Fred Hiatt’s decision to let Froomkin go makes me think that if he were an auto executive instead of a newspaper guy, he’d have been the one in charge of the Edsel.

though the taunters usually have no clue about the structural reasons for those crappy management decisions, and so have no idea how to fix them

Where could I get a competent summary? I’m sufficiently ignorant of the subject to not even guess at the right google search words.

I have worked in the Television Industry for 30 years, I don’t see the President’s joke as a flop. I believe that what we saw was a jab from someone that fights from the intellectual high ground. The response from the audience reflects the fact that many of those present recognized a slight when they hear one.

The ridiculous formatting of the arguments from the media, with regards to the auto industry and Obama’s financial plans, have been juvenile and misleading. Pointing the finger at blue collar worker’s, pensions, health care, everywhere except Management, a typical response from corporate lapdogs.

However, when it comes to the Media Industry’s themselves, it’s still everyones fault but their own. I think the President place kicked them right where they live, but no damage, cause there probably where no huevos in the whole audience.

Back in the late 60’s and into the 70’s, a local foundation supported in large part by several family owned national publishing (books, magazines and Newspapers) outfits, organized a long term panel comprised of some activists, Journalism Professors, and working reporters to quietly and privately review the coverage given to the Civil Rights Movement — we read vast amounts of coverage, and then had several kinds of panels to critique the collections we reviewed. It was not a public process — no reports were issued, but when I think back on the process I can see we actually identified many problems that lo these many years later, seem to me to be highly relevant to the corporate journalism failures.

One of our strongest criticisms was the treatment of the movement more or less the way wars got covered — unique battles were reported in bloody detail, without much connecting tissue, and without reference to much history. In essence, we questioned the daily drip drip of news that never really engaged in synthesis either with a distant past, or even with related stories. The argument that Civil Rights was just a modern extension of post Civil War matters — or that Abolitionism was just an extension of an unsettled issue from the Constitution writing times, and that most newspaper readers could not be depended on to bring to an individual battle story any sort of reasonably complete ability to contextualize — just was unacceptable to those teaching young Journalists, or working reporters. Activists claimed (rightly so in my opinion) that day to day battles were just a small extension of something that had been going on for near 200 years — and should be reported that way.

This is just another way to put “short term focus” — but I would put much more emphasis on it as a profound cultural characteristic. You can see the same thing today in the reporting about Iran — so few mentions of that all important 1953-54 US and British overthrow of an elected Iranian Government over the question of the nationalizing of Iran’s Oil assets. Assumption is everyone knows about this — even though CIA only released the key documents in the last ten years confirming much of what had been derived from other sources by historians. Not all that much recognition that 1979 and the Iranian Revolution happened 30 years ago — do a little math and most people under 45 have no memory of watching Nightline with Ted Koppel for 400 plus nights, following the Hostage Crisis, which was all most cared about (or was actually reported) with respect to the Iranian Revolution. It is all the same thing — the short focus, the hot button ethnocentric orientation of stories and reporting that given an alternative, people are rejecting left and right.

One comparison between the two industries is the desire for mergers and acquisitions that failed to produce the desired effect except for a few shareholders who benefited in the short term. Newspapers until the digital age or shortly before, tended to be family owned operations like the Ochs Sulzberger family with the NYT and the Taylor family and the Boston Globe.

Buying up other papers did not make the NYT stronger. If anything it has hastened the demise of the industry. The papers have been shedding workers for years but the massive debt service incurred from these mergers has made that seem like a band aid on an axe wound.

For the auto industry the perverse desire to merge starting with Daimler Chrysler has done virtually the same thing. One would think the auto industry learned something when GM started buying aircraft companies and payroll processing firms in the 80-’s, but they didn’t.

Another problem is the mindset of executives running both industries. Both think this is 1950 and they have no competition. By the time both realize how anachronistic they are, they will have gone the way of the dodo bird.