There's a popular NPR podcast called "How I Built This." I've often felt it should be accompanied by a different podcast, called, "How I Broke That," about stories of failure, or what went wrong — how Blackberry lost its dominance, how GM or Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, and so on. In that genre is a New York Times feature headlined "The Last Days of Time Inc.: An oral history of how the pre-eminent media organization of the 20th century ended up on the scrap heap."
Intentionally or not, the Times "oral history" discloses a lot of what went wrong. It's almost entirely composed of interviews with Time employees or former employees — "more than two dozen editors and writers who worked at Time Inc." The voices of controlling shareholders or owners (though some employees did have stock options) or of customers, whether subscribers or advertisers — are absent. Employees are important stakeholders in any business, but when a company is all about the employees to the exclusion of the customers or owners, it's not entirely surprising that it has an unhappy ending.