Simmons and Klosterman on death of newspapers ...

I didn't say it would save newspapers.

But I'm looking at this business now, and trying to imagine what it'll look like when or if I'm ever fully in it. And to cast off good writing, altogether, as a subject of importance, made you sound like the management people who so coldly dismissed their staffs -- including award winners -- and made the survivors go on without proper copy editing, and diversify into podcasting, blogging and twittering.

Would more attention to writing have changed the situation today even one bit? Probably not. There were larger, business-related decisions made, many of them by businesspeople who didn't care about whether the stories and photos were any good.

If you'd said Simmons and Klosterman were wasting their time, griding axes by talking about this, which means very little in the larger scheme of newspapers' decline, and left it at that, I wouldn't have spoken up. But you said, flatly, that the quality of writing doesn't matter at all for whether a newspaper thrives or expires.

You know more about this business than me, and maybe you're right. But I hope not.

 

Writing isn't the primary skill of a reporter.

 

I would a large portion of my obscene salary to get everyone in the industry to understand that.

 

Implied verbs are just really, really advanced writing.

 

Why why why do you always post about things you don't know about? First of all, I've been in a union since 1990 and never once during that time did we get a 3% raise.

The biggest raise we've ever gotten was 2% I think and in recent years, there have been raises of 1%, 1/2% and then 0% and now wage freezes. So your math doesn't quite work.

And if you think that "HIGH" salaries is the reason newspapers are going under, you really need to do some reading. Unions and high salaries have almost nothing to do with why newspapers are going under. See Internet, 1996, and craigslist, 2000, if you need more information about why we're going under, city by city.

And if you think $70,000 is a high salary in cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Miami or Los Angeles, you haven't done a lot of urban living.

Also, I really don't understand your beef with unions. Many of the people in unions are the hardest-working people in the newsroom. It's been my experience that the holdouts who don't join because, you know, it's "not in their belief system" or some such bull, are the slackers. But they're happy to take the protection and the raises (such as they are) while refusing to pay their dues. And when they get laid off, I'm quite sure they'll be happy to take their union-negotiated severance and health care benefits.

 

Magic, I don't know why you're so mad. A company like Wal-Mart never could have contributed so much to America if it had let those damn unions get in the way.

 

Because Wal-Mart broke the free market system with anti-competitive practices?

 

I'd like to know when it was that you got this 3% raise when you were working somewhere for three months. This has not been the norm among big or small newspapers for at least the last 20 years. I know this because I have been a vice president of a union, been involved in contract negotiations and been involved on a national level.

Also, $70,000 is not an "assload" in Detroit. Housing here is about what it is in Boston. And some expenses, like car insurance, especially if you live in the city limits, are four times what I paid when I lived in another Midwest state.

If you want to believe it was unions and salaries that took down newspapers, I think you'll find that a pretty lonely perch. Most people in newspapers are pretty glad they have a union to count on right now. In fact, we signed two new members last week after they looked around the industry and saw what was happening.

 

Not in this business, but I once got a 35% raise, with nine months of it retroactive. And even though I was in a union at the time, the raise was proposed by management because our pay scale was so out of whack when compared to similar people working in similar institutions.

I'm guessing those days are gone. Oh, and we got increased vacation and personal time, too. And this was about a year after the place paid for me to get myh graduate degree.

 

The key words there are NOT IN THIS BUSINESS. The biggest raise I ever got in this business was 40% when I went from a NON-UNION newspaper to a UNION newspaper. Other than that, the biggest raise I ever got was 10%. I've gotten a few merit raises along the way in addition to the union raises but the only way to make real money in this biz (and those days are probably gone) is to move around a lot and be really, really good at marketing yourself (see Mitch Albom).

 

Now they make you wish you hadn't gotten raises, because your higher salary can put you in the crosshairs of the beancounters' next layoffs. It's getting to the point that merit raises have to be reclassified as "merit bonuses," since they end up being temporary -- ending the day they cause you to get you dumped.

 

Or they just take away your raises by giving you a 9 percent pay cut over the course of a year.