Zell drops the F-bomb in Orlando
By now, you’ve all heard what happened in Orlando last week. New Tribune company CEO Sam Zell said “F*ck you” to a photographer for The Orlando Sentinel after she asked a couple of pointed questions during his visit Thursday.
From YouTube:
Zell’s people say he wasn’t aiming the barb at her or her question; rather, he was reportedly annoyed that she didn’t appear to be listening to his answer.
Even so, that’s not the way to win over your newsrooms. Even if you’re a zillionaire. Or, in this case, a Zell-ionaire.
Zell says he’s called the Sentinel employee twice, seeking to apologize but hasn’t been able to get her on the phone. The photog has reportedly refused to comment. Which seems pretty wise.
Watch the videos — a short version and a longer, context-providing version — at Gawker.
You can also read about the whole sordid thing in the Sentinel or in The Los Angeles Times. In particular, I love the LAT headline:
Pretty bold stuff.
With corporate CEOs like this, we’ll no longer need coversations like this one.
Meanwhile, Poynter’s Romenesko published a letter from Patrick Olsen — formerly a Chicago Tribune editor and now with Cars.com — in which Olsen decries the way we’re dancing around the actual word that Zell used:
See, this is why readers are dumping newspapers in favor of the Internet. …the lack of clarity about what was actually said is appalling. Newspapers need to worry less about offending readers, and do more to engage them and provide transparency. …The sort of parental condescension that comes from euphemizing that exchange is a key reason that many smart adults have turned to the Internet where they can get their information uncensored, for better or worse.
For the record, I’m pretty sure VizEds uses a filter that prevents me from posting the actual F-word. But I agree with Patrick’s point.
On the other hand, I live in the city where the cops confiscate mall displays and charge the folks at Abercrombie & Finch with obscenity.
Sigh…
February 6th, 2008 at 9:51 am
That’s pretty sad. Usually the F-you is delivered in less direct forms, like salary freezes and layoffs. But I guess it’s refreshing for a corporate master to tell his peons what he’s going to do to them before he does it.
What’s even sadder to me is that right before the F-bomb, the audience was actually applauding his remarks. If I were a Sentinel employee and I just heard what Zell said, I would be ambivalent at best about the direction the paper seems to be headed in and my own job security. Haven’t they heard every other newspaper exec in America say “We’re committed to journalism” right before they trim staff? “I want to make enough money to afford you”? So he wants to make enough money to be able to afford good journalism — that makes good journalism sound a like luxury, not a core mission. Don’t most newspapers already make enough money to afford their employees and then some? The problem with the business model isn’t staff cost; it’s corporate greed and profit expectations that are unreasonable for today’s media landscape, and Zell’s comments strike me as more along that same vein. You’re already making a profit; but how much more profit do you need to make to be able to “afford” me? That’s a pretty arbitrary number, isn’t it?
February 6th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
I have said for years that I think the way newspapers walk on eggshells when it comes to dealing with expletives, sex acts or any other “indiscretion” they think readers MIGHT find offensive when they’re browsing their paper is moronic.
When we first began writing stories about the Sopranos, we refused to identify Sal “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero using his nickname, which, if you are unfamiliar with the show, is how everyone referred to him. Instead we made the decision the “Big Pussy” was too much for our readers to handle, and so we opted for calling him Sal Bonpensiero, which no one on the show called him, thus confusing our readers.
Our solution to this was not to break down and refer to him as “Big Pussy,” but to shorten the nickname to “Big P.,” which is even more offensive in my opinion, because we were treating our readers like children, and by making up a name for a prominent character in an extremely popular television series we confused them even more as they wondered who the hell we were talking about.
We have also pulled graphics on ovarian cancer because the graphic had a cutaway diagram of a vagina, and not run graphics on prostate cancer because there was the outline of a penis. Additionally we had to remove one frame of a graphic instructing women how to get measured for a bra that fits properly because an editor found the rendering of the breasts too much for our angelic readers to handle.
We are more concerned about the phone calls we MIGHT receive than we are about delivering the news, and that, in my opinion, is pathetic.
February 6th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Re: The Abercrombie & Fitch episode
What, did Pat Robertson buy the Norfolk police department? Or does he own the mall? What a joke.
February 7th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
I agree with Telford. However, Zhu and I are starting to come to a moment of contention about what journalism is really for.
Zhu, news is a commodity and until you treat it like that you’ll find yourself hating business people for the rest of your life. How is news NOT a commodity? News is not an expectation, it’s something that people want not something they need that definition itself should give you a hint. We may be in the First Amendment but in order for us to continue doing our job we must make money! Good journalism is not easy to do, it takes time and it takes people. A good meaningful story cannot be done from 9am-5pm by one person and then pooped onto a page.
Good journalism takes multiple journalists attacking several angles. It takes time and it takes production. It takes graphics people, designers, photographers, reporters, advertisers, circulation managers, copy editors, delivery people, a well registered press, post-consumer paper, editors, secretaries, internet, phone lines, buildings, vehicles>gas, plane tickets and more. Do you think good journalism can honestly be pooped out with minimal effort because that’s what it sounds like.
Do you know why they’re worried about affording you Zhu? Because profits are falling and you can’t hire MORE people if you’re making LESS money, that’s basic economics. Take a risk, you say? Take a risk on what, a failing model of journalism that has no guarantee of working? Zell wants you to do good journalism and he’s pretty sure it’s not what you’re currently doing otherwise the numbers would be rising. So you first need to figure out what good journalism is and do it and convince him it works and then he’ll hire you more people to get the job done right.
ADAPT OR DIE!
February 8th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Michael, since I’ve already written on the other VizEd site about why I think good journalism isn’t necessarily good business, I will not rehash that here. People can read our respective points for themselves:
http://visualeditors.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1985197%3ABlogPost%3A7469
Not sure why you got the impression that I think good journalism can be pooped out with minimal effort, since I’m advocating re-investment in the product (hey, it takes money to re-invent and innovate). Yes, profits are declining, but papers are still raking in profits in the 20% range. Doesn’t it make sense to reinvest some of that now (while you’re still making a good amount of money) if you’re serious about re-inventing the product? The whole idea of investing is that you put money into something with the expectation of it paying bigger returns in the future. Example: You take out a loan to expand your business, with the expectation that the expansion will eventually earn back more than the loan. Yet newspapers are saying, “We want those returns from the expansion, but we don’t want to take out the loan to get that expansion started. We’ll just expand with the resources we have, while we’re at the same time cutting those resources.†How do you think that’ll turn out?
Think about how much it’d help if a newspaper re-invests just 1% of the millions of dollars in profit it makes. How many extra reporters, copy editors, multimedia specialists, and programmers will that pay for? We can scream “innovation†all we want, without the financial investment, it’s but an empty mantra.
You say that no businessman should take a risk on a failing model of journalism. I completely agree. But the “adapt or die” idea applies to both the editorial and the business side. At the same time that we re-invent the editorial model of journalism, should we also not look at the business model? My problem is that it doesn’t seem like the newspaper industry is interested in re-examining its business model and developing a new one that will work well in concert with a new model for the editorial content in the present media landscape, where newspapers cannot possibly return to the mega-cashcows they once were. Instead, we are simply reshaping the editorial model to continue to prop up an obsolete business model. I’ve written this before: The hope seems to be that online revenue will grow big enough so that we can simply plug online dollars into the spot occupied by print revenue in the current equation and keep on raking in 30% profits.
If your computer’s fan breaks and the motherboard gets fried, what do you do? The computer didn’t go kaput just because of a bad motherboard; the broken fan had something to do with it, too. If you just plug in a new motherboard and keep working without replacing the broken fan as well, your computer will break again soon enough.
February 8th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
I believe a number of companies are looking at their business model and that includes how journalism is covered and presented. What’s so wrong with giving people what they want? Why is this idea met with such resistance by so many “journalists”?
A quick look at any Website’s stats will show what online readers are checking out. Guess what! It’s not just puppies and kittens, celebrities and crime (or celebrities who commit crimes). Sometimes it’s hard news. And sometimes their habits offer hints to what kind of hard news they want to read.
So when you have an inkling of an idea of what “serious” news readers want, why not chase it and see if the numbers grow more? Although a wall sits between advertising and the newsroom, the newsroom is not completely outside the client, i.e. reader, investment loop. The job of the newsroom isn’t to sell the reader something they may not have wanted in the first place. It’s to give them useful information.
Wouldn’t it make sense to give them some of the information they want - fun and serious - and also give them what editors think they really need? Of course, that begs the question: “What do readers really really need to see know?”
But who am I, and why am I writing this? Well… I am an online journalist, who collects blogs maintained by locals. I stumbled upon Charle’s blog and think it’s quite nice - the design and content - and wanted to compliment him on it, but I got sidetracked and decided to ramble. (Dag it!)
February 8th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
> But who am I, and why am I writing this?
> Well… I am an online journalist, who
> collects blogs maintained by locals. I
> stumbled upon Charle’s blog and think
> it’s quite nice - the design and content -
> and wanted to compliment him on it, but I
> got sidetracked and decided to ramble.
> (Dag it!)
.
Oooh! A compliment! Me likes the compliments!
.
Thanks, Deb! And thanks for making the great points that you made. Your insight is as keen as your eye for blogs. :)