this is why i’m concerned…money making public companies!
October 7, 2006
The Tribune Company fired Jeffrey Johnson, the publisher of the LA Times, after he refused to cutback his reporting staff by 100. He has been replaced by a man with obvious partisan beliefs (he used to work in the Reagan whitehouse alongside John Roberts.) Read it here. Scroll down the page.
Also reported is an advertising deal that stinks of corporate control. Free Press, the media watchdog organization, was prevented from taking out an advertisement that rallied against the FCC loosening media ownership rules. Read about it right below the blurb on the Tribune Company. And yup, you guessed it! They’re related.
georgia kral\'s fiercetalk on anything and everything 
I too was dismayed by the Jeffrey Johnson’s ousting, though I don’t put it down to the pursuit of profit- it’s the pursuit of quarterly profits that’s the problem.
Too many companies destroy what they do well in the pursuit of short-term profits and I believe that the Tribune is a classic case of this.
What do they do well? They gather the news. But in the quest to maximize “shareholder value” they’ve deliberately hamstrung their ability to do just that. Near-term profits go up,
but they’re destroying their future.
Johnson’s firing, and the other layoffs that are now a done-deal, will come back to bite them in the ass.
quarterly profits…profits…either way it’s about $$$, not quality.