executive sweet

Last week on Wednesday, the "paper of record," The New York Times, engaged in executive-editor-removal, replacing Jill Abramson with Dean Baquet.


On the same day, the editor in chief of Le Monde, France's most prominent newspaper, stepped down.





What is the problem?


A contributing factor to this sudden trend has got to be the stress, for these large and venerable publications, of going online and finding a way to be profitable, with all the new technology.


The NYT itself carried a story on Le Monde:
------------- PARIS -- Faced with a newsroom revolt, the editor in chief of Le Monde ... stepped down on Wednesday after a 14-month tenure marked by staff resistance to her efforts to push the paper faster and more fully into the digital era.


The editor, Natalie Nougayrede, had been criticized by her staff for a top-down management style and an inability to build consensus.


...In a letter of resignation, which was posted on Le Monde's website, Ms. Nougayrede, the first woman to hold the titles of both editor in chief and director, said she was leaving the paper because "I no longer have the means to run it with all the necessary peace and serenity that is required." -------------------------- [end NYT excerpt]


Besides digital-age adjustments, hubris, a factor as old as humanity, also comes in:


[Politico.com]-------------- Both Howell Raines [previous exec. ed., NYT] and Abramson struggled upon becoming executive editor for many of the same reasons -- personalities that provoked intense backlashes within the Times newsroom long before their actual firings. 


Both seemed in the eyes of many colleagues to relish the title of executive editor and the prestige it conveyed more than the actual work of editing or managing the army of sensitive and idiosyncratic journalists necessary to produce a great daily newspaper. ---------------- [end excerpt]


Hubris, an ancient Greek word for
 
Getting A Swelled Head And Running Amuck
 
may apply, here.


When you


"relish the title...and the prestige"


more than the


"actual work"


then the next stop may often be -- feet sinking inexorably in thick, sticky, green hubris.


...(Perhaps am thinking of oobleck...)


----------------
At the place where I work, miles and miles from the New York Times, one of the management teams has a phrase -- a motto, -- which says, "Stay hungry; stay humble." 


They have T-shirts....


I wonder if the folks in the executive suite at the NYT would find it easier to keep perspective if they had some T-shirts that said that. ...


----------------------
The guy they put into the NYT job, Dean Baquet,





is originally from New Orleans.


Politico writes,


While he was investigating corrupt cops in New Orleans, to confirm an account of a police officer who drunkenly fired a gun in a bar, Baquet "spent a morning clawing through the bar's plaster wall with his bare hands, looking for the bullet."  He found it and broke the story, according to the Los Angeles Times.


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