Bay Area news biz, revisited
American Journalism Review reports on what I’ve alluded to in past posts:
The layoff-by-phone drill represented yet another backpedal from the lofty rhetoric of just 11 months earlier, when William Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group bought the paper and its suburban cousin, the Contra Costa Times. MediaNews acquired both dailies in a complicated deal with McClatchy, which in turn had purchased them a few weeks earlier from Knight Ridder, the Merc’s deceased and dismembered former owner. “We have bought the crown jewels of Knight Ridder,” Singleton declared at the time. “They are excellent papers that we expect to make better.”
Perhaps he meant “smaller.” The first layoff at the Merc newsroom (15 people) came just four months after Singleton, known in some quarters as “Lean Dean,” assumed control. A series of resignations starting in June trimmed 15 more jobs. Combined with the Passover cuts, the newspaper’s staff had shrunk by 22 percent in the first year of the Singleton era.
The Mercury used to have more than a dozen reporters in its San Francisco peninsula bureau located about 15 miles from San Jose. Now there’s just one. The Merc gets most of its peninsula news from the short-handed San Mateo Times and the Palo Alto Daily News, a free tabloid MediaNews acquired in the Knight Ridder deal last year. Some parts of the paper’s newsroom have simply just disappeared, among them a five-member projects team that included 40-year Merc veteran Pete Carey, who was part of a group that won a Pulitzer for foreign reporting in 1986. Carey is now a business reporter.
I can also add this: We used to have 40 copy editors. Now we have 15.
Singleton says it’ll be a rough three or four years till things turn around. Well, not so rough for him, I suspect.
September 29th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
The lay off bug is hitting where I work too. In fact the company was sold off and the buying company has been busy this past summer figuring out how to merge us into their business.
And of course, layoffs are coming. Tuesday, Oct 2nd in fact. I have been told by my manager that he will present me with a letter at 10:30 AM Tuesday morning. He does not yet know the contents of the letter except that it will either offer me a job in the new organization or it will say thanks but no thanks and don’t let the door hit you where the good lord split you on your way out. Everyone will be getting one letter or the other and rumors are 25 to 50% of the employees will get the axe.
The uncertainty of not knowing your fate is miserable. And if I loose my job I don’t know what I will do. I’m too young to retire and I don’t think there is a lot of demand out there for the type of information technology I have been doing. So, we shall see. Good luck to us all. I think we’re gonna need it.
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Well, today was the big day and somehow I survived it. I still have my job. A lot of my friends and coworkers don’t though and were laid off. I gather about a third of the employees were let go today. And what do you say to a friend who no longer has a pay check coming in? It sure was a strange feeling day. Oh man.