Tennessean buyouts

It's understandable that there were 66 people willing to pull the rip cord. If I'm not mistaken, this was the first time Gannett put buyouts on the table more or less across the country. Employees who were shown the door in past layoffs at various papers were given fair to middling packages, but the workforce reductions were done in bang-bang fashion that did not allow anyone to volunteer.

 

Again the question is asked, what makes journalists different from bloggers? A demonstrated track record and accountability. So what are newspapers doing? Getting rid of people with a demonstrated track record and experience in their respective communities. Genius.

 

Some species eat their young. Newspapers of the 21st century seem hellbent on eating their old. I talked to a friend from my old paper last week. They went through buyouts, and the three guys in the newsroom who talk the offer averaged just short of 35 years in the business.

They're a mid-size metro, and they are now dangerous short of institutional knowledge. They have three news reporters in the mid-to-late 40s are clutch performers. Just about no one else would be worth a damn if a plane went down, a building collapsed or the mayor got caught banging his dog.

 

...or realize its news if former coach Ray Mears died.

 

Ding!

 

How did they play it? Unless Climer and Biddle were on vacation, there should have been enough institutional knowledge.

 

They played it well ... including an orange teaser above the flag on A-1 and a centerpiece by (I think) Climer and Chris Low on the sports front.

But a story made the rounds, and I trust the sourcing on it, that the former S.E. did not understand the significance of Mears' death himself and that it had to be explained to him. Whether that was before or after the main budget meeting or whatever, I do not know ... but it was widely regarded, as Fred Flintstone once said, as the camel that broke his straw back.