“Business Affairs”

By Patrick Appel
Tina Brown compares the auto companies to the media business:

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 demisethe 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. It’s the same with the auto companies.

It's not the bureaucrats fault that the media market fundamentally changed. The big three stopped making a product Americans wanted to buy. The American media has never had more readers. People want what we make. They just consume it differently now. Creativity isn't the problem; finding a new way to make money off it is.

(Hat tip: Booksquare)