"What played to what had been a relative weakness for us-this was exploding overseas as well, and we had to scramble to mount some reach and get into places and be competitive on the ground"
About this Quote
The sentence reads like a live feed from inside an anxious newsroom: not polished rhetoric, but the clipped, managerial language of someone describing a competitive threat in real time. Hume frames the problem as a “relative weakness,” a phrase that softens accountability while still conceding vulnerability. It’s not failure; it’s a gap. That corporate euphemism matters because it signals the ethos of modern media strategizing, where editorial mission and market position blur into the same dashboard metric.
“Exploding overseas” does double duty. On the surface, it’s growth - an audience, a story, a platform catching fire beyond U.S. borders. Underneath, the verb carries a wartime charge, borrowing the drama of conflict to justify urgency. The implied fear isn’t just being late to a trend; it’s losing narrative control in regions where influence is contested and where competitors - local outlets, global networks, digital upstarts - can define events before American media even arrives.
Then there’s the scramble: “mount some reach,” “get into places,” “competitive on the ground.” Hume is describing journalism with the vocabulary of deployment. “On the ground” is the tell, suggesting a moment when proximity equals credibility and when access is a form of power. The subtext is that audiences were starting to demand immediacy and presence, and the institution he’s speaking from had been built for a different era: centralized, domestic, slower. The intent is pragmatic, but the context is cultural - a media world shifting from broadcast authority to global, frictionless competition where being everywhere isn’t ambition; it’s survival.
“Exploding overseas” does double duty. On the surface, it’s growth - an audience, a story, a platform catching fire beyond U.S. borders. Underneath, the verb carries a wartime charge, borrowing the drama of conflict to justify urgency. The implied fear isn’t just being late to a trend; it’s losing narrative control in regions where influence is contested and where competitors - local outlets, global networks, digital upstarts - can define events before American media even arrives.
Then there’s the scramble: “mount some reach,” “get into places,” “competitive on the ground.” Hume is describing journalism with the vocabulary of deployment. “On the ground” is the tell, suggesting a moment when proximity equals credibility and when access is a form of power. The subtext is that audiences were starting to demand immediacy and presence, and the institution he’s speaking from had been built for a different era: centralized, domestic, slower. The intent is pragmatic, but the context is cultural - a media world shifting from broadcast authority to global, frictionless competition where being everywhere isn’t ambition; it’s survival.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
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