Jack Ma says that CEOs could be robots in the future, but they already are. Someone accuses your most-necessary employee of something bad and you instantly fire him. That’s quite robotic and that’s the trend in management, at least in the changing news industry.
Bill O’Reilly is gone, at least from television. Yeah, he should have acted better. But, there are much bigger fish to fry still swimming at large in the vast ocean of harassment and bureaucratic strong-arming. Bill was only a target because powerful people don’t like what he was saying—the very things that made him number one in cable news. And, they were willing to get rid of him, even though it meant losing money.
Money has rarely motivated the news industry. Newspapers are losing profit left and right, but they don’t change. News website advertising doesn’t work—not because readers don’t like ads, but because they don’t want ad services to triple web page load times. And, the slow, snail-mail, old culture leaders in the dying news industry think that web page load times are no problem because it’s faster than waiting for the morning paper. But, it’s not about that; it’s about slowing down your entire computer or not being able to read a story before you get off at your bus stop.
News is led by leadership that is out of touch with its own industry. That’s why Bill O’Reilly, of all people, was let go. And, just as predicted last week, he wasn’t the first. The small-fish friers saw the inch and thought themselves to be rulers. Someone accused Hannity, expecting the precedent to work. But, Hannity stopped that in a hurry. But, believe it, one way or another, Hannity is next.
Once Sean Hannity leaves his normal programming, he’ll have plenty of friends to welcome him—including Milo Yiannopoulos, Bill O’Reilly, and the newest inventor in news and information, Jimmy Wales. Yes, the Wikipedia founder is now starting the Wikitribune. As of press time, wikitribune.com has hired 4 of 10 journalists.