1. Welcome to SportsJournalists.com, a friendly forum for discussing all things sports and journalism.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register for a free account to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Access to private conversations with other members.
    • Fewer ads.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Should the President of the United States have a Swiss bank account?

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by TigerVols, May 1, 2012.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. dooley_womack1

    dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

    That would sound right to you.
     
  2. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    2000 was the peak of the market expansion, before the internet bubble burst, and 9/11.

    I know our business -- Continental Airlines -- was already well off before 9/11. You just couldn't get the high prices for business fares.

    1965, and 2011 weren't exactly great years.

    So, by "sounds about right", what I meant was that it was predictable.
     
  3. dooley_womack1

    dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

    OK, point withdrawn
     
  4. Hokie_pokie

    Hokie_pokie Well-Known Member

    Baron, I'd like to hire you as CEO of my new start-up, Hindsight.com.
     
  5. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    Let's see, an emergency arises. One guy looks at all the usual workable options in his dangerous situation that he didn't even create. None of these solutions will work in his situation. He decides to innovate, not to mention also prevent the deaths of innocent people on the ground, and safely keeps all his passengers alive.

    The other guy decides he wants to set a record in his final trip, ignores warnings from others, and plows his way into a dangerous situation. Two out of every three of his passengers die.

    Yep, great comparison there.
     
  6. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    Um, plenty of my fellow co-workers were suggesting the exact same thing. It wasn't hindsight, and they didn't need six-figure consultants to tell them about it. We were told by management that nobody would want to pay for our online content.

    Of course, our online content was the exact same content that we were putting in the paper. Gee, I wonder why people would want to pay for something that they can get for free?

    Instead, we were told we had to find Moments of Life in our stories. Yep. Moments of Life.
     
  7. J Staley

    J Staley Member

    You make an interesting point about the influence of innovation. CEO salaries have spiked, while pay for the average worker has stagnated. Do you think that this is purely market driven?
     
  8. da man

    da man Well-Known Member

    Apparently, CEO salaries, as compared to workers' salaries, have fallen considerably since 2000. At least according to the numbers presented earlier by Az.
     
  9. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    It's not that CEOs have become more valuable.

    Two factors, imo:

    1) The American worker has shrunk in value. In the decades after WWII, the world only had three major developed continents, and one had just destroyed itself in two costly wars and the other had shackled itself to an awful political/economic system. If you wanted to build shit, you needed American workers and that was that. That value was never sustainable, and it's being whittled away on two sides by technology and other countries' workforces improving.

    2) Given that there's so much money to be made and you don't need to pay workers more to make it, that money has to go somewhere. And if corporate executives are in charge of deciding where that money goes, it's not hard to figure out where they are going to look to give it.
     
  10. bigpern23

    bigpern23 Well-Known Member

    You must have been working for Gatehouse. How I loathe Moments of Life.
     
  11. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    Honestly, I didn't want to debate this because you are overpassionate about it whenever you bring it up on here (and I get it, there are newspaper people on this site), and you are going to take any response as if I have a dog in a fight. I don't.

    Gannett is a dying company. Craig Dubow didn't cause its stock price to plummet. It's business model, and the fact that it has gotten left behind the way buggy whips did after cars were invented, has done that. So pointing to the stock price is useless.

    Investors destroy stock prices of companies that are going down. And there isn't a CEO, short of a one in a zillion visionary who could have totally remade the company (which still would have resulted in all the newspaper layoffs), who could have saved Gannett.

    Dubow was never one of the highest-paid executives in America. I went back and looked the first time this came up on here. Relative to a CEO of a company his size, he actually might have been underpaid.

    Then the BoD and investors, faced with their company sinking like the Titanic, and possibly facing bankruptcy sooner than later, charged him (and his team) with cutting costs -- severely. And he did it, WELL by investors standards (but not by employee standards). There were layoffs, unpaid furloughs, salary freezes, a ton of cost cutting measures, centralization and consolidation, and it reduced expenses significantly and bought the company time to try to desperately try to figure out if it can save itself by remaking itself, which it is struggling to do, and probably won't be able to. Operating the way it was, it was dying. It STILL is. Newspaper advertising is not a revenue model that works.

    Dubow did what he was charged with doing. He cut costs and actually kept an earnings flow coming in -- for a company whose earnings have been sinking like a rock. That is why he was supposedly rewarded with that salary increase and bonus a few years ago.

    Your narrative has him destroying the company, but from an investors standpoint, it was the opposite. He was asked to cut costs, he did it dramatically, and it added to earnings.

    I know that doesn't sit well with you if you are a rank-and-file employee, and you lost your job, or you are hurting because of the carnage around you. I am sorry for it.

    But if you could separate yourself from the emotional impact of it (try to look in as an investor or an outsider), you might conclude that the company needed to cut costs, quickly and dramatically, and that Dubow was simply a guy who did what he was asked to do.

    That isn't CEO incompetence, and in fact, the best evidence of that is that when he resigned the stock price went down further.

    Now I am going to hate that I let you drag me into that, because I know any response OTHER than him being the most awful person on earth and incompetent is just going to get a lashing out at.
     
  12. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    slurp slurp slurp
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page