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.