Relatively stable newspapers?

It is stable as long as the owner, Glen Taylor, decides that it will be stable. But at some point many of the white knight owners see revenues decline and start whacking. John Henry at the Boston Globe is one example. Warren Buffet at his papers is another.

 

Yeah. Henry hasn't been the savior people thought he would be, either by propping up the paper or growing the business. The Globe is the most aggressive with its paywall other than the WSJ, though.

 

Same here. We are understaffed because jobs don't always get filled when someone leaves. Sometimes they do, but not always.

There's a massive push to grow subscriptions, as there should be, yet that's tricky when ownership is unwilling to fill positions that have remained vacant for months. What's the sell?

 

WaPo because of Jeff Bezos. The Villages Daily Sun because it knows its market, and that market still wants newspapers.

The rest? No. I have zero doubt that wicked knows what he's talking about in reference to the Globe. NYT? No ... sorry. And no one else comes close to stable.

 

Exactly. We've left positions open for up to 6 months before filling them. Others just disappeared, never to return.

 

My shop recently had someone move from the newsroom to the front desk. Haven't seen any job posting yet for the position. Starting to wonder if that position will disappear, even if it's only been a couple weeks.

 

I'm guessing nothing is safe. Come the next recession, many, many newspapers will cease to exist.

 

Thank you for backing me up on this. He bought the Globe days before Bezos bought the Post. One operation has grown. One has not. They've probably cut close to 100 jobs from the newsroom since Henry bought the paper.

John Henry, billionaire, should be able to lose a couple mil here and there -- except if he's full of shit about how much he's worth or how much cash he has, and that wouldn't surprise me. He leveraged himself heavily with the Red Sox and Liverpool and with renovating Fenway Park. I'd love to see the real numbers there.

 

Honestly, if you're not in healthcare -- and even that's no guarantee if your system gets merged or bought out -- there isn't a career path in any industry that requires a college degree that I'd declare "safe" anymore. Even tech positions have huge amounts of turnover. Insurance? Sales? Accounting? I know people in each of those who have lost their jobs. If you're near 50, you've got a target on your back, because institutional knowledge isn't worth a tinker's damn any more. Younger. Cheaper. Do more with less.

If I had a kid, I'd strongly advise them towards pharmacology.

 

Henry closed his funds a while back after they took big losses for a few years. I don't know if he has a ton of income without them. He might be cash poor after all his acquisitions, but still be worth a lot. He must have lost some money with Fenway Roush racing.

 

When things started going downhill at my longtime former employer around 2006 or so, the editor employed a similar attrition strategy to cut jobs while avoiding layoffs. In fact, he took pride in never having laid anyone off.

Then Sam Zell and his henchmen took over, and suddenly the strategy became "attrition by subtraction."