This wasn’t doing anyone any good, so several times I told him he should stop doing the radio programme, but he would not listen. But he had befriended the boss, who kept protecting him. I had heard that the radio’s employees had complained about the poor quality of his work, and had lobbied for his contract not to be renewed. ![]() More and more often (and as time went by, it became his habit) he’d merely summarise an article from some daily. Furthermore, he was being really careless about his radio programme. Several times, I tried to tell him his strategy was dangerous in the long run. There was much gossip in the company and outside about Alfred’s endless ambition. So he kept piling on the tasks and he was more and more overwhelmed, which the management did not seem to realize – but the company’s management was itself pretty erratic. Then he started wanting to be in charge of the company’s web, then of the company’s TV – he was still the boss of all the company’s magazines. At some point he used his network to do the same kind of programme on another radio, where he was well paid, as thanks to his network, he had found an insurance company to sponsor it. It was a lot of work and it took a lot of his time, but he was keen on hiding it, so he always said how his daily screening of the news for the radio was helping him with his tasks within the Weekly. He was so eager to gain experience that when they said they had no budget he offered to do it for free. As the company owned no radio station suited to his needs, he offered to do a daily programme to a private radio. But he was clearly overwhelmed – although he would not admit it. So he offered the management to take on more and more tasks. Actually, Alfred was not that much behind the scenes, as he was increasingly busy with lots of other things.Īlfred’s ambitions inside and outside the companyĪlfred wanted to have an impressive CV, and thought he needed to work in radio, TV and web to embrace nearly all the media. Sometimes he imposed something else, but most weeks he had been too busy and he’d choose one of our proposals, adding an angle, taking out another, etc.īut all the same the team thought Alfred was always behind the scenes, so the tensions only built up, as from the start no common ground had been found between him and them. Generally Delia and I talked about cover ideas after hearing the journalists, Delia summed them all up in an email she then sent to Alfred (because he was away so often) and he’d choose among them. So many ideas came from us and not from Alfred, but the team seemed to be unaware of it (or pretended not to be). Delia and I also came up with ideas, and we discussed them in meetings someone from the redaction attended. And almost every time he came up with an idea, they fought it. They wanted him to keep out of everything related to the content. He had a sense of how a magazine could sell more, but the team hated his ways and his ideas, they thought he was more about marketing a product than conveying info. ![]() Alfred screened the media a lot and often offered ideas. Alfred, Delia and I had to come up with in-the-news cover ideas. Approving change in general is one thing, embracing change when it knocks on your own door is something else entirely. But they opposed any change in their habits, like writing shorter articles. They all openly acknowledged that the Weekly needed to treat more news, more exclusive news too, its articles needed to be shorter and punchier. The team had officially approved the poll’s conclusions, and since then everyone in the team would keep repeating change was urgently needed. The Weekly badly needed an overhaul, Delia was aware of it – she had been coordinating the readers’ poll about the magazine. There was a lot of pressure on Delia from the very beginning. The management expected him to get fast results, particularly on the sales figures. So Delia started with difficult conditions – the team was expecting her to distance herself from Alfred and Alfred was eager to gain more influence.
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