That blogger is Kevin Maney, high-profile technology writer at new business glossy Portfolio magazine. Maney said today that he's perplexed by Brandes Investment Partners' growing investments in Gannett.
"(Gannett) has tried some interesting ideas around the edges, but there is no great vision coming from CEO Craig Dubow, no transformation on the horizon,'' Maney, a long-time Gannett employee before going to Portfolio this year, says. "Watching Gannett these days is like watching your grandfather age and starting to realize his health isn't going to go in a positive direction."
Monday, November 12, 2007
1 comment:
Jim says: "Proceed with caution; this is a free-for-all comment zone. I try to correct or clarify incorrect information. But I can't catch everything. Please keep your posts focused on Gannett and media-related subjects. Note that I occasionally review comments in advance, to reject inappropriate ones. And I ignore hostile posters, and recommend you do, too."
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Many of us within Gannett have seen these days coming since the 1990s, when Gannett began banking on a strategy of buying up little weekly papers and advertising circulars in a bid to keep circulation and "reach" afloat. To Gannett, the Internet didn't event exist in any substantial fashion until long after Yahoo, Google, Amazon and eBay popularized it. The company has been so wedded to traditional newspaper thinking (and that fault lies with the journalists as much as the management) that even its ideas for the Web smell like ink. But the industry as a whole has suffered the same short-sightedness.
ReplyDeleteThe problem now is that Gannett wants to play like a tech-info company but isn't willing to invest in the R&D needed to leapfrog the competition. It's still trying to stay afloat with its traditional thinking and strategy of cutting, cutting and more cutting of staff and resources. What the company needs to do is bite the bullet, actually do something with its much-ballyhooed "DIG" development team and get cracking. The company is capable of so much better.