Huffington Magazine Issue 12-13 | Page 33

Voices group whose chief investor was Goldman Sachs. The heavily-leveraged buyers didn’t care about the newspapers (aka “the product”) or the people (aka “the head count”). What mattered was the “exit strategy”—how many years it would take until the company could be “flipped” to maximize the return on investment. Now, with many more papers and far less revenue, VVM faces a mountain of debt with no discernible exit strategy. They wouldn’t “hurt the Voice instead of shuttering or selling other papers” unless they could make more money by doing so—which they can’t: without the Voice they lose the country’s most important market and any hopes of selling significant national advertising. As for trust, the famously cantankerous Voice staff has deeply distrusted management for decades, often with good reason. Rupert Murdoch once owned the paper, for God’s sake! There’s plenty to criticize about Larkin/Lacey’s handling of the decline at their papers, including the Backpage.com fiasco. But Carr gets it right when he says that whatever one thinks of Lacey and Larkin, their bottom-line busi- MICAHAEL SIGMAN HUFFINGTON 09.09.12 ness failure was making “a big bet at the wrong moment.” Like millions of American homebuyers, they couldn’t see the end to endlessly rising publication values— or could but were convinced they could successfully navigate the leap between old and new media. It’s painfully true that we in management at VVM pre-2002 hadn’t a clue about how to adapt to the digital revolution. Our owners were hardly helpful: they paid a small fortune to a consultNow, with ing firm for a “plan” many more that amounted to the papers and far functional equivalent less revenue, of the magic word VVM faces a given to Dustin Hoffmountain of man in The Graduate. debt with no Instead of “plastics,” discernable the mantra was “Inexit strategy.” ternet radio.” Another canard is that the downfall of the Voice began when Stern leveraged his assets to buy other papers during the ‘90s. The truth is that Leonard never borrowed a dime to purchase these papers, virtually all of which continued to be highly profitable until Stern sold them in 1999 at the top of the market. And then came Craigslist.