“Three guys in a garage create YouTube, and we’ve got 800 people in Chicago who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground!”
Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune Company, which publishes the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, and other Jurassic-era publications your grandmother still reads because the thought of turning on a computer makes her knees shake.
The NPR article on Zell also includes a subhead titled, “Journalists as ‘Overhead'”. Which illustrates that the author can’t comprehend that unlike a government-subsidized operation, the owner can’t force taxpayers to bail him out if readers aren’t footing the bill:
“This is the first unit of Tribune that I’ve talked to that doesn’t generate any revenue. So all of you are overhead,” Zell said during the late February meeting with editors and reporters for the company’s Washington bureau.
Most reporters and editors who cover the government don’t consider themselves overhead
Join the conversation as a VIP Member