The recently rescued trade publication Editor & Publisher has decided to give its top honors to another guy who had a tough 2009. They named Les Hinton, CEO of The Wall Street Journal, their publisher of the year. The Journal, they observe, “is in one of the strongest positions of any newspaper in the country.” Though, as Jeff Bercovici points out, that’s like saying “a shipwreck survivor is the envy of all his friends because of the particularly large and buoyant piece of timber he’s clinging to.” And we recently learned that the Journal actually lost $80 million last year as they aggressively expanded, while their rival the Times raked in a modest $21 million in operating profit through careful cutbacks. “The Journal’s aggressive, market-leading posture is only made possible by the willingness of its owner, Rupert Murdoch, to lose tens of millions of dollars on it, observes Bercovici. “Any executive can construct a facade of success if he’s free to ignore the bottom line.”
WSJ Exec Named Publisher of the Year – for Losing $80 Million [Daily Finance]
