Brown attacks newspapers’ “zombie” management
The only people failing to pay the price of hard times in publishing is the management, claims former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown.
Her attack is on the culture of US old media companies:
There are floors of feckless zombies in any behemoth media company, buzzing about each day thwarting new ideas or, worse, having “transformative” ideas of their own.
Arguably that puts the US behind Australia, where Fairfax last week said goodbye to CEO David Kirk, and there’s just been a wholesale clearout of the West Australian’s board of management.
UPDATE: Former Guardian editor Peter Preston makes the same point in today’s Observer:
The central problem isn’t the internet (a dampener on profits and spreader of uncertainty, at worst; not the end of everything). The problem is newspaper ownership flawed by misplaced ambition and short-sighted management.
