Plain Dealer guts union

Reporters are next.
Plain Dealer Busts Union, Moves Forward With Plan to Cut 29 Local Journalism Jobs

 

Very sad. Very.

 

Disgusting. And not at all surprising.

 

I could so get laid off by the Plain Dealer ...

 

When I read the link the article stated that when the 29 personnel in design are sacked that will eliminate almost half the unionized positions. So how many reporters does that leave at the Plain-Dealer?

And on a pessimistic note. Gatehouse bought Akron earlier this year for 16 million dollars. Newhouse, which could afford the Beacon Journal, passed. Newhouse could have gotten much of the purchase price back just from consolidating real estate. And also consolidated staffs which would have saved a lot of money.

Which is another way of saying the newspaper business is going to hell.

 

Gatehouse has been a surprisingly aggressive bidder in some cases.

 

Word is that GateHouse is sniffing around the Dayton paper and the two smaller papers Cox owns in that area. And people I know who recently left Cox believe the AJC is on the block, too, though not necessarily to GateHouse.

 

Not knowing that the Plain Dealer had a union, when I first saw the thread head, I read it as "Plain Dealer Gets a Union."

I thought, "Hm, maybe that's good." Which was a switch for me, because, generally speaking, I don't support unions.

 

Cox President Kim Guthrie has said the company is looking to sell 14 TV stations -- not sure if that represents all of Cox's TV stations -- because of a lack of scale. If they're worried about scale, they have to sell Dayton and AJC, the last two papers.

 

It's a bit confusing, since only a handful of the reporters in Cleveland are employees of the Plain Dealer (unionized). The rest are non-unionized employees of Cleveland.com (Ohio Media Group or something like that?). Virtually every current sports reporter is *not* officially a Plain Dealer employee, including veterans who wisely left the union to join what they knew would ultimately be the winning side.

 

14 is all the television stations. My guess is that all the stations except the ones in Dayton and Atlanta are for sale which are the legacy markets. And maybe Dayton and Atlanta are for sale also.

If the AJC is for sale I wonder if Bezos, Murdoch or the Ne York Times tries to buy it. Those three companies are fighting it out for the national online subscription market. Buying the biggest paper in the Southeast would give one of those companies the same a competitive advantage over a large geographic area.

 

This is what you get when you gut your copy editors. This is no knock against Cabot, either. She should be backed up better than this.

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