Many Cuts and Crises at a Paper (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

MINNEAPOLIS, May 13 — Last Thursday afternoon, more than a hundred employees of The Star Tribune in Minneapolis took to the small park across the street, many of then dressed in black or wearing black armbands in what they said was an act of mourning.

“It is such a beautiful day out here and I wish we had something to celebrate. But as you all know, these have been very dark times at The Star Tribune,” said Jaime Chismar, unit chairwoman of the Newspaper Guild, her voice halting with emotion as she stood on a concrete bench with a bullhorn. “Our leaders have greatly disappointed us.”

Even though the newspaper was fresh from a round of voluntary buyouts that erased many veteran reporters, Par Ridder, the publisher of The Star Tribune, said last week that deeper cuts were required. This is not just tweaking: Longtime columnists are being reassigned, and many reporters who are not losing their jobs are losing their beats in an extensive revamping.

All newspapers have been clobbered, but midsize dailies like The Star Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press, serving the Twin Cities, have taken it right on the kisser. Both were bought and eventually orphaned by the McClatchy Company, with The Star Tribune ending up in the hands of Avista Capital, a private equity group.

In addition, Mr. Ridder, the former publisher of The Pioneer Press, switched to The Star Tribune, sparking a corrosive legal battle between the two beleaguered competitors. On top of deep, problematic layoffs at both papers comes what looks to be a protracted legal battle over the circumstances of his change of allegiance.

It is as if two men, hanging off the cliff by the fingernails of one hand, decided to have a knife fight with the other hand.

http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/node/4716

‘We Will Not Go Quietly’: Strib Staffers Protest Cuts at ‘Black Thursday’ Rally

By Paul Schmelzer , Minnesota Monitor

Outside the Star Tribune offices Thursday afternoon, one of the few smiles to be found was on the fiberglas Lucy. Just behind the statue from the “Peanuts” comic strip, more than 100 Strib employees and their supporters gathered to protest 145 planned job cuts at the paper, the work of “21st century robber barons who believe profits come before the people who work here [and] the people who read this newspaper,” as 34-year newsroom veteran Randy Furst put it.

Many in the crowd wore black armbands and held day-glo signs proclaiming “Save the Strib” and “Twin Cities Papers Under Siege,” eliciting the occasional chorus of honks from passing cars. The purpose seemed to be two-fold: to rally both workers hit by an unusually emotional week and citizens concerned about the paper’s future. An impassioned Furst, taking his turn at the bullhorn, addressed the group. “To the public we say, ‘Speak out! They’re wrecking your newspaper.’”

Many worried about their futures: Management has told employees their jobs will change, but don’t yet know how, and an “organizational table” is expected to be revealed by management on Friday or Monday, showing the positions that will be available to soon-to-be-reassigned newsroom staff.

The rally was also a show of solidarity for union members. According to Strib retail reporter and Newspaper Guild representative Chris Serres, management barred union stewards from accompanying its members into meetings with editors on Wednesday. Reporter Rochelle Olson urged the group to stand firm and stick together and, as if to illustrate the us-and-them polarity of the management/worker divide, she led the crowd in waving to managers, including managing editor Scott Gillespie, who were visible in windows on the top floors at 425 Portland Ave. in Minneapolis.

Recurring themes at the rally were distrust of new owners Avista Capital Partners and deep fear about the quality of news that will be produced in the Star Tribune in the future. Writer Doug Grow, who awaits word about the fate of his metro column, predicts the paper will not be worthy of its readers. “After losing 24 people (in the newsroom), you can’t cut another 50 people and then say, somehow, we’re going to be better,” he said, adding that the Twin Cities market demands a paper that is “more than a shopper.”

Furst lamented the paper’s “shrinking newshole” and, specifically, its plans to trim national and international coverage. “We have the luxury of putting a number of reporters into the field to dig and dig,” he said. “They cut staff, what does that do? We’re the public watchdog. We have a responsibility. So everybody gets hurt if they clip the tail of the public watchdog.”

Grow disagreed with Jim Boyd, outgoing deputy editor of the editorial page, who said in a Minnesota Monitor interview he thought the staff cuts might improve the paper by clearing out “deadwood” in the newsroom.

“We haven’t had strong inspirational leadership at this place for a long, long time, and if there is a ‘deadwood problem,’ it’s a deadwood management problem,” he said.

Grow has big questions about Par Ridder, both his leadership abilities and the way he came to be the paper’s publisher after leaving the same job at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “He comes in here under circumstances that we don’t understand. He’s 38 years old. He has no reputation for building anything. And within a few weeks of his entrance into the door, he’s slashing and burning,” he said. “Trust is something that’s earned. Leadership is something that’s earned. He’s the publisher; he’s not the leader.”

He cites the case of Linda Mack, a part-timer who writes about architecture and design. “We live in a cutting-edge city, in terms of architecture—projects are being mentioned all over the country, a lot of buildings I’m not too fond of, but they’re getting raves—and we had an expert in architecture. She’s going to be given the opportunity to apply for something else. To me, dealing with people that way means they’re trying to run people out of here.”

Furst, though, says this isn’t the end of things. Encouraged by readers who he says are now starting to pay closer attention, he seems cautiously hopeful.

“This is the beginning. There’s going to be a big fight-back,” he said. “We are not going to go quietly into the night.”

http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1178515.html

Doug Stone: A newspaper’s responsibility
Managers making cuts ought to recall the role they play in the well-being of the community.

Doug Stone

Published: May 14, 2007

I was talking recently with George Latimer, the former St. Paul mayor and Macalester faculty member, about how sad it was that the Star Tribune is facing layoffs in the newsroom and elsewhere. We were sad for the people we both know who work there. And, in a larger sense, we were sad for what these job losses mean for the Twin Cities community that the state’s largest newspaper is supposed to serve.
Before management makes additional staff cuts allegedly to protect the paper’s bottom line, it should consider the role the paper plays in the political and social well-being of the Twin Cities. I have always been taught that a newspaper was far more than a business. It is, in fact, a public trust. The essence of journalism is that reporters, editors and photographers provide readers with essential information upon which they can make informed decisions about public policy. It’s the only business that’s protected from government interference by a constitutional amendment.

For nearly 50 years as a reader, later as a reporter for the old Minneapolis Tribune and now a communications employee of a college, I always believed the management at the paper took its responsibilities seriously. Whether you agreed with a particular story or editorial, you always felt as though the folks at the Strib from the newsroom to the boardroom thoughtfully considered the alternatives. My faith has now been shaken.

How else to explain a once-proud Washington Bureau that specialized in the coverage of our congressional delegation now dependent on one young reporter? How else to explain a potential reduction in arts and television coverage? How else to explain the potential loss of nearly half of a very good editorial page staff? How else to explain the loss of a local columnist? How else to explain the potential loss of additional editors, photographers and local reporters who tell us every day what is going on in politics and government, the schools, the courts, the police stations and the suburbs?

snip

These guys do not understand what’s going on.

Yesterday morning, there was a short news segment on WCCO-TV where they interviewed a StarTribune business reporter.

He mouthed platitudes about understanding that business has been bad at the Red Star but offers no suggestions as to how best to fix it.

In the last few weeks, I have come to believe that a number of these employees believe that they are ENTITLED to a job at the Red Star. Many of them seem to embrace the attitude that they (individually and collectively) are the glue that’s barely holding Western Civilization together.

They don’t understand that the business model has changed, i.e the Internet. They also do not understand that their newspaper’s columnists and editorial board has p**sed off many readers and caused them to discontinue their subscriptions.

In short, they don’t get it.

They can use the old “big business cabal” schtick to try to whip up sympathy for their position - but anyone with common sense knows they don’t have a leg to stand on.

One of the dangers of letting a newspaper get too ideological is that you will eventually reach a point of no return.

The Red Star panders to an activist left-wing audience as well as to their own views. Those readers are delighted every time they bash Bush or glorify abortion or undermine the GWOT. But they have driven all the conservative readers out.

Now, let’s say they decide they need to get the conservatives back again, as the only way to increase circulation. So they move to the right and cut back on their Bush bashing and gay peddling. Immediately, their core audience is up in arms and starts screaming that they are traitors.

It’s much like Pelosi’s situation, where she has to take all sorts of radical positions to curry her constituents in SF at the same time that she has to have the gravitas of a national leader who is the figurehead for the Democrat party. Yet every day she has code pinkos invading her office protesting that she’s not radical enough.

If the newspapers had refrained from taking one political side at the cost of truth, they would have been wiser. Now they are committed. Going back to simply telling the truth won’t be easy. Moreover, even if they tried, hardly anyone now working in the field of journalism understands what the meaning of “truth” is. There’s only one Lileks on their staff, and evidently they don’t understand what they’ve got, but resent his popularity.

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