Big Doings in Dallas

I believe it's 25-30 in sports alone. Don't know about the whole newsroom.

 

So will today just be the message that Belo's offering buyouts to X-amount of people? How long will the Beloites have to reach that number before the real D-day comes -- the day when layoffs are imposed to reach the Dream Committee's magic number?

 

Employees were told they will have a week to decide whether to accept the buyout once the terms are announced. If not enough take the buyout, they have been told there will be layoffs. Not sure how quickly those would follow, but you have to figure the dept heads put together a hit list during their week of sequester.

 

From those in the know:
Thursday, all newsroom employees will receive a packet that will explain to them their individual buyout/benefits options. They will then have perhaps two weeks to decide whether or not to take it.
If not enough volunteer to take it, then the long knives come out. And the severance packages at that time might not be as lucrative as the ones originally offered.
Rumor has it that columnists Tim Cowlishaw and Kevin B. Blackistone were both in Bristol interviewing for ESPN.com gigs.

 

Was the DMN really "the stud paper" in Texas. I read some of this stuff and people mention the Dallas Morning News as a top-flight paper, maybe a notch below the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post, etc. Well, was it really? I mean, if you have four major pro teams in a city, that alone should attract or develop some decent writers and columnists but really? Dave Smith invented the agate page? Pardon me for thinking that doesn't compare with Watergate.

Is the Dallas Morning News like Enron in the sense that they blew up and trumpted their supposed accomplishments? And it seemed like a lot of people, from some of the things I have read on this board, bought into it. OK, the Enron comparison may be a exaggerated, but this seems to be the day of reckoning.

 

Yes, the DMN was all that. At one point it might have been the biggest sports section in America in terms of space. They covered everything and, for the most part, did it well. I don't know so much about the rest of the paper, but in sports, the DMN was as big-time as big-time gets.

 

OK, big in terms of volume and that, to paraphrase Martha Stewart, is a good thing.

I saw it and read it in 1998 for three days when I had a seminar there. It was pretty good, but I didn't think their writers could match the New York Times columnists, and there are columnists at other New York area papers which match or exceed the Times people.

 

Three words... volume, volume, volume.

It may not have approached the reads of columnists from, say, the NYT or the Tribune, but just the space devoted to sports was staggering. I was there in 2001 on a vacation and I swear SportsDay on a Wednesday was about 28-30 pages. That's nuts.

Those days, very sad to say, might be gone. Whether S-T picks up the slack remains to be seen, and maybe DMN can do a good job with, say, 14-16 pages a day on heavy days. But the destruction of one of the great American sports sections continues.

 

30 pages isn't nuts if you are in a market that is nuts for sports. I was there at the time. The Times-Herald had owned sports coverage in Dallas for decades. Smith and the DMN took it over in about two weeks. What's sad about all this is that they took a mediocre paper and turned it into a very good one, excellent in some respects. It had its quirks, true, but it was a paper that generated a lot of loyalty among staff and readers. For me, it was very hard to leave, and the brief time I spent there was probably the best and most exciting part of my career.

 

That's assuming the paper was in a gradual slide. There are arguments to be made for that view, particularly if you know (or knew) the key players. But I suspect that what will come out is that this is further fallout from some big hits to the local economy (DMN depended heavily on classified, for example) and from the circulation scandal. One thing I know is that the people at the top at Belo were (and I am sure still are) highly sensitive to Wall Street. And Wall Street punishes you if it does not think you are paying attention.

 

Haven't all the papers involved in similar circulation scandals whacked staff?