Bari Weiss has sold her company, The Free Press, to manage the decline of broadcast news at CBS. How many ways can it go wrong?

This isn’t news, nor is it politics. But given networks’ actual competition these days, tech seemed a safe home to share.

To: Bari Weiss

RE: Good luck, babe!

I honestly cannot believe you’ve willingly decided to go into the worst kind of job that exists: management at a dying company.

Managing sucks! It sucks even when you like the people you’re managing and it’s a low-stress position! And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you: running CBS News is not a low-stress position. You are going to get blamed by everyone above you for decisions that are made by people below you, and you are going to get blamed by people below you for the decisions that are made by people above you. You’re also going to get blamed for your own decisions, just for kicks. You have elected to take a job where the primary purpose is for you to eat shit and own the death of broadcast TV news, a thing that is going to die no matter what you do. Nice work!

This is the glass cliff to end all glass cliffs. You’re Marissa Mayer at Yahoo without the Googler street cred. You’re Nancy Dubuc at Vice without the string of hit TV shows. You’re Linda Yaccarino at Twitter without the advertiser relationships. You have been hired as a sop to a Trump administration that is actively hostile to the actual free press, and you will be made to oversee wave after wave of layoffs until you quit or get fired and the entire news division is shut down in a final spasm of cost-cutting after the next inescapable media merger.

This is a pretty brutal assessment of the state of the media ecosystem.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    12·
    5 hours ago

    Yeah, but it’s been a long long time coming for traditional television media.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/business/media/04hulu.html

    Dec. 3, 2009

    As she prepared her daughter for college, Anne Sweeney insisted that a television be among the dorm room accessories.

    “Mom, you don’t understand. I don’t need it,” her 19-year-old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge.

    That flustered Ms. Sweeney, who happens to be the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group.

    “You’re going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall,” she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. “You have to have one.”

    But she does not, actually. For 60 years, TV could be watched only one way: through the television set. Now, though, millions watch shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” on demand and online on network Web sites like Ms. Sweeney’s ABC.com and on the Internet’s most popular streaming hub, Hulu.com.

    This is a story Sweeney was proud to tell at a media event, as though she was exuding strength by forcing her daughter to have a television. As if the sheer power of Disney’s wealth could make the dying industry last in it’s current form forever. Disney+ wouldn’t launch until ten years later, with Sweeney pissing away time and energy on losing prospects in the meantime until she stepped down from her position as Disney’s president in 2014.

    Never forget how much money these media dinosaurs have dumped into trying to legislate their business models as the only legal way to participate in any product or service they provide. They only ever come into the future kicking, screaming, and baying for the blood of those who are forcing them to change.