Showing posts tagged “News & Observer”
Fiona Morgan ·
22 Apr 2009, 4:50 PM ·
7 Comments
Maybe someone should invite Howard Weaver out for a nice game of golf. The retired McClatchy executive seems to find it hard to keep his hands off the keyboard, and it’s a rather sensitive time for employees — and former employees — of the newspapers he used to oversee.
After launching a defensive back and forth in the comments thread of Romenesko yesterday with News & Observer reporter Joe Neff, Weaver today raised the topic again on his blog, Etaoin Shrdlu, where he has continued to opine about the newspaper business and McClatchy’s role in innovating it — and, perhaps inadvertently, fed the fire of resentment rising in those who see McClatchy’s poor business decisions as the root cause of The N&O’s recent layoffs.
While today’s post demonstrated sympathy toward those who’ve lost their jobs, Weaver repeated an earlier assertion that The N&O was in bad shape long before McClatchy came along:
I don’t apologize for expressing the facts as I know them. It simply isn’t helpful to build mythologies based on anger and blame that don’t reflect reality. [...] For example, those who argue that McClatchy took over a thriving N&O and greedily ran it into the ground are misinformed, and perpetuating that myth hurts the cause of reconstruction.
Frank Daniels, Jr., whose family sold the newspaper to McClatchy in 1995, tells the Indy that Weaver is the one perpetuating a myth, at least in part.
“As far as we were concerned, we were doing extremely well. Financials had nothing to do with our decision to sell,” Daniels says. “So he’s just mistaken.”
Continue reading »
media layoffs, News & Observer, newspapers
Fiona Morgan ·
22 Apr 2009, 1:50 PM ·
Comment
Click the photo to see the full front page.
It’s been a very sad month for those of us who work in journalism, as we watch dedicated people whose work we admire and whose talents we envy lose their jobs. What makes it all the more sad is that they aren’t just victims of an economic downturn that will eventually turn back around. It’s not at all clear that the jobs they’re leaving will ever come back. Even though we understand the root causes — declining ad revenue, the decoupling of classifieds with newsprint, the crushing debt of corporate owners — we can’t help but wonder at a deeper level why the work we value doesn’t have the value it once did.
That, I imagine, is the doubt that hangs over those left in The News & Observer’s newsroom today, following the departure of another 31 staffers due to layoffs and buyouts that were announced last month.
An anonymous staffer’s mock front page (excerpted above; click the photo for the full page) lists the names of all departing staffers. (Hat tip to Jim Romenesko and NewRaleigh.) They include reporters Joe Miller, Sam Spies and Sabine Vollmer; editors Ned Barnett, Van Denton and Rob Waters; photographer Jason Arthurs; as well as several copy editors and production folks, people whose work was often behind the scenes, but nonetheless essential. There’s no dead wood on that list. Continue reading »
media layoffs, News & Observer
Fiona Morgan ·
16 Mar 2009, 2:53 PM ·
4 Comments
Before we get to the numbers, here’s the most important thing you should know about the News & Observer publishing company:
It’s still making money.
Notwithstanding all the worry and wonder about what sort of business model will pay for journalism in the online age, as of this moment, many print newspapers — including Raleigh’s daily — still make a profit. Just not enough profit to pay the interest on its corporate owner’s $2 billion in debt.
Today, the N&O’s management announced more staggering job cuts, pay cuts, and unpaid furloughs. The cuts will total 11 percent of the work force. They include the equivalent of 27 newsroom positions — which means more than 30 people, if you include the part-timers losing their jobs.
Employees were expecting the cuts, but not until the end of this month, according to a staffer. N&O management had warned staffers that as many as 30 newsroom jobs would be lost but told employees that federal labor laws would require more time to pass following layoffs of approximately 75 delivery drivers earlier this year.
Yet this morning, executives at the McClatchy Company, the Sacramento-based newspaper chain that owns the N&O, told its publisher that the announcement should come today in order to coincide with corporate-wide cuts.
That means laid off N&O employees will have more than another month’s work ahead of them. How’s that for morale?
media journalism, News & Observer
Fiona Morgan ·
23 Feb 2009, 11:39 AM ·
1 Comment
Gary Pearce at Talking About Politics thought my post about Vaden’s departure from The News & Observer was snarky. So did Laura Leslie at Isaac Hunter’s Tavern. Perhaps it came out snarkier than intended.
I really do wish Ted Vaden well. He has more than three decades of experience as a serious and thoughtful journalist, editor and publisher, and he deserves a secure job with a good salary. I don’t begrudge him that. Nor do I begrudge any journalist who finds a better opportunity—how could you not jump from a sinking ship? I do hope Conti will make good on the pledge to make the Department of Transportation more transparent, and hiring Vaden is a step in the right direction.
Am I suspicious of government flacks? You bet I am. The N&O’s own investigations over the past year have only deepened that suspicion. I say that knowing that the way things are going, we may all become flacks one day.
What strikes me about Vaden’s departure is the irony of the contrast: Which of these organizations has a history of failure and corruption, and which one has a track record of ferreting out that failure and corruption?
Now, which one appears to be in danger of going out of business? And which one has the resources to keep someone like Vaden employed?
Let me amplify Pearce’s cry: “Will someone save the N&O from the disastrous reign of the McClatchy chain?”
media News & Observer, newspapers
Fiona Morgan ·
17 Feb 2009, 12:47 PM ·
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After 32 years as a journalist, editor and publisher at The News & Observer, Ted Vaden is leaving for a public relations job at the Department of Transportation.
We wish Vaden well. After all the anxiety over layoffs at the paper, the new opportunity (and $117,000 annual salary) must be irresistible. The work public information officers do can be quite valuable.
But what does it say about the state of journalism that the guy whose job is to “[monitor] N&O coverage for fairness and accuracy and [serve] as a readers’ representative at the paper” will now be in charge of spinning for one of the most egregiously mismanaged and obfuscating agencies of state government?
N&O Publisher Orage Quarles III, to whom Vaden reports, told the Indy he doesn’t yet know if he will hire a replacement. Under pressure due to parent company McClatchy’s falling profits, Quarles recently announced there will be more staff cuts coming.
Continue reading »
media media, News & Observer, newspapers
Fiona Morgan ·
6 Feb 2009, 1:30 PM ·
1 Comment
Employees at The News & Observer started feeling the pain of the financial downturn early on, with layoffs and buyouts that began last spring and have so far amounted to 233 lost jobs.
Today, the paper announced more layoffs are coming, though it’s unclear how many.
“We had hoped that previous cuts would be sufficient to see us through the sharp revenue declines affecting our industry,” N&O publisher Orage Quarles III said in a statement e-mailed to employees this morning.
“Unfortunately, we have seen an unprecedented loss in advertising revenue with many of our retailers and auto dealers either going out of business or leaving the area, and employment advertising dropping to all time lows,” he said. “Instead, we must continue to respond to the deepening financial crisis that is threatening not only our industry but all kinds of businesses in almost every sector of the economy.”
The N&O also has to respond to the more than $2 billion in debt and tanking stock price of its parent company, McClatchy, which risks being de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange.
In a recent conversation, N&O Executive Editor John Drescher told me he’d freed business reporter Jonathan Cox from his regular news duties to work for two months on a project to find alternate streams of revenue for the newspaper. Cox, who has a business degree, came to Drescher with the idea of selling content the company has already created — its bank of photos, for example — to bring in an additional $100,000 in revenue. That’s not much when you consider The News & Observer Publishing Company is a $100 million a year operation. But as Drescher pointed out, $100K is enough to save a couple newsroom jobs. No word yet on the details of that plan.
Finding new streams of revenue seems to fit with McClatchy CEO and Chairman Gary Pruitt’s thinking.
Pruitt recently told investors the company isn’t just sitting idly by, but plans to push for more revenue from the Web.
That could include experimenting with charging readers for some online features, instead of giving it all away. “Our costs of delivery online is lower, so the distinction between ‘print is pay and online is free’ is wrong,” Pruitt was quoted as saying. “We’ll experiment with paid content online. But most experiments show that you lose more online revenue than you gain per subscriber.”
Most major newspapers did away with paid online subscriptions following the lead of the The New York Times which in 2007 abandoned the TimesSelect service that put its columnists and archives behind a pay wall. In a Q&A with readers this week, NYT Editor Bill Keller defended the basic idea behind paid content, saying it was one concept the paper is looking into along with micro-payments (an iTunes for news, as NYT media columnist David Carr recently imagined) and selling content to reading devices like the Kindle. There’s also been a lot of talk lately of creating endowments for newspapers, which would allow them to operate on a nonprofit model.
I doubt anybody’s going to crack the big question of how to pay for journalism between now and the next MNI earnings report. So meanwhile, what does it all mean for the worried and demoralized employees on South McDowell Street?
Continue reading »
media layoffs, News & Observer, newspap
Fiona Morgan ·
11 Nov 2008, 12:39 PM ·
1 Comment
The longtime arts reporter and critic of theater and dance plans to leave the paper after eight years, effective sometime next month. Swift said she plans to continue to freelance for the paper as time and space permits.
Update/correction: Swift said she’s been assured by editors that “there’ll be ample space for theater coverage — to which Roy Dicks and Adam Sobsey will also continue to contribute, probably more than before.”
We’ll miss Swift’s devoted attention to the Triangle’s performing arts, and we wonder how the paper will handle coverage of the American Dance Festival next summer.
arts, media arts, News & Observer
Fiona Morgan ·
26 Sep 2008, 2:21 PM ·
1 Comment
Today’s issue of The News & Observer’s pullout weekend preview section is the last. Beginning next week, its content — movie, music, and TV coverage, as well as Greg Cox’s restaurant reviews — will be folded into a Weekend section.
The farewell What’s Up cover is a collection of 15 covers from the section’s 15 years. (Unfortunately, the cover image does not seem to be available on the newspaper’s web site.) Inside there is a look back at the film, TV and music hits from its inaugural week in 1993, as well as a comparison of dining options from then and now.
There’s also a brief note from the editors of the Weekend and Features sections. “We loved What’s Up, but we think we can love Weekend, too.”
media News & Observer
David Fellerath ·
23 Sep 2008, 2:00 PM ·
Comment
Last year, the N&O ran a much-ballyhooed comics poll that seemed to go on forever, in multiple stages. After all the voting, the paper’s readers boldly ratified a new comics page consisting of Cathy, Family Circus, Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, Beetle Bailey, Sally Forth, Marmaduke and that edgy avatar from the Jazz Age, Blondie.
For some of us, the main focus of the poll was to see how new prospect Mallard Fillmore would fare in reader opinion. Mallard Fillmore is the daily excrement on the comics page, a reliable kick to the liberal groin that gets us into fighting form every morning. This is why it’s practically the only cartoon we read. Continue reading »
media, news Bruce Tinsley, comics, Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau, Mallard Fillmore, News & Observer, Steve Ford, Ted Vaden, Thad Ogburn
Fiona Morgan ·
23 Sep 2008, 11:01 AM ·
Comment
Internal email memos from section editors, obtained by the Indy, confirm the names of more editorial staffers who have decided to take voluntary buyout offers from The News & Observer:
- Danny Hooley, TV and radio writer who writes the blog TV Eye. Hooley got the first interview with Clay Aiken when Aiken was auditioning for “American Idol.” He has been at The N&O for 10 years.
- Marcy Smith, books editor and features copy editor, known for her love of knitting. Smith also wrote a column and blog on crafting called Notions.
- Chuck Small, a features department copy editor who has done much more than edit copy. Among his efforts to engage young readers is a digital program with Newspapers in Education called NandoNext. He has been at the paper since 1993. The memo said Small plans to go to grad school and wants to work as a high school guidance counselor.
- Weta Clark, daily features and Home & Garden editor. She is credited with engaging readers in several ongoing features, including the Turning Point series in the Life, etc. section, which tells the stories of readers making a life change. She has been at the paper since 2003.
- Vicki Lee Parker, a business reporter who covers technology and manufacturing and writes the Savvy Consumer column. She has been at the paper since 2000.
- Molly O’Day, a designer who works in both the Chapel Hill and Raleigh offices. She came to The N&O from The Herald-Sun in 2002. Her editor described her as “the guardian against wire copy in the community paper.”
media News & Observer
