A major reason for the declining fortunes of book and periodical publishing is the fact that these industries are still operating in thrall to an MBA-hatched formula that is both retrograde and thoroughly inappropriate to the industries operating—now groaning–under its yoke.
As media companies went public and started to be owned by the banks, the banks demanded not simply healthy but unrealistic, onerous profit margins. And the way to those margins was a process of standardization that could make sense only to an MBA. In fact it was a lunatic methodology to be applied to publishing.
In book publishing what it instituted was a massive re-alignment of editorial decisions. It must be noted that in today’s commercial book publishing world, editors are not the ones making the decisions. The sales departments are. There are literally no more than a handful of Manhattan editors who can defy the verdict of a sales department. And what the sales departments can overwhelmingly relate to is the most formula-ridden, generic fodder.
Where periodicals are concerned, the decision has similarly been not only to turn news into propaganda and distraction but to entirely eliminate coverage of subjects for which anything less than a mass audience potentially exists. In doing so, the publications have not only made themselves virtually indistinguishable from each other but they have turned off a lot of readers whose interests are thus summarily dissed. Nor have they really gained a compensatory infusion among people who’d been going to TV for that type of coverage. Commercial TV, of course, has for its part been getting more and more substance-free as well.