way to operate a business of any kind.