Advance Publications: Liquidation Masquerades As Reinvention
When a newspaper simultaneously makes the jump to the web and lays off tons of employees, are they reinventing or liquidating? Tuesday, Advance Publications fired employees in Alabama and at the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One of the most high profile layoffs was Brett Anderson, the restaurant critic at the Times-Picayune. In fact, I first learned about the Advance Publications maneuver through the food media community—Anderson commands a great deal respect among food writers. Allegedly, Anderson was fired because he accepted a Nieman Foundation for Journalism fellowship at Harvard, which would keep him away from the Times-Picayune for a year. To me, this strategy—transitioning to the web, cutting daily paper service in the fall, and eliminating powerful and talented staffers—is an iconic representation of how liquidation masquerades as reinvention. The net value of the media company depreciates when it moves content online while cutting the volume and quality of that content. What do you do with a newspaper when it stops being a newspaper? You reimagine its print media life in digital form; you do not prop it up as a scare crow to keep the bigwigs away.
