Sunday, March 1, 2009
Commercial Appeal to Lay Off 23 More Guild Employees
Posted by Chris Davis on Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 4:00 AM
"That could be 20 percent," [of the editorial department] he estimates roughly, not entirely trusting his numbers. "I don't know exactly ... 18 [people] is a big cut."
According to Watson, there has still been no discussion of reducing the number of days a week the CA publishes. "That's been done in Detroit," he says, noting that in December the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit Morning News cut back to three days for full publication and home delivery. Both papers announced a shift to online-first reporting and continue to offer a smaller newsstand-only issue on days when there is no home delivery.
The bad news keeps piling up for Scripps. The company froze dividend payments to its stockholders last fall. Then the CA cut 9 percent of its total staff. Two weeks ago Scripps announced the suspension of matching funds for 401-k plans and revealed in a memo to all employees that Senior executives had begun 2009 with 5 to 15 percent salary cuts.
News of more layoffs at the CA comes in conjunction with Friday's shuttering of Scripps' Pulitzer-prize winning Denver property, The Rocky Mountain News, a 150-year old daily paper.
"We understand that things are grim," Watson says.
The Newspaper Guild is planning a March workshop to help the newly unemployed find work.
-- Chris Davis
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what??? no bail out?? Surely there are more tax payer dollars lying around.
sure. joke about people losing their jobs. very classy.
re B: It happens all the time. Why are these guys so different. Their product sucks...the market responded and the company is going under. That's how the market works when left alone. Give the market what it wants and you will be rewarded....don't and well...you go work for someone who does. It's very simple and has nothing to do with jokes or sentiment. I hope the paper can turn things around but I don't see it happening. I'm hiring at my company and frankly I have a lot to choose from right now...so I'm presenting lower salary offers than I would in a tight labor market. I suppose that's not classy either. We are running a business...not a charity. My job is to make money and create wealth.....not employ people.
TT, you're dishing out the usual short-sighted "free market" credo that only only looks at one side of the coin. Do you not see that creating jobs IS creating wealth? Who's going to buy whatever it is (god help us) that your "company" creates, if everyone's out of work? A healthy economy won't happen unless there are consumers who can, you know, buy shit.
@tt: keep talking. you get classier with every word.
re Ole Miss: So why don't we just put everybody on the government payroll and we will all have a job and money to buy things from each other. Money chases goods.......it's not the other way around. If you have a product that people want they will find a way to buy it. Jobs go away when capital goes away and sits on the sideline during restless times. Bring back the capital and the jobs will appear. Too deep for you???
re Ole Miss: no one is buying your shit.
TT: "Too deep for me"? Don't make me laugh, you racist jacktard. I remember when you first showed up on this site to defend David Duke. Now you're pretending to be a company owner, dissing Obama as "boy" at every opportunity, giving simplistic lectures on capitalism, and spewing fake "facts" such as the one you threw out about factcheck.org. No one's buying your bullshit around here, in case you hadn't noticed.
TT: Rat and Foot in mouth again. Trash Talker, for the final time, bow out with what tiny grace you still have. OleMiss, RantBoy, B, Myself, and many others have been trying to get you to understand that your foot is in your mouth when you troll instead bearing facts and logic.
As to the case at hand, AP is going to have to change. Deliveried news paper is dying. Yahoo, Google, Memphis Flyer, and the such is becoming mainstream everyday acceptable from of media for news. It can be updated in a flash and has a better turn over. Yes there are those who don't have the Internet, but numbers are shrinking with Netbooks, Blueberries, and IPhones becoming a popular hardware format for the web viewing. I would give it ten more years and we will see the newspapers, even Memphisflyer , convert to all web or electronic book reader systems that you just sign up and view. Journalist might as well learn HTML, Javascript, and Photoshop if they haven't already.
comment stolen from PJ on Bill Maher show."Hey look at this thing (newspaper). I don't have to plug it in. It is portable, I can take it to the john with me. And when I am done I just have to throw it out". Newspaper needs a marketing retool.
38109:To the next largest Rat and Foot problem, goto Amazon, and the first thing you see is a electronic book reader which you can use on the John, can go wireless, and you still have a forest to make air for you....In your case 38109, since you are full of hot air and need more as you rant off, maybe more important to you then a newspaper.
re Ole Miss: Get over it hotrod. I don't pretend to be anything and I'm honest enough to admit it when I make a mistake. Still no one is buying your shit.
TT: Rat comes out the foot goes in. OleMiss is stating facts that you yourself provided.
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