Diane Pucin cut by LA Times

Very sad...

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2014/01/longtime_la_times_sportsw.php

 

God, this sucks..

 

She's in the first phase of shock. Next comes the hundreds of calls, tweets, FB messages and emails telling her how wronged she was. Then, anger will set in... Acceptance is a long way off...

I'm guessing she'll be hired relatively quickly.

 

I hope she is hired again relatively quickly. If so, well, then, anger won't set in, and acceptance won't be necessary. It'll just be something that happened, she'll take a little bit of a vacation and then she'll have moved on already, maybe to some big web site that she's probably had her eye on as a future option (if she needed it), anyway.

That said, there's nothing that says for sure that she will be hired again relatively quickly. There are lots of younger-gun options out there, and sometimes, no matter how good your work, that's what matters now. If anywhere, this is where the anger will come from.

This is a case of there not being much fat to cut from a paper anymore, and being among the first in the pecking order for a cut among reporters/writers with the bigger salaries there.

 

Correct. Experience is a liability these days. A lot of media outlets would rather go the young-n-cheap route.

 

It's an odd business model where employees are punished for previous contributions to the company due to the rewards the company gave them for it. A newspaper with a staff of reporters exclusively young is as limited as one full of codgers like me, not that the product matters one bit.

 

Yeah, I thought about that one a lot after I got the boot. I was the highest-paid non-columnist on staff and I had just gotten a pretty big raise, that I didn't ask for, but the Executive Editor said, "We want to make sure you don't get tempted to go anywhere else..." and six months later I'm done...

If you think about it too much, it's a total mindfuck.

 

It's a business model that relies on people to "do it because they love it/it's in their blood," so publishers can avoid having to pay for quality.

 

It's also not specific to newspapers or media. In whatever business your compensation surpasses your perceived value, you're going to be in the red zone for the ax. This is one of those businesses -- unlike a sales job -- where there's no tangible evidence of your worth. If you provide great coverage or just OK coverage, what's the difference to the bosses and who in the executive suite much cares? I guess nowadays clicks can be counted, but a lot of those can be attributed to the duty rather than the person performing it.

Pucin is talented and should be fine, and probably was fortunate to have lasted this long. It's sad this is hitting her so hard, because the scrutiny and wisdom she brings to her work would have served her well if she'd been paying attention to everything going on at the LA Times and Tribune Co. She might have gotten in front of this divorce a while ago. This is a classic "Why me? Why not me?" situation.

 

I am "old" and I was tired. So when the buyout came (Thank you, Jesus), it wasn't a hard decision. Eight weeks later, it feels as if I lost a limb. I'm probably better off than most, but as I read her email, the feelings only intensified. Yep, the new normal