Job application for CEO of Gannett

I’ll do it for a thousand dollars less, plus I’m a social media expert.

PS Is this your new mission statement?

I’ve been punked by ad sense again!

Now, who said anything about competitive bidding for the Gannett CEO job?

Best blog post ever….

Just when I was having a humorless day.

Thank you!!!!

Brilliant. Thanks for putting a smile on my hungry face.

I actually took a flyer on a small piece of Gannet stock. At 4.20 I decided that I could flush $800 down the toilet if it doesn’t work out.

You got this shareholders attention and my vote. Let me know when the proxy statement goes out.

Pat,
I couldn’t easily find your email, so I wanted to get this on your radar ..and of course all your visitors. It’s a model for newspapers that I can’t figure out why it doesn’t work…The core is beat blogging as moderator of online discussions that are then published in Print. If anyone has the time to point me to the bullshit part, it would be very appreciated.

Thanks to all.
http://sellingprint.blogspot.com/2009/04/blog-newsletter-one-is-published-on.html

Let me play devil’s advocate here for a second.

I won’t defend Craig Dubow’s fiddling while Gannett burned. His justification for taking the huge bonus is the same as a dog’s when it indulges in the flavor of its own loins: They both do because they can.

Taking bonuses is perfectly legal. It is also ethical, if you go by the one sentence that sums up business ethics: If it’s good for business, it’s ethical.

Dubow didn’t do anything extraordinary or unusual. Many executives did the same in similar circumstances. And because Gannett is a publicly traded company, it is up to the shareholders to lodge Dubow’s head on a pike if they feel his bonus was wasted. You know why this never happens?

Two reasons. One is that the machinery of corporate governance insulates such behavior. Institutional investors hold immovable voting power, and they’ll tolerate such behavior because it’s a tiny cost of doing business (bonuses as a portion of the investment stake).

The other, and the more cynical, is that investors and executives — the ruling classes — are all cut from the same cloth. The reason why egregious bonuses are tolerated is that everybody who knows what’s going on would do the same thing in their position. Their shared class mentality says that rent-seeking is the ideal form of wealth generation (pure income with no expenses), it is perfectly acceptable and if they don’t help themselves to the trough, their successors will.

Craig Dubows come a dime a dozen. If you want a media mogul who deserves to be thrown into a grinder and made into little sausages, go after Sam Zell. He actually bankrupted a once-solid company, and demoralized investors, employees and customers alike. The most unforgivable thing, though, was the ESOP. He press-ganged employees into economic ruin by wiping out their wealth with the bankruptcy (no worker could opt out of the ownership plan) while any gains from a Tribune turnaround — if it can even be fixed — will go to him.

Too bad this isn’t China, where he could be executed for a similar scheme.

Chris,
Thanks for the new-to-me data point “The most unforgivable thing, though, was the ESOP.” Wow. That puts the whole bankruptcy thing in a context that makes alot more sense. I still remember when the airlines all went into “bankruptcy” to get out of their pension obligations. No we’re watching GM and Chrysler . . .renegotiating their legal contracts. Not to say they are not in real problem. Just to understand the incentives in place.

No one can say for sure how the Tribune matter will play out, but the circumstances leading up to it are reprehensible, to say the least.

Our legal system does provide remedy to plaintiffs if they can prove a breach of fiduciary duty. The proof, though, is Sisyphean.

The hurdle is not just to prove Sam Zell made a horribly bad business decision, but that he at least entertained the notion that he could deliberately bankrupt the company and restructure it to his favor with the shareholders (employees) safely out of the way.

Again, though, thousands of people had misgivings about the whole deal. Employees were incredulous. It wasn’t a conventional ESOP. It wasn’t even a sort of fire break used for sinking companies or hedges against hostile takeovers. This one also involved pension and 401(k) assets.

There had to be a lot of ex-Tribune shareholders, and probably a few executives, who knew or had misgivings about the plan. Zell entered into a ridiculously overleveraged agreement — one that had a high probability of default even in the dot-com bubble 1990s.

Again, the worst part was that there was virtually nothing any employee could do to opt out. All they were asked to do was hold their breath for 10-15 years.

So helpful. Thanks again. The new-to-me bit about the pension plans and 401K makes the whole thing make even more sense. Most big business is screwed trying to make good on pensions that were a great idea when the money was easy.

It strikes me as remarkably similar and tangled as the financial or auto industry situations. Unanticipated consequences of bad decisions leading to a crisis. Nobodies fault in the sense that everyone did what was reasonable for them to do given the rules and the incentives. Greed is not really a good explanation. It has the moral overtones that obscure rather than clarify.

The more revealing story is who has the power to resolve the crisis. And what kind of solution is implemented based on the power relationships.

Doing a compare and contrast between the Paulson/Bush response and Geithner/Obama response can be framed as focused intelligence rooted in policy v focused intelligence rooted in Wall Street culture combined with a political mindset. It seems clear that something had to be done. But it’s all about the details of the implementation.

It’s not about bad people. That’s the easy story. It’s about good people doing very stupid things. That’s a much harder story to see and to tell.

[...] Well, I haven’t heard from Gannett yet about my application to become their new brand/wealth/good will destroying CEO. [...]