In the military you shut up and follow orders; otherwise, things fall apart. Still, there can come a point when the strategy is a demonstrable loser. Then, sometimes, it is the generals who must go, or maybe the secretary of defense.

That’s true in corporations, too. When the Tribune Company orders manpower cuts, publishers and editors either follow through or hit the road. That’s the way it works. Yet there can come a Rumsfeld moment, and Tribune has reached it. That’s why we’d like to see the company sell itself out of the newspaper business.

Tribune has had tough luck. It paid dearly—$8.3 billion—for Times Mirror and then the dot-com bubble promptly burst and sank the stock market; Newsday contributed a circulation scandal; the IRS ruled against the company in a $1 billion dispute; and the courts sent the FCC’s plan to relax cross-ownership rules—which Tribune had counted on—back to the drawing board.

But to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you fight the war you’ve got. Between its eleven dailies—including the Hartford Courant, the Baltimore Sun, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Orlando Sentinel, Newsday, and the Los Angles Times—and its twenty-four TV stations, Tribune claims to reach 80 percent of U.S. households. The idea was to use that size to the company’s advantage. First, Tribune would use its TV-print overlaps to create editorial and advertising synergies; second, it would sell national advertising based on its big footprints in New York, Chicago, and L.A.; third, the merger would create efficiencies and the company could cut costs. But Tribune’s effort at merging the two cultures was ham-handed at best. And national advertisers, it turned out, didn’t see how those three markets made sense as a buy. The only thing left was the easy part—cutting costs.

Good editors will cut...

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