Some more DMN stuff

No, I'm not a resident of Beloville.

As an observer of the passing scene though, I think we all have to wonder where the good jobs are these days. A bunch of folks seem to be jumping to online gigs. I'm guessing that within a few years, that will be commonplace and the industry will be turned upside down. Maybe that already has happened and I'm just slow.

 

OK, they've got 90-95 people in sports. Somebody please explain to me why you need that many people and what they all do?

 

Well, SE, when they were the best in the country -- and they were -- they might have put out the most comprehensive local and national sports section there has ever been, special sections, huge daily sections, local agate on everything, complete high school coverage, tons of Cowboys and college and everything else. So they wrote, edited, designed, did all that agate, etc.

I say that having once worked at a major rival for the U.S. best, but at it's height, it was pretty hard to argue against the DMN.

 

I think the key phrase there is 'when they were the best in the country"

90-95 people is an INSANE number of people.

 

Talked to a DMNer today. Said it's like Auschwitz around there. The resumes are flying out of the building.

 

This is just, flat out, sad. I feel for them.

 

What does 90-95 boil down to minus suburban bureau writers, prep stringers, etc.?

 

Someone I know said the same thing. Good people and talented journalists are having their lives turned inside-out. What a horrible, horrible situation.

 

There are exciting opportunities out there for the Web and other multimedia and things we haven't even thought or heard of yet.

But the Golden Era of the modern mega sports section, from the very late 70s to a few years back, is pretty much over with this. Other places have been cutting back for while, but this is indeed sad.

Yeah, they were too big, too much coverage, too many pages that were probably more vanity than actual service to the majority of readers. National-level sections competing with each other.

But they were a lot of fun, and they gave readers choices, you can't dispute that. You can always ignore the things you want to in a "too-much" section. But when it's "not enough," that's what you're stuck with.

The DMN was one of those places that was considered an ultimate career destination, and that's diminishing, too. Still a great paper, but this is quite a step back.

I've been doing this for 29 years, and even though I went into the online biz a while back, I feel nothing but depressed about this. And I hope everything works out for our colleagues at the Morning News.

 

I feel bad for the guys who get cut, but I'm confident that if the DMN is your most recent entry on your resume, you have a pretty good shot at landing a good gi somewhere else.
the trickle down effect will be felt more at the bottom of the food chain -- A DMN guy grabs the job at a 100,000 circ. that a guy trying to move up from a 40,00-50,000 would normally get. that means the young pup at the 20,000 looking to move up probably gets screwed, etc., etc.

I'm betting they could cut some of the editors and not miss a beat.

 

Ninety to to 95 sounds like a lot, and it is. But you have to think about the bureaus and the desk, and the zoning and everything else.
If you are cranking six or seven editions with zoned local copy most nights, plus the state, regional, city and city finals. Along with the special sections, that's a crap ton of desk work and you can't make that work with only three or four people on the desk.
I'd wager that 30, maybe 40 of that were desk.
Those jobs are probably safe, unless they are also cutting out zoned editions.
As said earlier, the papers that benefit are the 200ks and smaller around the region. They will be be getting a ton of resumes with a high level of experience.
Austin, OKC, Tulsa, Little Rock, Shreveport, Lubbock, Waco, Fort Worth even. All of those have had recent openings and they are all going to be landing some people. Good people.
And with McClatchy making a billion dollar bet on the future of papers, the Startle-Gram is in a position to own the region.

 

I would love to see a breakdown of 90-95, because IMO that's way too many even with zoned editions, all the local coverage, national beats, etc. I can't imagine 75, honestly. Depends on what all they were covering, however.