Ziff Prediction Accuracy; and Soylent Ziff is Made of People!

Recently, a good B2B media source pointed out something that gave me great satisfaction: that I was right. This particular instance (and I think I can probably count all of them on one hand), though, is bittersweet. In May, I predicted, using very crude calculations, that Ziff Davis might run out of money some time in the middle of the third quarter. Ziff hit the date on the nose, declaring that it would not make a scheduled interest payment on its 2009 senior notes on August 15.

Being right in this case is bittersweet for me because, first of all, I was not rooting for this to happen. I was rooting for a miracle: some way in which the great brands that ZD operates could somehow get out from under the crushing debt that has shadowed their operations for six years. Maybe they still can.

But the real story behind this story–also contributing to the bitter half–is that this company isn’t just a publishing house, brick and mortar and money. It’s not just a hallowed name in B2B. It’s not just an important vestige of Bill Ziff’s time on earth. It’s also made up of people–hundreds of people who now have to wake up wondering what their job status will be that day and the next.

It’s very easy in other industries to think of a large company as just a bunch of factories or operations or services that result in a final product that often can be stacked in warehouses and snatched off store shelves. But in the media industry, the output is a manifestation of a collective personality. Future issues of PC Magazine will be an ink and paper representation of the PC Mag personality, headed by the new EIC, Lance Ulanoff.

It might not be useful business information to remember that the 300 or so remaining Ziff employees are in this, too, but I can’t help but think of it.