Bob_Grip's Blog

You get what you pay for.  That's the bottom line, if you excuse the pun, of an essay by David Carr in Monday's New York Times.  He writes a column called "The Media Equation".

He starts by looking at Circuit City's plan to prop up its sagging bottom line.  It fired its most talented and experienced employees.  Guess what follows?  Sales fell and the company had to declare bankruptcy protection.

Carr sees an analogy between Circuit City's short-sighted short-term business plan and what is happening in the media nowadays, specifically the layoffs that are happening in the newspaper industry (see my blog, Skinny Mondays).  He wrote, "It is not the young fresh faces that are getting whacked--they come cheap--but the most experienced, proven people in the room..."

He continues, "...I have always thought of journalism as more craft than profession and tell students that it is the accumulation of experience and technique that makes a journalism valuable, not some ineffable beckoning of the muse."

Carr goes on to site Ken Doctor, a media analyst at a market analysis firm.  Doctor says, "It is not just the cutting, but the cutting of more-experienced staff, a kind of slow-motion suicide."

Another media consultant, Alan Mutter has the last word.  "Newspapers are aimed at the movers and shakers in a community--the car dealers, the retailers, the restaurant owners.  When they get together and realize they are looking at the paper, that it is less compelling than it used to be, it creates a vicious cycle of weaker readership and weaker advertising."