Phawker: Stephen A. Smith loses Inquirer column

The Big Lead has some great info on the SAS saga...

Great stuff as usual...

http://thebiglead.com/?p=2981

 

I think the Inquirer was pretty awful for publishing this story. Do you agree?

 

Well, it does come off as small-timey. And it also makes me think this decision came from far above Jim Jenks' and Bill Marimow's heads.

It's a clear attempt to humiliate the guy into resigning, but I'll put my money on SAS staying around for a while.

 

Can't believe someone (Peter Mucha?) allowed his byline on that story. How embarrassing.

Paper should have just fired him and paid the damn severence. Printing that press release in the paper is pretty bizarre.

 

One of the most idiotic things ever... I feel bad for the writer, who probably had no choice, but I would have insisted it say "Staff report" or something...

 

SAS deserves to lose his column on merit (work ethic, not being in Philly, etc. I won't even get into the quality issue). But the Inquirer should have handled this better.

Lots of papers have used their right to "reassign" as a way to push someone out the door, rather than an honest firing with severance. Inquirer isn't alone in that tactic. But the story was just plain dumb.

(Think the Aldridge moves were part of a buyout or layoff situation in newsroom, had nothing to do with DA's performance.)

 

The General Hospital reference was nice. I think the "bonus" of having a columnist who does TV can't be that great. Why buy a paper when you can turn on a radio or TV to hear what he thinks for free?

 

They were. But if they had canned SAS, they may have been able to save a few of those bodies.

 

Couple points:
What some folks are missing is the union element here. A firing would lead to a grievance hearing and legal wrangling, in which Mr. Smith might rightly argue that he isn't doing things much differently from the way he did them the last three years -- when he was being rewarded with raises.
The union cannot grieve a reassignment. The editors have the right to decide who appears in the paper as a columnist. Period. This happened with Gail Shister, who was not a "TV guy" but maybe the most plugged-in reporter in the country on the inner workings of the TV network news divisions. Shister isn't the household name Smith is, but she has a very high profile in her field.
Aldridge was laid off last year because he was very low on the seniority list, one of the last-hired people in the entire newsroom. And he did in fact make a stink about it, which was his right. The NABJ got involved and Aldridge was reinstated. And yes, other people were laid off instead.
Still, I don't think you can blame any columnist's high salary for layoffs. That takes responsibility from where it belongs -- with the men in suits who can't settle for reasonable profit margins from newspapers.

 

Aldridge was being misused before the buyout... I'm not the biggest fan of the guy, but they were definitely not playing to his strengths...

 

The ultimate blame does lie with the suits.

But if you are on a sinking raft, and you already have a life jacket of your own, do you take the one the ship is offering you -- even though you're higher up on the pecking order and others may go without?

That's what SAS did.

To me, that speaks to character.

For some reason, I thought he no longer was union. I stand corrected, and Zeemer that's a very good point you bring up.