LA Times layoffs

Don't know Jaime. Bob's a very good guy ... hope it all works out well for him.

 

Another thing ...

I've actually opined on here that as bad as this all is, some of it is simply necessary to save newspapers. Some of that still might be true, but I regret saying it.

The reason is some of the completely inhuman methods being used in the ways people are being terminated. The Media General stuff is amazingly bad. Families and insurance and cutting people off just short of important service time milestones.

Now I'm looking at the Times. The layoffs started today, and they're going to continue until Aug. 29.

It doesn't take a savant to know why: Even that big newsroom can't take the hit of 150 people being let go at once. So they're going to drag out the process and make it relatively seamless -- but only for the good of the company.

Those who work an extra month or so might disagree, I guess. But I don't imagine that extra month is going to be worth the anxiety to most.

So yeah, the business is in trouble. But people have forgotten how to be human beings in the process, it seems to me.

 

In the interest of fairness, of which they deserve little at this point, I'm told that most of these layoffs will be within a week or two, with few coming after that. So they're not dragging the process out quite as badly as reflected in my opinion above.

 

Brings new meaning to the old saw: "Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable."

Now it's: "Comfort laid-off newsroom people, afflict the scumbags laying them off."

From the fact that this stuff is being done in the first place (cut the product, hope the customers don't get wise), to how it is all being done now, to the degrees to which so many of the top brass avoid accountability and transparency (they ought to be returning other media's phone calls about this crap and 'fessing up to their own journalists), these newspaper companies now have forfeited their credentials to hold other horseshit businesses' feet to the fire on their malevolent practices.

They have become miserable members of the business community in their respective markets, yet they're going to pass judgment and keep an eye on others of their ilk? Fat chance.

They needed to handle all of this differently, and better, because of the special role they're supposed to play. The people running the joints don't embrace that because they always have been businessmen first, journalists never. They do not deserve to survive.

 

I just did a quick check of my (Zell-owned) newspaper's archives.

Not one word reported on McClatchy layoffs.

Not one word reported on Tampa layoffs.

Not one word reported on LA layoffs or Chicago layoffs.

But when Citi or Bank of America or Delta or anyone else lays off people, it always seems to get mentioned.

 

I actually remember, believe it or not, when business-side people were actually proud about putting out a first-class newspaper.

Boy, are those days gone.