Showing posts with label Harlan Spector. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harlan Spector. Show all posts
Friday, July 26, 2013
The painful countdown continues at Plain Dealer
Consider this the painfully lost week end for the Plain Dealer staff. The news people are awaiting deadly verdicts, such as, "Will I have a job a week from now." Nobody knows as the paper moves closer to Aug. 3, the day when it will be shrunk to three weekday home deliveries plus a "bonus" delivery on Saturday to accompany the Wednesday, Friday and Sunday schedule. Why is it a bonus rather than a four-days-a week schedule? Beats me. Those clever consultants think of everything. PD Guild president Harlan Spector told me at 5 p.m. Thursday, he still had a job. But he, like all of the others, are in a state suspended animation. "The company hasn't told us anything," he said. But we expect it to happen next week."
Thursday, June 27, 2013
An unpleasant week, and it ain't over
Weekly mop-up of chaos and unpleasantries:
Some Plain Dealer non-union support staffers lost their jobs last week in what they will surely remember as their 90-minute date with destiny. That's how the PD's front office arranged their painful departure from the payroll. The company had told a hand-picked group of uncertain numbers to sit by their telephones for 90 minutes and await a possible phone call. If the phone rang, the staffer was informed he or she had drawn the unlucky straw in Newhouse's Advance Publications' mission to "realign " the workforce. The owners are using the same torturous tactic at its other papers. I'm told the next cuts will come by Aug. 1 as the paper nears the launching of a three-day home delivery plus a Saturday "bonus" in early August. Not much else is known about the PD's game plan. Guild President Harlan Spector says he's told very little by the company, and doesn't even know how many people got pink slips in the latest round. Anybody recall the newspaper crowd's faux Scout motto to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted"?
* * * * *
It's been mind-blowing to see the wingers' reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court 's decision to widen democracy's space for same-sex marriages. Justice Scalia,who dissented, said the 5-4 decision was "jaw-dropping", which for him, is a lot of jaw to drop. But the most stupendous non-sequitur from the gallery came from forever hyperactive Bill Donahue, the head of the Catholic League, who accused the court of engaging in an attack on "religious liberty" while fuming that the ruling was a "malicious effort to punish people of faith". Religious liberty? Until now I had thought that such liberty was the accepted catalyst of so many different faiths in America.
* * * * *
Poor Justice Clarence Thomas, the morose silent majority of one on the hard right who doesn't even speak when spoken to. Here's a beneficiary of affirmative action who once again voted to keep blacks in their place when he joined the white guys on the bench who shot a big hole in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Do you think he ever has a sleepless night?
* * * * *
Still reeling from Texas Rep. Michael Burgess, a Republican who asserted that fetuses can start masturbating in 15 weeks. Who knew?
* * * * *
July's Harper's Index reports that the highest paid public employe in 37 states is a sports coach. Note to parents: Do you really want your kid to study to be a doctor?
Some Plain Dealer non-union support staffers lost their jobs last week in what they will surely remember as their 90-minute date with destiny. That's how the PD's front office arranged their painful departure from the payroll. The company had told a hand-picked group of uncertain numbers to sit by their telephones for 90 minutes and await a possible phone call. If the phone rang, the staffer was informed he or she had drawn the unlucky straw in Newhouse's Advance Publications' mission to "realign " the workforce. The owners are using the same torturous tactic at its other papers. I'm told the next cuts will come by Aug. 1 as the paper nears the launching of a three-day home delivery plus a Saturday "bonus" in early August. Not much else is known about the PD's game plan. Guild President Harlan Spector says he's told very little by the company, and doesn't even know how many people got pink slips in the latest round. Anybody recall the newspaper crowd's faux Scout motto to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted"?
* * * * *
It's been mind-blowing to see the wingers' reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court 's decision to widen democracy's space for same-sex marriages. Justice Scalia,who dissented, said the 5-4 decision was "jaw-dropping", which for him, is a lot of jaw to drop. But the most stupendous non-sequitur from the gallery came from forever hyperactive Bill Donahue, the head of the Catholic League, who accused the court of engaging in an attack on "religious liberty" while fuming that the ruling was a "malicious effort to punish people of faith". Religious liberty? Until now I had thought that such liberty was the accepted catalyst of so many different faiths in America.
* * * * *
Poor Justice Clarence Thomas, the morose silent majority of one on the hard right who doesn't even speak when spoken to. Here's a beneficiary of affirmative action who once again voted to keep blacks in their place when he joined the white guys on the bench who shot a big hole in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Do you think he ever has a sleepless night?
* * * * *
Still reeling from Texas Rep. Michael Burgess, a Republican who asserted that fetuses can start masturbating in 15 weeks. Who knew?
* * * * *
July's Harper's Index reports that the highest paid public employe in 37 states is a sports coach. Note to parents: Do you really want your kid to study to be a doctor?
Thursday, March 7, 2013
The news inside Plain Dealer is painfully gloomy
(Now posted on Plunderbund)
In view of the Plain Dealer news room's mission to report the news, the absence of news about the people who are supposed to report the news of others has left the staff in a state of day-to-day suspended animation. And hardly feeling secure in their line of work.
The problem, of course, is the presumed impending doom of the state's biggest and often most puzzling newspaper (as we now know it), a deeply ensconced establishment journal that has tight-roped for years through local issues in a diverse city that has needed little encouragement to become unruly.
Ever since the word got out last year that the PD's absentee owners were serious about slicing another third of the paper's news staff (58 from about 165 is the operative number) and had a track record of reducing publication to thrice-weekly in other cities, it was only natural for reporters and on-site editors to wonder about their own survival. You still won't get an answer to the fate of the yet-to-be named outcasts. The hit list won't be known, we were told by staff sources, until May.
Nobody is more frustrated by the current lull in the action than Harlan Spector, the Guild president who has sat through meetings with the brass that recently ended with still more union concessions and few specifics about the layoffs. In a way, the Guild faced the option of death by hanging or firing squad.
"I'd love to know what they're planning," Spector said when I called him a few days ago. The "they" in this instance is Advance Publications owned by the Newhouse family. The company has already revealed its course with other papers in its grasp with something called the Michigan model. It started with the conversion in 2009 of the Ann Arbor News from print to digital. Along the way, the owners squeezed such papers as the New Orleans Times-Picayune into a three-day format. That seems to be where the PD is headed, if the speculation rules the reality. Some time in the spring, the PD's readers could be getting the paper on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday - if the current subscribers decide they want it at all.
Again, Spector and others on the staff with whom I spoke can do no more than rely on Advance's past actions. Besides, they suspiciously noted that Editor Debra Simmons and Managing Editor Thom Fladung just visited New Orleans when the Mardi Gras was only a memory.
"Everybody's on edge," a veteran reporter told me. "There are no decisions being made here - it's all being handled by the (Advance) New York office where the guys are preparing to do it (expletives deleted)."
The talk now is that the paper will see the rise of "curators" - a post -journalism term about the folks who will post news on the Internet. I'm not at all familiar with the precise process and will leave it at that. However, it has been evident for some time with the challenge of digital news that newspaper owners almost never inject the word "journalism" into their outlooks. It's become a meaningless distraction to the business model and therefore undefinable in today's alternate communications universe.
Journalism as it was once known didn't disappear overnight as it was painfully debilitated by the space-time speed of electronic transmission in the palms of a new generation's hands.
Still, during the print media's slow trek to the graveyard, it would be nice to meet somebody high up in the business slip in a nod to journalism just so we have a hint of what nobody on Wall Street seems to be talking about anymore.
.
In view of the Plain Dealer news room's mission to report the news, the absence of news about the people who are supposed to report the news of others has left the staff in a state of day-to-day suspended animation. And hardly feeling secure in their line of work.
The problem, of course, is the presumed impending doom of the state's biggest and often most puzzling newspaper (as we now know it), a deeply ensconced establishment journal that has tight-roped for years through local issues in a diverse city that has needed little encouragement to become unruly.
Ever since the word got out last year that the PD's absentee owners were serious about slicing another third of the paper's news staff (58 from about 165 is the operative number) and had a track record of reducing publication to thrice-weekly in other cities, it was only natural for reporters and on-site editors to wonder about their own survival. You still won't get an answer to the fate of the yet-to-be named outcasts. The hit list won't be known, we were told by staff sources, until May.
Nobody is more frustrated by the current lull in the action than Harlan Spector, the Guild president who has sat through meetings with the brass that recently ended with still more union concessions and few specifics about the layoffs. In a way, the Guild faced the option of death by hanging or firing squad.
"I'd love to know what they're planning," Spector said when I called him a few days ago. The "they" in this instance is Advance Publications owned by the Newhouse family. The company has already revealed its course with other papers in its grasp with something called the Michigan model. It started with the conversion in 2009 of the Ann Arbor News from print to digital. Along the way, the owners squeezed such papers as the New Orleans Times-Picayune into a three-day format. That seems to be where the PD is headed, if the speculation rules the reality. Some time in the spring, the PD's readers could be getting the paper on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday - if the current subscribers decide they want it at all.
Again, Spector and others on the staff with whom I spoke can do no more than rely on Advance's past actions. Besides, they suspiciously noted that Editor Debra Simmons and Managing Editor Thom Fladung just visited New Orleans when the Mardi Gras was only a memory.
"Everybody's on edge," a veteran reporter told me. "There are no decisions being made here - it's all being handled by the (Advance) New York office where the guys are preparing to do it (expletives deleted)."
The talk now is that the paper will see the rise of "curators" - a post -journalism term about the folks who will post news on the Internet. I'm not at all familiar with the precise process and will leave it at that. However, it has been evident for some time with the challenge of digital news that newspaper owners almost never inject the word "journalism" into their outlooks. It's become a meaningless distraction to the business model and therefore undefinable in today's alternate communications universe.
Journalism as it was once known didn't disappear overnight as it was painfully debilitated by the space-time speed of electronic transmission in the palms of a new generation's hands.
Still, during the print media's slow trek to the graveyard, it would be nice to meet somebody high up in the business slip in a nod to journalism just so we have a hint of what nobody on Wall Street seems to be talking about anymore.
.
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