D-Day Has Arrived At My Shop. Wish Me Luck.

By the way, want to be sicker?

I just found out my company swung the axe because it only made 51 cents per share last quarter instead of the projected 60 cents per share.

They still made money. Just not enough.

 

Are you kidding? 9 fucking cents? They cut that many people over 9 cents? That's ridiculous.

 

Pete,
Use your time wisely. Get your name out there, market yourself. Learn new technologies, new communication platforms.
See where your resume needs improvement and improve it.
Get ahead of the game.
Best of luck,
AMac

 

Not kidding in the least.

 

Pete, do you mind saying what chain you work for? That's just pathetic.

 

It's like we hear, a lot of newspapers are profitable, just not profitable enough.
Anyone else remember the days when newspapers operated in the red all the time and it wasn't considered a big deal. Shit, we used to hire despite profit losses and that was that. We went from knowing what to do in the red to not knowing how to work in the green.

 

Well, if some newspapers still are profitable, they sure won't be soon enough if we keep stripping everything out of them.

 

Here's what bugs me. Car plants have layoffs. But when they do, it doesn't decrease the quality of a car being made.
But newspapers have layoffs, and it becomes apparent that the quality of the paper suffers.
I don't understand why the suits don't get that. Why they don't understand that people aren't so crazy as to pay more for an inferior product.

 

Good to hear you are in the clear, Pete. But as you point out, for how long?

There's nothing good about being at the tail end of an industry's decline. We read about buggy-whip makers as a metaphor. Don't laugh, but my father remarked today that he could remember the huge industry built around the horse -- wagons, feed, equipment, stables, etc., and the thousands of horses and people it supported, in Newark in the 1930s. The automobile killed the business off inside of 10 years.

 

Pete....best to you and pray everything works out. I have a friend at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram who is on pins and needles right now because they are due to lay some more folks off. And he's got 30-plus years in the profession. He's really worried.
Hope something turns out well for you.

 

Pete, glad you're still in the game. I have a colleague who was told that he was being transferred to a sister paper about 100 miles away and if he wanted the job, he has to take a pay cut AND move over to news.
That sucks but he's fortunate and blessed. It could be worse.

 

We had eight losses in the newsroom, a CNHI paper which when they bought us, informed us we were overpaid. If I counted the losses we've had since the day of purchase, we've lost a third to maybe 40 percent of our newsroom. We're down to three paginators, period. At some point, you'd expect the model of an Executive Editor, Opinion Editor and City Editor to become a one-person managing editor but those positions have endured and even when one quits that position, someone is moved into that postion and their old position is not filled. And in our business, only the Opinion Editor writes and paginates...one or two pages a day. Morale sucks. We lost all our interns because of some federal law (I can't find) that says they have to be paid interns. Sports has lost its part-timers who took calls. Yet in the last layoff, the statement in the newspaper article announcing the layoffs included the statement that we would continue to be the dominant news agency in the region and didn't expect to reduce coverage.