The bargaining table

Rupert sells the Post for a quarter. The company is more interested in a circulation battle in which it's trying to run the NYDN of business. By the way, the NY Post also sucked in 1999 and 1989.

And of course one newspaper's performance is relevant to other publications within a chain. They're not run as stand-alone entities. Murdoch's enterprises, including huge Internet investments, are run with a top-down strategy. If that strategy calls for the Post to be a loss leader (for whatever purposes), that's OK with me. But please don't cite the NY Post as an example of our financially ailing industry and the need for cutbacks.

And how come nobody else got the message about the boom years of growth, hiring and salary increases during the 1990s?

 

I guess "nobody else" worked at my paper . . . which, despite its mid-major status (only the nation's 37th largest in terms of circulation) was still . . .

A place that had a sports department of almost 50 people.
A place that went to Russia to cover the Goodwill Games.
A place that once had a Sunday section of 180 columns (the equivalent of 30 open broadsheet pages) and whose daily editorial space was rivaled only by The Dallas Morning News.
A place that regularly sent two people to the Olympics.
A place that sent someone to cover the America's Cup . . . in bleeping Australia.
A place that once had a 2:15 a.m. deadline for its main run.
A place where the sports editor could go $10,000 over the travel budget for a month and there by zero repercussions.
A place that saw its stock split every five years and doled out 21 percent of employees' salaries to each person's ESOP in one particularly fruitful year.

 

I don't doubt your personal experience.

There were exceptions like the LA Times-Mirror chain, which was tremendously generous with its employees during that time period but unfortunately looked upon as a bloated takeover target in publishing circles. Hello Tribune Co., party over.

Regardless or where you worked, most newspaper chains were already well into profit-increasing, shareholder appeasement mode by the late '80s.

 

My rag (I mean paper) sent 20 people to the SLC games a few years back...

Now the pro beat writers are being asked which road trips we can skip...

 

Problem is, newspapers have ALWAYS cried poverty, even when they were making the high profit margins. They would cry poverty when they would pay journalists measly salaries, cutting newshole and travel budgets. Rather than invest some of their profits back into the business for future growth and to guard against future problems, they just kept taking their big profits and demanding more.

I agree that the money losses are becoming a serious problem. The thing is, it's hard to be sympathetic when newspapers squandered their chances for long-term growth, instead settling for the short-term gain.

 

Pratically every newspaper invested millions in pagination systems and/or new presses and/or upgraded computer systems a decade ago. If that's not investing profits back into the business for future growth, then somebody better explain to me what the concept means. And was anyone shedding any tears for all the composing room people laid off in the late-90s?

Wall Street gave them little choice. In hindsight, all newspapers should have gone private in 1999. But had my paper concentrated on "long-term growth" in the mid-90s . . . at the expense of its stock price and ESOP disbursements . . . there would have been no guarantee of success, and we would have been screaming because of a flat stock price during the booming 90s and retirement accounts that showed little growth.