What They Didn't Teach Katharine Weymouth at Harvard Business School
Sunday, July 5, 2009 at 10:25PM It's really mind boggling when you think about it: The Washington Post's cockamamie scheme to sell access to reporters and editorial writers shows the current desperation within the traditional mainstream media world. Could this be why many people regard “business ethics” as an oxymoron?
Weymouth is a lawyer and Harvard MBA graduate. She worked 12 years within the Washington Post company before becoming its publisher. Her background was right for the job, her relative youth would make you think she'd come up with some creative new ideas for making the company financially viable in this challenging brave new world of 24/7, flattened out, digitally-driven media.
She rightly focused on her imperative to bail the sinking ship financially. But she failed to see that financial success for a mainstream newspaper is rooted in the integrity of its journalistic mission. Once that mission is lost, people will lose faith and even the most loyal readers will move on to other news sources.
Apparently Harvard neglected to teach her the most important element of long term leadership success.
In the news biz, even for-profit media organizations are quasi-public trusts. In the wake of diminishing advertising money, "old" media companies must understand what most not-for-profits have to live by every day: No organization deserves to survive. You have to earn your survival every day by staying ahead of the curve, and by doing what the world needs from you now, not by standing still doing what you've always done for an ever-shrinking audience.
Weymouth chose to address the needs of the small Washington insider world of lobbyists and fat cats to the detriment of the larger public's desire for reporting and commentary that might not always be 100 percent unbiased, but at least ought to be reliably unbought. Having recognized the mistake and called the plan off, let’s hope that she has learned a lesson she can teach to the Harvard B-School.
http://www.GloriaFeldt.com/leadership
Reader Comments (1)
Diminishing advertising dollars doesn't have to be a concern as long as businesses know how to make up for it in free advertising. The Internet is full of no cost advertising opportunities.