Lupica is laid off

There was little that could have changed the inexorable decline of the printed product any more than a high school football team could scheme its way into a victory over the Patriots.

 

I just think this is way too easy of a scapegoat, blaming it all on upper management.

The truth is, the world of journalism is moving at whatever Internet speed you subscribe to. Information can be obtained at the press of a button, at the speed of the delivery of an email or a text message. The "suits" made mistakes but there is no way newspapers could ever keep up with this growth in technology.

Newspapers are the 8-track tapes of the 70s, the vinyl albums of the 80s, or the CDs of the 90s. Look at companies like Eastman Kodak, Sporting News, Timex, Radio Shack, and Circuit City that were once huge and are now a shell of themselves or completely gone. They couldn't keep up either. This is a fast-changing and developing world. Newspapers never had a chance.

In reality, the suits may have done a pretty good job keeping the whole thing afloat for as long as they have, somehow convincing the public they're still relevant.

 

They all should have reinvented themselves, just as the buggy whip owners should have started their own automobile companies.

[/Baron'sresponse]

 

This is probably more accurate than some of us want to admit. When I was forced out of my job seven years ago, I told family and friends that it wouldn't surprise me if newspapers went all-digital within five years. Hasn't happened, although print dies a little bit more every day. And remarkably, I've been hired twice in those seven years (first job was 50/50 print/digital, current job is mostly print with some digital work I took on because I thought it could help my job security with retirement at least four or five years away). But I suspect the other shoe will drop on my current shop sooner rather than later.

 

Hey, look who just, somewhat, agreed with me:

Now, papers were still immensely profitable 10, 15 years ago, so there may have been a reluctance to sell by owners. But if the writing is on the wall, why not use some of those profits to embrace the new technology and put money into the business with that technology?

 

To me, a lot of the blame on the suits is a result of the suits' own behavior during this time. While the decline may have been inevitable, how they've acted during this time is why there is such an eagerness to blame them.

I'm not talking about layoffs and financial cutbacks, although that certainly plays a part. It's Sam Zell fucking around with employees' pension funds; it's Gannett suits throwing another irrelevant shit sandwich flavor of the month idea at the wall and telling employees to like it; it's Mary Junck getting 82 percent raises and bonuses for Lee's failures; It's John Paton telling employees to be digital first, seven years after everyone else: it's Bob Jelenic for deliberately going out of his way to be an asshole to employees needlessly to the point where people openly celebrated his death.

It's one thing to have failed due to forces beyond one's control. It's another thing to to fail, and act like an ass while doing it.

 

In 1993 the Times bought the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion. They sold it for $70 million in 2013.

I'm going to guess that they could have spent that money better.

Oh, you said 15 yeas ago. OK. In 2000, Tribune bought a controlling interest in Times Mirror for $8 billion in cash and stock. Tribune was already a diversified media company, owning 22 television stations. They would have been far better off investing in more television stations vs. purchasing the publisher of the LA Times, the Baltimore Sun, and the Hartford Courant,

Also in 2000, Gannett purchased Central Newspapers, publishers of the Indianapolis Star and Arizona Republic, for $2.6 billion.

All of these companies would have been better off selling newspapers, not buying them.

 

Tribune did screw up by not considering a $2 billion offer for the L.A. Times more than a decade ago. But other than that, most of the "profits" these papers made went into debt service, as most carried burdensome debt loads.

There is a reason, when it was still a public company, why Tribune stock went from $58 to about $27 a year or so before Zell rescued (yes, rescued) our 401(k)s by paying us $34/share for it. The stock dropped like a rock because revenues were drying up. Companies losing more than half their market value and with heavy debt loads are in little position to "invest" theses profits without a clear vision of what the future of the business really is. Hell, even today, with all that we know, newspapers are about five years behind the curve in their "innovations."

I was a Tribune Company employee long before, during and partly after the Zell era.

Nothing happened to our pensions. Oh, I'm sure 'ol Sam would have liked to fuck around with them. But I can look mine up every day at vanguard.com and see I'm due the same $760/month I've had coming since long before anyone had heard of Zell.

 

At the risk of turning this into a thread about Zell, what he did was eliminate the company 401K match when he set up an employee stock ownership plan. Employees still could contribute to their 401Ks, but the company no longer kicked in anything. When Tribune declared bankruptcy, the ESOP was rendered worthless and the 401K match eventually was restored. Nothing happened to the pensions -- mine, paltry though it is, remains intact (and will be paid by the "old" Tribune Co. instead of the struggling publishing spinoff).

 

You must be upset -- you forgot to refer to yourself in the third person.

 

Yes, they did. It just didn't tie in to the 401(k) employee contributions. For (at least) three years there was a "Cash Balance Plan" whereby Tribune deposited a hunk of money each year into the employees' 401(k)s. I received three disbursements, totaling about $6,500.

When they returned to 401(k) matching, it was actually quite decent. If the employee contributed 6 percent or higher, the company would tack on 4 percent. Thus, a 6 percent contribution equaled 10 percent; my 15 percent contribution equaled 19 percent.

I don't think it was very cheap. Tribune was paying about 8 percent interest.

Well, that was the idea. They figured the tax savings from being an "S" corp was so great that it gave them a huge up-front advantage toward paying off the debt. But revenues cratered before the ink on the contracts was dry.