Stupid Executive Tricks

David Carr, a native Twin Citizen, has carved out a nice niche at the New York Times as a media columnist. After a couple years on the media beat, he recently rose a notch up the masthead. His byline has ripened into a headline, and he gets to insert informed commentary into his semi-regular stories on the media biz. So far, so good–I’ve enjoyed his work a lot, and I think today’s piece on the Strib was well reported and nicely written. It helps to have the contacts he has from his years as editor of the Twin Cities Reader, these many years dead and gone. The gist of today’s piece is that the non-journalists at the Strib seem to have lost their humor entirely. Perhaps it was the failed play at landing blue-chip advertisers with enough namedropping and styling credits. Perhaps it stung to be publically humiliated for being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Funny thing about executive hubris, it has a way of biting you on the ass, and at some point the nickel-counters at the Newspaper of the Twin Cities have to realize that they keep sitting on the whoopie cushion, so maybe they should stop sitting down; the redder they get, the harder everyone else laughs. I have to say, it would be fun to be a fly on the Strib’s Intranet today.


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