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Tales of two industries . . .

The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown:

As great newspapers, magazines, TV networks, and publishing houses dismember themselves around us, it would be marginally consoling if the pink slips were going to those who contributed so vigorously to their companies’ accelerating demise—the feckless zombies at the head of corporate bureaucracies who cared only about the next quarter’s numbers, never troubled to understand the DNA of the companies they took over, and installed swarms of “Business Affairs” drones to oversee and torment the people “under” them. There are floors of these creatures in any behemoth media company, buzzing about each day thwarting new ideas or, worse, having “transformative” ideas of their own when what is usually required is to revive, with a bit of steadfast conviction, the originating creative purpose of the enterprise. It’s the same with the auto companies. …

Actually, no: though similar, not fully the same. For as The Atlantic’s Patrick Appel sees,

The American media has never had more readers. People want what we make. They just consume it differently now. Creativity isn’t the problem; finding a new way to make money off it is.

(Ah, there’s a code that NMC and I haven’t cracked either, alas.) But contrast Brown on the dying media’s situation to David Leonhardt at NYT on the dying Big 2.5’s. Contrary to what Detroit executives would rather we think, he explains, $73/hour labor (1) doesn’t actually exist and (2) ain’t their real survival issue. This is:

If we had wanted to preserve the Big Three, we would have bought more of their cars.

Oversimplified it may be, but a bottom line hard to ignore. Still, I’m guessing that the shaken-out carmakers’ route back to creativity shows up faster and easier than the shaken-out media’s back to sustenance.

Now in the meantime . . . got tornado watches here, but yeesh, what’s that stuff falling on Mississippi? (Here’s the radar view.) Is the snow-and-black-ice to clear out by Fri/Sat? (I’ve got a whole year to use these plane tix, you know; we could reschedule if need be.) Good luck to all today!