Posted on 01/24/2008 3:07:32 PM PST by abb
"There was a land of Publishers and Editors called the Newspaper Business... Here in this pretty world Journalism took its last bow... Here was the last ever to be seen of Reporters and their Enablers, of Anonymous Sources and of Stringers... Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization Gone With the Wind..."
With apologies to Margaret Mitchell...
ping
http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=13072
Topic: Miscellaneous items
Date/Time: 1/24/2008 5:18:19 PM
Title: Boston Newspaper Guild reacts to layoffs story
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
Boston Newspaper Guild’s letter to Boston Globe execs
TO: Stephen Ainsley, Publisher
Gregory Thornton, Senior Vice President
FROM: Daniel Totten, President/BNG
RE: Boston Globe Layoffs-Metro Story
The Boston Newspaper Guild is disgusted to have read the Metro story about possible layoffs at the Boston Globe with no prior mention of reductions by Globe representatives to The Boston Newspaper Guild.
The Boston Globe’s response to the Union’s inquiry on this matter is that “no decisions have been made”.
If there’s any truth to the story in the Metro and there is in fact yet another reduction plan afoot, It’s disgraceful the NYT/Globe did not have the common decency nor strength of character to discuss this matter before it was made public, nor even a phone call placed to The Boston Newspaper Guild to disclose such an item was breaking news, or request any input from The Boston Newspaper Guild on such an important decision by the NYT/Boston Globe.
The Boston Newspaper Guild has endured far too many cutbacks, numbering well into the hundreds over the last few years.
Successful companies do not reduce their finest asset, it’s employees, to the bare bones and expect to maintain quality and achieve consistent success.
Perhaps the time is long overdue for review of all NYT compensation for executives along with a cost benefit analysis of exactly what each and every manager from the very top on down, have brought to the company over the last few years.
The fact remains that the Boston Newspaper Guild has ALREADY lost literally HUNDREDS of experienced, dedicated, LOYAL employees in a very short time, which is nothing short of a travesty and reflects horribly on the value the NY Times puts on it’s Boston Globe employees - the human beings who have put out the Boston Globe product - an incredible product and effort, for well over a hundred years.
The Boston Newspaper Guild demands NO MORE CUTBACKS of loyal union members.
It is the Boston Newspaper Guild members who remain committed to producing the Boston Globe and maintaining it’s quality and character —we expect the same commitment in return from The NY Times and Boston Globe.
Great! Buy the newspaper.
The same Boston Globe owned by the New York Times? Why yes.
Great news BUMP!
I wish the Boston Globe would hurry up and be dead.
The Boston Newspaper Guild, the Boston Globe and its owner, the New York Times, are about to get down and dirty.
How about a nice long, bitter strike, eh, fellas?
Raising their price? That’s like raising the price of a manure sandwich because not enough people are buying and you’ve got to make up the shortfall.
LMAO, yep, jacking up the price will definetly get more readers.................LOL!
I agree 100% with this Guild. I urge the Boston Globe/NYT to make a larger increase in the newspaper price so that nobody need lose their job.
...and if the circulation should decrease, then please raise the price further, so that these jobs can still be maintained. thankyou.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080211/alterman
Wall Street to Daily Papers: 'Drop Dead'
Eric Alterman
It's just a coincidence that the essay "Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore?" by the impresario of The Wire, David Simon, appeared in the Washington Post the same day news broke of the top editor of the Los Angeles Times having been forced out over a refusal to make further budget cuts. Virtually every major magazine--as if by divine decree--has run a David Simon profile recently, and in each one the former Sun veteran has eloquently bemoaned the state of contemporary newspapering. And the departure of James O'Shea from the LA Times marks the fourth time in less than three years that either the top editor or the publisher has "quit" rather than make budget cuts demanded by the owner.
What was different about the latest LA Times departure was that it took place not under the much-detested Tribune Company ownership but the would-be savior of the Times, entrepreneur Samuel Zell. No less odd is that, according to the Tribune's Phil Rosenthal, O'Shea's departure had been planned about a week before the announcement, yet nobody at the Times bothered to come up with some corporate-friendly spin. According to the New York Times, Nancy Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the LA Times, simply said, "I don't have any comment for you." It's as if newspaper owners have given up caring to explain themselves. "This is the way of the world," they're telling us. "Get used to it."
Regarding Simon's newspaper critique, what is odd--at least if you're a fan of The Wire, and I defer to no one in that department--is that it mixes up problems with no relation to one another. I don't like that ambitious yuppie on the city desk any more than anyone, but what's he got to do with the budget cuts that are destroying the paper's institutional memory? And other Simon complaints about what's happened to the Baltimore Sun--where he worked and upon whose woes The Wire focuses--do not strike me as relevant to the industry's current conundrum. Perhaps his editors were overly obsessed with prizes, but since when have editors not been obsessed with prizes? Perhaps they did force him to oversimplify complex social phenomena, but again, when was that not journalistically the case?
I don't begrudge Simon his hobbyhorses. I have my own, primarily the business's refusal to stand up to--or even acknowledge--the war on press freedom the Bush Administration and its allies have been waging since they came to power seven years ago. But the guys who run these newspapers are focused on one thing only, and that's survival. You might be, too, if you were faced with facts like these:
§ The combined market value of independent, publicly traded US newspaper publishers has fallen by 42 percent in the past three years.
§ The Washington Post Company, with circulation down 14 percent since 2000, now calls itself "an education and media company," as the balance of its profits comes from its purchase of the Stanley Kaplan educational testing business.
§ Advertising--the industry's lifeblood--is also in rapid decline, moving to where it is cheaper and more efficiently targeted on the Internet. Spending for print ads in newspapers fell 9 percent last year, with the fall rapidly accelerating in the third quarter.
§ Newspapers are receiving a declining share of Internet advertising as well. While online ad sales surged 26 percent to more than $15 billion in the first nine months of 2007, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, for the first time newspapers no longer received the largest share.
§ The time Americans spend reading newspapers has fallen to just fifteen hours per month.
§ Fully 23 percent of Americans cite the Internet as their main source of election news. And though 26 percent name newspapers as their source, that figure has fallen by more than half since 1996.
§ Young people in particular do not read newspapers and have no interest in acquiring the habit. Daily readership for people under 30 now stands at barely one in five.
§ A recent Goldman Sachs analysis predicted a 7.9 percent decline in ad revenue this year, and cut its earnings forecast for all newspaper-based companies in 2008. Paper costs are going up 11 percent to boot.
Even though profits remain high at almost all these papers, the sad fact is that virtually no one is interested in staying in the business for business reasons anymore. The cautionary tales are too powerful. When, for instance, Wall Street lost confidence in the Knight Ridder chain in 2005, its sale netted only one bidder: the smaller McClatchy Company chain. At the time, McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the chain's $6.5 billion purchase price would have constituted "an unimaginable bargain only a few years ago." Since the takeover McClatchy has lost more than 82 percent of its market value. And it's hardly alone. In June 2005, Lee Enterprises paid $1.46 billion in cash to buy the Pulitzer newspaper chain. Lee's stock is worth barely a third of what it was before the purchase.
Nobody's got a good solution to this problem--at least not one that involves continued public, for-profit ownership of daily newspapers--but what is perhaps most depressing about the reaction of the industry has been its timid acquiescence to these trends. In James O'Shea's final remarks to the LA Times newsroom, he correctly identified "the biggest challenge" facing the industry: "to overcome this pervasive culture of defeat, the psychology of surrender that accepts decline as inevitable." The dude, alas, is dead-on. Newsmen and -women are supposed to go down fighting. As the great Molly Ivins observed not long before we lost her: budget cuts, buyout plans, it's as if the only agreed-upon solution to fight this deadly disease is "to commit suicide."
Not even the junkies on The Wire are that far gone...
Get Less For More
Yeah - That’ll work.
“.......including hundreds of layoffs,....”.
Now THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!! OORAH
Perhaps the Slimes figured it can do without the Glob?
LOL, ditto that............ooooooooooooooooooorah!
Every day in almost every store I go to I see a stack of unsold Boston Globes. The Boston Herald often sells out.
Few read that rag in the areas that I frequent.
Good riddance to that POS newspaper.
Y’all need to read Alterman. He’s having a slobbering fit.
I hope the union genius who strung this nonsense together isn't involved in any proofreading.
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