As news conglomerates break apart, the Rupert Murdochs of the world need to look further down the food chain for the next great money-makers

Do we need better media moguls?

Newspaper writers and pundits have an obsession with media-company business models: how newspapers should charge for their articles online, how to lure advertisers, 12 reasons to worry about BuzzFeed’s clicks.

But what if the problem isn’t business models, per se? What if the problem is management models?

Already this week, the US news business has witnessed a quartet of major milestones for independence, and with them, the first test of whether formerly major media companies really need their moguls. Spoiler alert: they probably do. The reality check is that journalists are going to have to fill the void themselves.

• Gannett, a company founded by Frank Gannett and later passed on to his family, decided to spin off its publishing arm, including USA Today; Gannett will now devote itself to two digital sites, CareerBuilder.com and Cars.com.
• Tribune, the survivor of an ill-fated takeover by Sam Zell and a subsequent bankruptcy, started its first week as a new company.
• Time Inc, once under the oversight of mogul-executive Jeff Bewkes, announced its first earnings as a public company after its split from Time Warner.
• And about that newly independent Time Warner, it will likely have to stand alone as well: if the aspiring media giant was hoping for a major league suitor, its last best hope – none other than Rupert Murdoch himself – just dropped 21st Century Fox’s acquisition offer because he thought Time Warner just couldn’t agree on a compelling offer.

Speaking of Murdoch, he was the one who split News Corp’s news businesses, including the Wall Street Journal, from 21st Century Fox’s movie and television business. On a lesser scale, Pearson has pared down to keep the Financial Times, while shuffling off trade publications like Debtwire to a private equity firm.

It’s not so cold everywhere in the news business. At least three major publications are still in the warm embrace of deep-pocketed moguls: the New York Times, where a scion of the Sulzberger family still maintains control; the Washington Post, now under a blanket of money provided by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; and Bloomberg, where the former New York mayor is back at work and reporters are subsidized by the hugely successful business of selling market-information terminals to financiers.

The race is on, then, to understand: Can media companies stomach losses on their own, or do they still need the traditional and all-too-comfortable model of someone to just pour in the money and look the other way?

It’s a difficult question, largely because journalists don’t like to be beholden to anybody, much less billionaires with corporate interests. To have a mogul as an owner largely means that journalists spend a lot of time worried about whether that mogul will get bored or suddenly start listening to his accountants.

This fear is eminently justified.

Murdoch pursued Dow Jones and the Journal relentlessly, despite (as I saw in the newsroom at the time) the open opposition of its staff in 2007, then spiffed up the paper with significant investments once his $5bn bid succeeded … only to shuffle it off when advisers told him that print was dragging down the value of the Fox broadcasting business. Barry Diller openly called his investment in Newsweek “a mistake”. Zell, who didn’t do so well with Tribune, reportedly laughed at Bezos’s acquisition of the Post: “He probably thinks he’s buying it, but he’s just renting,” Zell told Forbes.

OK, we get it: most billionaires have little interest in the old-school news racket anymore. A bunch of media companies will have to stand on their own two feet as independent companies.

So what do we have to fill the void?

The answer is: employees. Not the ego-driven visionaries, necessarily, who are willing to take millions in losses – but a generation of (hopefully capable) managers whose job will be to read the room.

Now the even harder question: where do we get those managers? The news business has not historically been known for generating hard-headed businesspeople the way it turns out strong and stubborn reporters. The few existing skilled managers of news businesses are rightfully hailed for their foresight – as well as their rarity. There’s a new generation of journalists, in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who grew up with the reality of the digital takeover of news – but just because they grew up with it doesn’t mean they know how to make it profitable.

The solution, as Elvis almost put it, is probably a little less conversation. One option – not without controversy – is to train journalists in the harsh realities of the economics of news. Most journalists have largely been protected from this: the traditional separation between sales teams and news teams means that most journalists don’t know how much about how their companies make money, what the cost of an ad is, or even how many people read their stories.

Except for an exclusive club of incumbent journopreneurs, the journalists’ job has traditionally been to write the stories. That’s not going to cut it anymore. The same way we ask journalists to learn how to code, we should ask them how they plan to make their work good enough to pay for. Journalists can’t keep waiting for saviors to run their businesses; at least a few will have to step up and do the saving themselves.

In the meantime, there will be plenty of debate – no surprise, given that this is, after all, the class of society with access to the most ink. The (by now) old joke goes that the future of news will be … long debates about the future of news. Unfortunately, that’s not a great employment plan. When the moguls have stepped back, what do you do? Maybe it’s time to step up.