Posted on 06/21/2011 1:53:26 PM PDT by Zakeet
The nation's largest newspaper publisher is laying off another 700 employees to cope with an unrelenting advertising slump.
Gannett, the owner of USA Today and more than 80 other daily U.S. newspapers, hoped to complete the cuts Tuesday. The layoffs are occurring at most Gannett newspapers but not at USA Today.
The payroll reductions represent 2 percent of Gannett's 32,600 employees. The division targeted in the cutbacks employs 22,400 people at newspapers that include The Indianapolis Star and The Arizona Republic.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
CodeToad wrote: “Ad slump? Hell, newpapers are nothing BUT ads and liberals opeds. There is no substance to them anymore.”
Both of you have pointed to key underlying problems of the news media.
USA Today has been a terrible influence on newspapers. Instead of trying to provide content and details that people can't get in a 30-second TV or radio story, the USA Today model says people won't read anything detailed, so stories should be only 6 to 8 inches long.
So why pay to buy a newspaper when you can get the news faster and for free from TV or radio?
Secondly, the entry-level wages for reporters and other newspaper staff are at a very low level because there are far more people graduating and/or applying for jobs than the number of jobs available, and jobs continue to be cut.
It probably does make good short-term financial sense to lay experienced people off and hire inexperienced people at lower wages. It may work for a while but that's no recipe for success.
The ATMs strike again!
I know a guy with a journalism degree and experience writing for a large paper. He said $10/hour is good money in that industry. He now paints houses.
I know a guy with a journalism degree and experience writing for a large paper. He said $10/hour is good money in that industry. He now paints houses.
Now they have to pay for their propaganda.
If he's talking rural America, earning $20,800 per year (40 hour weeks at $10 per hour for one year) is good money for a **LOT** of jobs. Until the last minimum wage hike when a number of jobs had to have pay hikes to stay competitive with McDonald's and other unskilled jobs paying the new minimum wage, many reporters I've known in rural America made quite a bit less than $10 per hour — but then again, so did most local police officers, most paid firefighters, and (if calculated on an hourly basis) lots of small business owners.
For many, many years journalism has paid close to the bottom of the scale for jobs where college degrees are standard. That's at least partly because smaller newspapers routinely hire people with little or no formal education in the field who, once they get promoted, may end up being in management of newspapers where they believe training somebody with no degree for a couple of years is better than paying a higher wage to somebody with a degree who has to pay back student loans.
I can't dispute the benefits of hands-on training versus a college degree but it has had a definite effect on the pay scale for entry-level employees, and the effect of low entry-level pay ratchets its way up through the promotion pyramid.
Another problem is that until local news stops being a monopoly environment and people have actual competition for their skills, there really is no solution to payscales because a lot of people who like a community will stay in a low-paying job if they know the only way to get higher pay is to move.
Personally I don't care. I didn't get into journalism to make a lot of money, but I see the problems. Socialism never has worked, and the American local news media, in many ways, operate in a very anticompetitive environment.
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