reality hits Decatur Daily, TimesDaily in Alabama

... while gas prices, food prices, college tuition, healthcare premiums, and just about anything else you can think of continue to get more expensive.

 

Been there, doing that -- I know this is the third rail here when someone dares to express anything but sympathy for the newsmartyrs and contempt for the evil bosses. But it sounds like in the last five years there haven't really been pay cuts or layoffs (RB mentioned some job losses after NYT Co. bought them but it doesn't sound like those were all too significant), and now it seems they're being hit with a small pay cut and management furlough weeks, about three years after most papers made it a fact of life that employees would take big pay cuts and furlough weeks for everybody AND layoffs.

If at this point someone is that close to the line that 6 percent is going to make or break them, then they haven't been paying attention to what has been going on in the business or the world in the last five years. We've discussed it on other threads; there are other jobs, and if you're that committed to staying in the newspaper business you're just going to have to accept these cutbacks as a fact of life.

 

LTL, maybe you can afford a 6-percent salary cut. If that's the case, more power to you. Most of the folks i know at those papers aren't exactly flush in cash. In case you weren't aware, small newspapers don't exactly pay their employees a ton of money, so yeah, i think a lot of them might be on a financial ledge.

 

There is no law that anyone has to work at a newspaper. The law of supply and demand isn't ever going to be on your side if you do.

 

The guy that gets laid off, furloughed, or cut in salary doesn't give two shits about macroeconomics of the journalism industry relative to the broader economy; he just wants a sympathetic ear to listen to him while he absorbs the blow. Most people who encounter bad things figure out how to manage, and I'm sure these guys will. But in the meantime what better place for them to get some empathy from colleagues?

 

Economy is slowly recovering.

Layoffs and pay cuts keep happening.

And we're supposed to be OK with that?

Sorry. Don't see the logic.

 

Tennis balls still $2 a can . . . same as 30 years ago.

Newspaper ad revenue is not recovering. The decline is simply less steep than it was 1-2 years ago, when it basically fell off a cliff.

Every quarter our publisher shows us the numbers, and it's a good day when they look like this:

Revenues -4%,
Expenses -5%
Operating cash flow +1%

A while back they looked like this:

Revenues -20%
Expenses -8%
Operating cash flow -12%


But the revenues are always going to be less than they were the previous year. Unless the economy turns 1990sesque and newspapers figure out how to make more than $1.98 off an online ad.

 

Nobody seriously thought the problems with newspapers were directly related to the short-term problems in the economy.

 

Well, losing a $1 million Circuit City contract and things of that nature sure didn't help. But no, the economy only accelerated a decline that had already started many months before.

 

I can see both sides: LongTimeListener is pointing out that most people aren't special, and by extension, most layoffs and pay cuts aren't special, either. That's an important point to serve as a background in this discussion. It's like what I say when coworkers gripe about how overworked they are: "You work in newspapers; everyone in this industry is overworked, as is true for many other industries in these times."

But Point of Order is correct because this board can and should act as a sounding board for frustrations, even if, at times, those frustrations are short-sighted. There's an attitude of one-upmanship that some posters have (not referring to LongTimeListener), where the minute one person posts a horror story about preps, they have to call that person out for whining about nothing and tell something that, in their eyes, is worse. But we should use this board to offer support, whether that means telling our own stories without attempting to sound holier-than-thou or providing solutions because we've gone through the situation in the past.

 

Also, some have tried to leave the biz and can't get a job. It isn't as easy as saying if you're still in journalism, you get what you deserve. Some people won't hire the resume of a journo, especially a seasoned one.

 

Am told Decatur lost two: A news reporter who had been there 15 years and a news librarian who had been there more than 10.
Maybe LTL can explain to them about their insignificance....