68 Philadelphia Inquirer newsroom layoffs

According to the Guild contract, the Inquirer is forced to start with people with the least amount of seniority and work backwards. There are many nooks and crannies, but that is the layman's version.

Theoretically, if Jim Murray had recently been hired, he would have had a better shot at being fired than Smith.

 

No it didn't come down to t that. Jim Jenks and company had to make a tough decision. This is one call you can't blame him for. Letting DA go was hard. He brought him in. But the fact is, especially in a union shop, seniority rules.
Parent is a vet but he was caught up in a numbers crunch.
Part of the Inky's problem stems from identity. Once a mighty player nationally, it's status as gone basically regional. As for the Daily News, its been living on borrowed time for a while. People aren't buying the product and to be honest, its simply not as good as the hey day when its lineup boasted Tom Cushman, Thom Greer, Stan Hochman, Bill Conlin and a blossoming Phil Jasner. The horses that are pulling the wagon now are donkeys compared to them and that's not taking a cheap shot. It's a fact. The same can be said for the Inky as well.
This scene was inevitable and probably would've happened if K-R was still in command. It's just a sign of things to come.
The idea of moving more towards web-based journalism is good but too late. K-R had a chance to corner the market in the 1980's with View-Tron but scratched the idea when it didn't turn an immediate profit. Now, that move has come back to bite K-R and journalism in the ass.

 

buzz bissinger goes to town, courtesy of romenesko:

 

Nice to see someone calling Smith on the carpet. It's an absolute joke that he still has a job at the newspaper. I wonder how many days the man has been to a Philadelphia Flyers/76ers/Eagles game in the last two years.

It's got to be less than five.

I can't wait until someone does to Smith what the guy at Slate did to Kornheiser: Go through nexis and find the last time SAS actually quoted a human being.

 

not making any judgments about his work or approach to his job but a lot more than five

 

That's ridiculous when it's applied to SAS, it's ridiculous when it's applied to Kornheiser, it's ridiculous when it's applied to Lupica. The people who sign their checks are paying them for their opinions, not to go out and report. You don't see the people who write the newspaper's editorials going to city council meetings regularly, either. They research their opinions in various ways besides being there.

Now, whether this is a good thing is a different issue. But that's the way it is. We are judging them by standards that don't apply. SAS, TK and Lupica aren't being paid to find out other people's opinions and transcribe them for us, they are being paid for their own opinions. The issue isn't how many people they quote, it's whether they hold readers' attention.

Personally, I hope this is a dying gig. With the Internet, opinions aren't a dime a dozen -- they're free. I hope newspapers will begin to realize that reporting, not opinion, is going to be the only thing worth selling. But that's not the way the top brass perceive the situation now. People like SAS are giving their bosses an agreed-upon product -- there is no ripoff on the part of the columnist, and it's unfair to pretend there is.

 

That would be true if SAS actually WROTE in the paper, which he hardly does anymore. There was barely a word from him when Iverson was traded. Aldridge was the one who did all that legwork, and wrote coherent columns throughout the whole process, who actually had informed opinions because he knew what he was talking about. SAS had nothing to add to the situation except a few dozen exclamation points.

 

But they love those exclamation points. I understand that the Inky is valuing star power over substance, but SAS isn't the person to blame for it.

No doubt they look at it in the same misguided way a lot of papers do -- they don't really care what he writes, he's a multimedia star and people are going to buy the paper because of that. A lot of big papers tolerate reduced output from columnists who spread themselves too thin because they believe name writers draw readers, and that's not true. I've been a few places where great columnists left or arrived, and did not affect circulation at all. But papers are afraid to tell people like SAS that we're going to sell X-number of papers with you or without you, so if you want to stay here you have to work for us exclusively. No, they want to hold on to some fragment of the columnist, and for what? The blame belongs to the editors who allow this, not the writers who profit from it.

 

damn! that whole situation is effed up!

 

http://blogs.philly.com/blinq/

best of luck to all of you

David Aldridge
Tom Fitzgerald
Rob Watson
Rob Parent
Kellie Patrick
Howery Pack
Natalie Pompilio
Adam Fifield
Gaiutra Bahadur
Don Steinberg
Keith Herbert
Ben Lowe
Stephanie Arnold
Julie Shaw
Christine Schiavo
Jeff Shields
Dawn Fallik
Eils Lotozo
Dwayne Campbell
Pete Schnatz
Jennifer Dorazio
Toni Callas
Joel Bewley
Todd Mason
Jackie Soteropolous
Leonard Fleming
Gloria Hoffner
Kera Ritter

 

What a great paper gone down the toilet.

While I agree that the Inquirer has issues, you don't see this gutting happening to such an extent at other regional papers.

 

Jesus, it's not even good enough to be a fishwrapper, now.