The most frightening words you can hear

Might as well enjoy a redesign, probably the last one most papers will ever have. This year is shaping up to end up twice as bad as last year, perhaps as bad as the last three combined.

 

"If they won't work for minimum wage, then we don't want them"

 

"We've got a huge stack of resumes" — managing editor to complaining employees, 2009

"Know anyone who wants to deliver the paper at 3 a.m., for $400/month?. A felony conviction isn't a problem." — newspaper executives in 2016

 

Several years ago, our editor made the announcement that someone who had no business being named an assistant editor was being named an assistant editor (the unofficial story was so that he could keep his job during a round of major layoffs). So we were stuck with him and his questionable decisions until the next round of layoffs.

 

We had an executive editor who, whenever he called the entire newsroom together to announce cutbacks and/or layoffs, would always grin at some point and say: "Well, we all know we're not in it for the money, right?"

 

"It could be worse. At least you have a job." Those are pretty much fighting words to anybody with self respect.
Or, to the person who works 70 hours and is paid for 40 with the wink wink system: "You should have pride to work as long as it takes to get the job done. There are a lot of people out there who would do anything to have your job."

 

That's basically what ME said when a sports guy mentioned offering more than minimum wage might help us fill a position that had been empty for over a year.

 

"It's not about the money."

"This will allow us to be leaner and more efficient. Now we can do fewer things better."

 

"While we will miss those who have been rightsized, our paper will not only continue to provide the community with a strong local report, we will have an even stronger presence in the community through our reporting."

 

I'm thankfully no longer working for a newspaper, so it's been a few years since I've listened to any of the BS that the top brass slings at you when there's about to be a bloodletting. I believe I've purged a lot of their platitudes from my memory. But there's one line that I remember that still bothers me, that was delivered in a small, quiet sit-down:

"We're cutting a position on your staff and we need you to give us a name."

How do you sit there and rattle off a name just like that and turn someone's life upside-down? I told them I needed time to think about it and was told they needed a name first thing the next morning at the latest because they had to begin the separation paperwork. I went home and stayed up all night trying to figure out whose life to obliterate -- and even after I'd decided I wasn't able to sleep. You lose a little piece of yourself every time you watch layoffs happen -- and there were several more rounds that I somehow survived before I finally landed a job outside of journalism.

But I hated being put in that position ... and nothing was quite the same for me after that.

 

"Every time I call journalism a calling, you call it a business. When I call it a business, you say it's a calling."

 

Whenever I think of the process that goes through newspaper executives' heads when they make cuts, I imagine it's like this: