Hot gossip from Ned Brainard's poison pen.
Should the august dons of the Harvard Business School decide, years from now, to create a course about the development of the Net media industry, we assume they'll want to include a case study that can frighten budding MBAs with tales of management troubles. Fortunately, there's always CMP. The problems of Long Island's Ziff-Davis wannabe corporation have cost it mounds of cash in recent years, beginning with its decision in 1994 to launch the ad-thin and editorially ill-fated NetGuide magazine. The latest victims tossed atop NetGuide's burning pyre were the two dozen or more employees - fully half the remaining staff - fired last week from NetGuide Live, the online directory based here in San Francisco.
These layoffs carry distinct echoes of previous shake-ups initiated by the plodding East Coast executives of CMP. Flux friends may recall our reports of turmoil and management meddling at NetGuide several months ago, when Fred Davis and company either jumped or were pushed out the door. And those departures bore a distinct resemblance to an earlier round of ugliness CMP endured when it parted ways with its original management team at NetGuide magazine - publisher Don Tydeman and editor-in-chief Patty Adcroft. CMP spokespeople attributed last week's slashing and burning at NetGuide Live to a long-established business plan, a plan which apparently included instructions to PR flacks on the use of "rightsizing" as a euphemism for layoffs. But insiders familiar with the company's decision-making are deeply offended by reports that a business plan even existed. Sure there were budgets, our friends tell us - but those budgets have apparently been reduced by as much as 70 percent. And don't believe homilies being tossed about by our old friend Robert Seidman, who CMP brought in last week to preside over the massacre. Certain Flux friends close to CMP's senior management believe the company will cut its losses soon enough and bury the entire operation. Any promises made to Seidman (and passed on to the staff) are, at best, empty, those friends say.
Starwave's intimidating attempts to keep the wraps on its plans for a news Web site in association with their friends at ABC came undone last week, but not for want of trying. Thanks to our old friend and ersatz media-mogul Patrick Naughton (the former Sun engineer who runs the technology side of the operation at Paul Allen's favorite candidate for an early '97 IPO), Interactive Week was able to get enough of a hint to run with the story. While carefully avoiding an on-the-record quote with the letters "ABC" in it, Naughton, or someone else very close to the top at Starwave, somehow managed to slip enough to Interactive Week reporter Steven Vonder Haar that he got the point. "The additions would give Starwave content coverage in the four major editorial areas of news, sports, entertainment and financial services," Vonder Haar wrote, while apparently channeling the thoughts of this particular high-ranking Starwave insider. Meanwhile, we've heard from Starwave employees hired in recent months to build the news service that they live in fear of the severe penalties management has threatened to impose on any staffer who even whispers to outsiders about the project. An onerous NDA and noncompete agreement apparently remains in effect despite the leakage.
