Zell Hell: The Tribune on Life Support
December 9, 2008
I am now making good progress on my Google and Publishing study for Infonortics Ltd. I took a break from things Google to write the April 2008 Beyond Search report for the Gilbane Group and to work with Martin White on our Successful Enterprise Search Management available in a matter of days. I have been thinking about Google’s business model which seems to be insulated from the problems of certain traditional media; for example, the Chicago Tribune, once the world’s greatest newspaper or so a radio station’s call letters suggested. The financial genius of Sam Zell met the shift in advertiser and customer behavior. He learned that online can be a stern taskmaster. Street smarts don’t apply to some of the micro climates created when digital information flows through a tidy market like Chicago. Even the original Mayor Daley might find his ward power ineffectual when facing online’s oddities.
The Chicago Tribune itself reported here that the Tribune’s bankruptcy would not stop the company from selling the Chicago Cubs. Now that is a heck of a story. Little wonder that 20 somethings use Craigslist.org to find apartments for rent, not the Tribune classifieds. Business Week ran “Tribune Bankruptcy Snares Employees” here. The angle for this story in my opinion is nicely stated in this paragraph:
The bright side may be that Tribune employees didn’t have a lot of time to put much money toward ESOP contributions. “In a weird way, the employees are better off that the company crashed today instead of seven years from now,” says a banker familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named.
Now that’s how to find good news where I see a somewhat disturbing situation. In fact, in my Google and Publishing monograph, I set technology aside. The Tribune and soon more traditional publishing companies will find themselves under the wheels of a speeding business model. The Information superhighway–to drag up a metaphor from the 1994 to 1996 period–has a huge dinosaur staggering across six lanes of digital traffic. Google is not to blame, nor is any single company. The Tribune’s sharp management team is doing the 21st century equivalent of making buggy whips. The Tribune does good buggy whips, but the customers don’t want buggy whips. The customers want free apartment listings or other nifty things that a different business model coupled with whizzy technology delivers to their iPhones or BlackBerries. Mr. Sell and his crack management team are now living in a Harvard Business School case study that begins, “From his office overlooking the murky river, Mr. Zell ponders how he can escape from the financial catastrophe escalating by the minute.” This is no ivory tower Starbuck’s problem. This is the real deal, and the traditional tools aren’t working at the moment.
The question becomes more urgent because Google is pushing beyond books and into magazines. There are hundreds of posts about this move. In my opinion, Zell hell is about to invite others to the party. The GOOG is on the prowl for eyeballs and traffic. Microsoft dropped out of the race. Yahoo is busy rationalizing its work force. The commercial database publishers are oblivious. Google is disrupting the traditional information order. Who’s next for Zell hell?
Stephen Arnold, December 9, 2008
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i always look for cheap but very clean apartment for rent in our area. there are actually great deals here-~;
when we are looking for apartment for rents, we usually choose those with very clean rooms ,'”