Anyone been paying attention to the stories in recent weeks about the antics at the Chicago Tribune? The New York Times did a big piece a week or two ago about how Sam Zell’s minions had turned the company into a giant frat house:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/business/media/06tribune.html
And Lee Abrams, chief innovation officer, resigned after sending out a memo with some racy links only days after the NYT story.
Now it seems that CEO Randy Michaels may be out:
Many of the people that Sam Zell put in charge including Michaels and Abrams are veterans of Clear Channel, which probably tells you all you need to know about their ethical standards and business practices.
Anyway I can’t say I’m surprised about the frat house atmosphere these boys brought to the paper. The radio industry is notorious for being chockfull of douchebags, and having dealt with radio people on several work projects I can tell you that perception holds plenty of truth. Of all the mass media, it really attracts the lowest of the low and crassest of the crassest, a bunch of people who are neither smart enough nor anywhere near pretty enough to work in TV news, but have massive egos nonetheless. The newspaper industry, by comparison, is pretty conservative (I don’t mean that politically, just in the way they do business), so a clash was inevitable.