Megatimes: Who Owns This Place, Anyway?   

It used to matter whose name was on the door, but now the door's gone.

I think I'm getting the hang of it now. It doesn't matter who owns the network, the newspaper chain or the station.

Whoever buys, the quality of the journalism will remain the same or get better. I wrote that down when they told us. There was just a need to unload a few billion of the cash on hand and a few billion more in wasted borrowing capacity. It turned out that some dying pterodactyls, including networks and newspapers, had been living it up in bank vaults.

Both the acquiring company and its loyal acquisitions will be healthier, and you can count on that, said the guy who gets attention on the stock-exchange floor by wearing a magenta macintosh.

What if that turns out to be true? Ownership always did matter, but these are new times. Not dreadful one-ownership-newspaper times, but Megatimes. Now, nothing is mickeymouse.

(Ernie: Will that reference cost AJR any advertising, or did we ever get them in the magazine anyway? They don't own this building, do they? Oh, just the phones and the AJR satellite. And you say they do buy space in our special ad sections on copyrights? Thanks, Ernie. I'll mention capitalizing the mouse to Rem.)

In Megatimes (which John Morton and Douglas Gomery regularly pierce for AJR readers in their columns), the owners are getting so distant that we don't know who they are. Paramount was that movie company with the great.. what is it? The stars rotating in a circle? Just as you learned that Paramount was now owned by Viacom, the parent's branches foliate.

Or was Viacom added to another tree's branches? Having deals pending for a long time keeps people jumping to look at the corners of their payroll checks, or electronic transfers, if there is any pay.

Employees of a company named, say, Viacom, no doubt worry week to week that the company's grand old name will vanish, with the loss of traditions dating back to the founder, Mr. J. Goodrich Via ("Goody" to all of the employee family, including the elevator operators and the widows whose husbands' funeral expenses he quietly paid).

Some of the media companies that have been disappearing were failed companies; others were just chips, which might or might not have been failing before Megatimes.

The fact is, we don't know what the results of all this conglomeration will be. In some cases, we don't even know which is the tail and which is the dog, or whether the dog itself is actually a big tail on something bigger that we can't see.

(We do have an idea of what bankers look like, even though they no longer sit behind glass windows just on the edge of the first floor, and no longer have telephones, and you have never actually seen one. But what color eyes does a fiduciary have? Does a migratory gold-twilled spotted leverager have webbed feet?)

You could argue the case that Megatimes present nothing more dangerous to good journalism than a rogue advertising department and a malleable news-editorial side in Oldtimes. If the editors could be rolled over by the ad guys, the news was polluted.

As you see, I'm sitting this one out for a month or so, until Morton and Gomery analyze. But for now: I don't think it looks good. l