communication is essential to business making and it involves more than the ability to name your product, write a tag line or a press release. It's an intricate, rational and scalable effort and, let's face it, not anyone can do it.

3/03/2010

Our Onion is chopped

Romania has ... used to have one weekly which behaved much like The Onion in the US: witty, independent, for people who were smarter than the average. Their slogan was "our readers are smarter than theirs". A while back some of the owners realized they were turning 40 and were still broke and decided to cash in and bring in an "angel investor" - one of Romania's most controversial business men. Today, two thirds of the editorial team of the weekly has quit amid accusations of editorial interference, fraud and other such disgusting things. The remaining team - some of the founding members, have issued their own press release accusing the deserters of fickleness and greed. Everybody is trying to figure out who fucked whom and the "brouhaha" is on about whose fault and whose interests (political) are at stake.
....

Nobody cares that one good contemporary brand, a decent editorial product and one of the few print products with a future has been trashed and will probably disappear due to people being greedy (for money or for power). All we care about is the scandal behind. Nobody stops to think about how dire, how disturbingly empty the media landscape is getting: journals are morphing into tabloids, newspapers are becoming political tools, magazines are localizing irrelevant second hand western European content. People break everything for the sake of some extra cash today. We all think short term. It's dog eat dog.
....
How I feel? Like saying "Good night and ... good luck" :D

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, it's 1/3 of the editorial team. And a lot of the people that were sacked, or quit, in the past 6 months are coming back to the old catavencu.

Anonymous said...

Actually, it doesn't matter if it's 1/3 or 2/3, Bogdana is right, catavencu is doomed.

Tanti Jeni said...

Very interesting post. I like onion too. I used it very often in cooking. This romanian weekly, I dont know what to say.. how do you pronounce it in english? Katzavencoo? is it correct?