Tribune's downfall is industry warning

15 December 2008 | 9:29 - By Stefano Boscutti

Tribune is a classic textbook case on how not to take a media company private, especially in hard times.  But the real tragedy will be if Sam Zell adds insult to injury by failing to use Chapter 11 restructuring to give it a new lease on life.

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Tribune's daily newspapers include the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.), The Sun (Baltimore), South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel and Hartford Courant.  The company's broadcasting group operates 23 television stations, Superstation WGN on national cable, Chicago's WGN-AM and the Chicago Cubs baseball team.  Undertaking a dramatic digital reinvention of its diverse operations would provide a template to other media companies that desperately need to transition into new infrastructures to survive.  But such dramatic reinventions of established companies — public or private — rarely succeed.  Forget evolution and think revolution.  File for bankruptcy, sell off the assets and a small group of the newspaper's best former employees (and a few others) regroup in a startup, designed from the ground up as a low-cost digital operation with a small print extension.  This is much more likely to succeed than a newspaper completely reinventing itself from the inside.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=96390

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About this Blog

New New Media looks at how our mediascape is exploding to bits. How the latest technology and the internet are changing the way we live, work and play. How the latest media is shaping us all.

Stefano Boscutti is an executive creative director and strategist. He's like a better looking version of Todd Sampson. He also has an abiding faith that stories and wordplay (and not powerpoint presentations) will change the world.

 
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