Visit the new NextGenMagazines.com site!!
I had a very enjoyable conversation with a colleague regarding the state of our company, it’s challenges and opportunities. As I get back to my desk, I see this article in my inbox that might as well have been sitting with us at lunch – sans discussion of the heavy financial side of the business which does bring an interesting perspective to our current plight.
Big media companies are over leveraged and working from outdated business models that show little or no integration of multimedia and strategic services. Rather than making critical investments in growth markets, behemoth media companies are taking short term cost cutting approaches designed to keep investors rich happy while covering debt.
Change and integration is easier said than done. With an old school business, you inherit a aging talented pool of workers that are adverse to change of any kind masters of print and biding time until retirement with as little aggravation as possible coming to the end of impressive careers. Niceties aside, their attitudes are toxic and any new initiatives intended to put us back on track are seen as “more work” on an already taxed and ill equipped work force…which ultimately goes back to cost cutting at the top.
I can empathize with frustrations from tenured employees but how about working to make the publishing world a better place for the next generation? When they tell their great grand children what they did it will be like explaining a record player. On second thought – they can always reference Mad Men.
Media was a glamorous industry in its day, how do we save these publishing legends and make media sexy again? I have a good 30 years before I retire, am passionate about this business, see the possibilities for a very bright future for publishing as a whole and would like to see the return of the three martini lunch. Doesn’t anyone else? If big media companies don’t make some dramatic changes soon, their days are numbered and so is an era.
This might not make me popular but top level management needs to completely re-think our business from the bottom up. I love this:
When Cygnus announced it was entering a Chapter 11 restructuring last August, one poster at Foliomag.com wrote: “We’ll know when they emerge from this, if they are serious about their business: Get rid of the dead-weight management, bring actual talent back, re-establish the core values that have been lost some time ago, and do business based upon principles that leave room for integrity and ethics, as well as profits.”
At the moment, there is too much legacy management the business to really take a step back and truly restructure the big media companies in a way that makes sense. I remain optimistic that someone at the top will get a clue and make some magic happen.
The upside is a great opportunity for individual titles and groups to rebuild should the major players fail. Take a look at the fallout from Reed, we are already seeing a number of small/medium size publishing companies created from the ashes sell offs provided by the misfortunes of a major player. This new wave of media companies will be competitive, nimble and have the unabashed visionaries who will carry media into the future. Maybe this is what media really needs…
