Execs at the liberal/leftist McClatchy News Co. have seen its stock share price plummet from the mid-$70s to penny status.
Current and former employees now comment at blogs slamming McClatchy execs for their mismanagement of the newspapers and for misleading employees about jobs, layoff plans, etc.
Financial analysts rate McClatchy’s bonds “junk;” and say its bankruptcy bound.
I’ve no sympathy for the execs at McClatchy's head office and its newspapers who’ve run McClatchy into the ground.
Still, I don’t think they needed the latest indignity heaped directly on some of them and indirectly on all McClatchy execs who've marched and spoke in lockstep with CEO Gary Pruitt.
McClatchy Watch tells about this latest indignity in “Beleaguered Sacramento Bee gets free advice from hippie councilperson from Davis”
City councilmember Sue Greenwald gave the execs at McClatchy’s flagship paper her plan for saving the Bee.
You can’t read her plan without realizing Greenwald thinks she knows best and that Bee execs are - - to use the Yiddish word for "jerk" - - schmucks.
Just look at some of what Greenwald said to them:
Newspapers and businesses have to learn how to advertise on the internet. There is no reason why on-line advertising, and hence revenues, should not be as effective as hard copy advertising. (Yes, Mom, I wrote it down as soon as the teacher told me. - - JinC)There’s more of Greenwald’s lecture in McClatchy Watch’s post.
I have been really missing the Safeway weekly specials and the Macy's sale ads since I went all-electronic. (Greenwald’s telling Bee execs she let her print subscription expire or canceled it to go “all-electronic.” That from someone as liberal/leftist as the Bee itself. That had to hurt the execs.)
I have also been shopping less because of this, which is probably good for me but bad for the economy, bad for the businesses and bad for the newspapers.
I have noticed that you have some decent on-line ads. (Bee execs can’t take comfort from Greenwald’s saying they’ve “just started having some decent on-line ads. For years they've been telling McClatchy shareholders and Bee employees that’s just what they were bringing to Sacbee’s online site. That's what justified their positions and salaries.) . . .
In my opinion Bee execs didn’t need Greenwald’s presumptive and condescending lecture to a group she must think are schmucks.
Bee execs surely know by now they’ve blown things big time.
But did the execs deserve Greenwald’s lecture?
That’s a separate question.
How do you vote?
McClatchy Watch's post is here.
3 comments:
Internecine warfare. I LOVE it!!
Tarheel Hawkeye
Ms. Greenwald's comments about the SacBee are interesting, if only to point out the hubris of many elected officials. She says that all the SacBee needs to do is get more advertising on their on-line site. Sure....why not? That's easy!
Of course, the steps involved in actually monetizing the advertisements is just a minor detail to politicians like Ms. Greenwald - who is going to pay the SacBee to put up advertising that they could put up on the very same internet by themselves? I'm sure that Safeway has a website, at which their coupons could be placed, and probably at a far smaller cost per customer than at the SacBee site.
But, to the elected officials, the actual means of making a profit off the web are just details. To them, it's all the concept, not the practice. When the actual practice doesn't quite work out, you blame it on some other administration, or the other party, or Washington, or something else. In the interim, to the politicians, there's always more money to be had, since raising taxes is in fact a simpler detail than monetizing supermarket ads on the internet.
Without that cushion of easy tax money, it becomes difficult to be able to tell others how to do their business. Perhaps Ms. Greenwald should spend a day as the Chairman of McClatchy, and see just how the real world works. Maybe then, she'd do the rest of us a favor and shut up.
Please understand, I don't really think the McClatchy folks are entirely without blame here. It's just that people like Ms. Greenwald find it so easy to "pile on" with their crazy schemes, and to act sanctimonious when they do do. Not ALL the idiots work for McClatchy.
Good.
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