The few people that still do pay the news organizations for their content largely do so due to a perception of quality. When I read something crazy on somebody's blog, I always go back and check the Economist or the NYT to see if it's true. I value the fact that they actually did fly somebody over, had them investigate, etc. It's important.

So yes, they're bloated – but it's not all fat, there's muscle there too.

The few people that still do pay the news organizations for their content largely do so due to a perception of quality. When I read something crazy on somebody's blog, I always go back and check the Economist or the NYT to see if it's true. I value the fact that they actually did fly somebody over, had them investigate, etc. It's important.

So yes, they're bloated – but it's not all fat, there's muscle there too.

But the clearest view of the fatness/inefficiency came in summer 2006, when Tribune (owner of my last old-media employer, a tv station here in Seattle) sent me to a leadership conference of some sort at its West Coast fort, the LA Times. I shared tables with nice people whose name tags were crowded with long, granular titles like “Co-director of revenue analysis management audits for Orange County classified ads that start with the letter A and end with the letter C but never at dusk.”

It was overkill that they spent maybe a thousand bucks on airfare and hotel to send me down there in the first place, when the information I received could have been distributed via webinar or even e-mailed PPT. Saw the same thing working for Disney at the turn of the millennium, when I was flown from Seattle to San Jose almost weekly for a while, just for the day, to participate in meetings that could have been dial-in. And I was nothing/no one special, so imagine that kind of financial inefficiency multiplied by thousands, in so many different ways.

Ultimately the plug was pulled on the Disney project I was on, after it lost a billion dollars. 400 of us lost our jobs. So I wince in reminiscence as I see what's happening with the newspaper folks now.