Best/worst newspaper companies?

Companies in every industry will throw you overboard the minute they no longer need you.

I worry for young people who have an incredible loyalty to their employer and think they will be taken care of. It's like they need to get their heart broken once before they see things clearly.

 

The best advice ever given to me was "Don't love your paper because it won't love you back."

 

Another true story involving a guy I knew at a McLatchey paper: Driving to cover an event. SE called him on the cell phone to tell him he was being laid off and had two weeks. Then told him, "we need a lead, notes and bar today."

 

Close thread, please. Question answered; nothing more to say, though YF did put a cogent cherry on top of the cupcake.

Well, one more thing. Fear this: I know a guy who spent almost three decades with one chain, hopping from outpost to outpost at their beck and call as he rose through the ranks. Tremendously competent, best leader I ever worked with (not that THAT was a contest), hard worker, good man. The bean counters decide they can save a few dollars by replacing a couple of publishers with less-experienced personnel under a lower job title and WHAM! He and his mortgage and his family are unemployed; he's in his late 50s.

They are beginning to devour their own. May they have no one who loves them when they are elderly and drooling and demented and rolling around in their excrement-filled diapers.

 

The way I heard it, the line continues: "... but it will bend you over and bone you up the ass on a regular basis."

 

The comparison to other fields of business is a fair one, but the economy will eventually bounce back.

Newspapers will not.

 

What, no Patch? (OK, technically not a newspaper, but I couldn't resist)

 

Family paper I worked for was and currently is awful. Sunday sports section went from 14 pages when I started to 10 and is now at 8. Ownership doesn't care about the papers it owns, only the family's real estate holdings. Sports shop at my paper had an absentee sports editor only in it for his column and access to the major university (access he brags about at the bar and uses to pick up girls half his age). Ownership didn't care that he never was around and frequently charged booze to his expense reports because he was a local "celebrity."

I was in the middle of closing on a house with my wedding two months away when I got pink slipped. No warning. Came in one day and was told that I was cut. I was in such shock I left my jacket on the back of my chair and went home. NBD, right? Went home, collected my thoughts and came back to finish out my last day. They had changed my door code while I was gone. Had to knock on the door and, with the whole newsroom staring, someone had to bring my jacket to me. Wasn't even allowed to finish out the day like a man. Two days later I get a call from the mortgage company telling me they called the paper and was told I didn't work there anymore.

Fuck those fucking fucks.

 

Yeah, my pink slip came three months after our executive editor walked up to me at a company function, put his arm around me and said, "If some other paper doesn't snatch this guy up, he's going to be a lifer here..."

 

That's why I do this on the side. My philosophy is treat me like a side employee, I will treat this like a side job.

 

That sentiment definitely appears to be a theme on this thread. I guess I should have titled the thread, "Ranking the lesser of evils."

But I still think there's a big difference between working for Tribune Co. and working for CNHI. Isn't there? Or does it just not matter?