Sam Zell and the Re-Engineering of Newspaper Culture
Posted by Sebastien on the 2008/04/08 at 08:59
in Hyperlocal, Local, News, Newspapers, Sam Zell, Tribune -
I was reading this weekend in the Globe & Mail a long article about billionaire Sam Zell and his purchase and subsequent re-engineering of the Tribune Company, one of the large US newspaper groups. The article as a whole is very informative but I was especially intrigued by this excerpt:
Since taking over, Mr. Zell has attempted to raze the culture by replenishing the senior management team with trusted lieutenants and giving his properties more autonomy: Local papers will decide what they do in a particular market and they will also be responsible for creating and meeting their own budgets. Most importantly, though, in some people’s minds, he’s showed up. “I’d say when he came to visit our shop, what a lot of my managers came away with was we didn’t often get visits from executives before. And when they did, they couldn’t pronounce the names of the local cities,” said Digby Solomon, publisher of the Daily Press in Newport News, Va. “It’s not as though the people who have been running newspaper companies are stupid, but I think in any sort of business, you get trapped in a particular way of thinking, and it’s just very difficult to shake loose from that.”
Flickr picture by William Couch.
The Daily Press fits the mould of w
