Posted on 04/02/2019 7:38:33 AM PDT by relictele
CLEVELAND, Ohio – The Plain Dealer on Monday laid off 14 newsroom employees as part of a staff reduction first announced in December. The 14, most of them reporters and all members of Local 1 of the News Guild of the Communication Workers of America, account for about a third of the unionized news-gathering staff.
One additional journalist will depart later this month. The company had earlier announced plans to eliminate 29 other jobs in May by shifting its page-production work to a centralized outside system. Three of those production staffers will move to the newsroom, however, reducing the net loss of jobs there to 12.
"Today, we share a sense of loss,” Plain Dealer President and Editor George Rodrigue said in a statement. “The essence of any layoff is that good people lose their jobs. We regret that, and we wish our colleagues well.
“In the near future, we will be refocusing our efforts to invest in deeper coverage of key topics that are of high value to our community. We will be sharing more about those plans in the coming weeks.”
Said Ginger Christ, Plain Dealer News Guild unit chair: “Today was an incredibly stressful day. We lost talented colleagues and the community lost important voices. The damage isn’t just the loss of jobs. It’s the loss of information vital to the life of the city.”
Rodrigue blamed the cuts on the continuing decline in advertising revenue that has battered virtually all mass media, including television, radio and digital-first news organizations such as cleveland.com. A Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor statistics from 2008 to 2017 found overall newsroom employment dropped nationally by 23 percent and in newspaper newsrooms employment dropped by 45 percent. More than 2,400 media jobs have been eliminated so far this year, according to Business Insider.
The Guild said in a statement that The Plain Dealer had a unionized staff of 340 journalists two decades ago. That soon will be reduced to 33. "Many of our members volunteered for layoffs to save the job of another, which speaks volumes about the respect those in our union have for each other,” Christ said. “We find some relief that editor George Rodrigue allowed members to volunteer for this layoff.”
The Guild unit, meanwhile, voted over the weekend to extend its contract with The Plain Dealer through Feb. 28, 2021. The Guild said the agreement “continues protections for overtime, vacation and severance pay" and eliminates unpaid furlough days that were accepted as part of a pay reduction in 2009. The agreement provides the option for laid-off employees to extend health care benefits.
As part of the agreement, the Guild gave up its grievance over The Plain Dealer’s plan to outsource production jobs to a subsidiary of Advance Publications, the paper’s parent company.
1) Whenever layoffs at media outlets occur, most people regardless of politics lament the loss of frontline jobs. But where is the line drawn on the organizational chart between those concerned mostly with propaganda and manipulation and those concerned with stories and deadlines? If a cub reporter uses terms like 'critics say,' 'experts say,' and the rest of the big book of cliches do we blame the editor, the VP or do we blame the reporter himself?
2) Unions are a hopeless parasitic anachronism. Not only have they failed utterly to protect jobs, salaries, benefits, etc., they have financially gutted their hosts.
3) Spare me the crocodile tears from president/editors, presidents, editors and anyone else talking about 'loss.'
4) Spare me also the 'the community lost important voices' rubbish. If the voices were important to the community, then the community would have paid to hear them. QED.
5) #4 ties in with the main point surrounding media shrinkage/consolidation: why do they ALWAYS point the finger of blame elsewhere - mostly at the readership? If McDonald's introduces a sandwich nobody really likes and about which many customers openly complain, does McDonald's tell the customers they are fools? Does McDonald's tell them not only is the sandwich staying on the menu, a more popular sandwich is being taken off the menu and oh, by the way, you'll also get a smaller order of fries costing more money? The media mindset of punishing dissent by serving up more of the same is Fascism 101. Yet columnists everywhere respond to job losses down the hall with a nauseatingly disingenuous expressions of wonder and equally disingenuous statements of how fantastic newspapers are, particularly the columnists themselves, and that anyone criticizing their faults: bias, a reliance on wire copy, a reliance on old news, a bizarre love of government in all its forms, an insistence on importing leftist coastal values to 90% of the nation that isn't leftist or coastal.
6) The Columbus Dispatch and the Cincinnati Enquirer were longtime relatively conservative papers, reflecting local values. The PD was always a bit Bolshevik due to the strength of unions and the prevalence of industry in NE Ohio. The Dispatch and especially the Enquirer dashed themselves to pieces on leftist rocks. The PD was a longtime employer of unreconstructed Marxist the late Tom Brazaitis - whose widow is Eleanor Clift no less. It also carried columns from the terminally smug lefty dilettante Connie Schultz - married to Sherrod Brown no less.
7) Nowhere is the mass psychosis of liberalism more evident than in the media. Virtue signaling and a lust for power (by squandering 1st Amendment protections and becoming mouthpieces for government) literally prevent them from taking any steps to survive.
On the bright side, they could learn to code.
“Learn to code.”
L
Seven seconds.
L
Another good start for our side.
and in the case of #2 the Teacher’s Union destroys the future by produces an inferior product called kids
You’re correct about the Plain Dealer. It’s unreadable with its doctrine. (It goes beyond bias). It’s unreadable. Besides that, it’s stopped being a window into the history, culture and activities of very diverse and unique greater Cleveland. Besides that, their puzzles are awful!
The Ministry of Propaganda shrinks.
The Plain Dealer Endorses Hillary Clinton For President
Hillary Clinton - demonstrably, the better choice for president: by Thomas Suddes, Oct 9, 2016
“Thomas Suddes writes that Clinton’s in-depth knowledge of the nation’s security challenges and grasp of economic realities compared to Donald Trump’s narrow skill set make her the clear choice for president.
You don’t have to like Hillary Clinton or for that matter to loathe Donald Trump to consider Clinton the better presidential prospect. She is. Demonstrably.”
Thomas Suddes is an editorial writer and member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
Trump curse is working....
HAHA HAHA HAHA HAHA HAHA HAHA
Newspapers are not in the “news” business, they are in the advertising business. News is the content that bring the eyeballs to their ads.
Newspapers as they exist today are failing because they have decided to become crusaders and have chosen sides in our cultural war. They have in effect told half their potential readers we do not care about you or what you think so go away. And go away they have.
RIP newspaper, no one killed them, they committed suicide.
Not a word about the Readers, who may be fewer than the original news staff. I suspect that the Plain Dealer has behaving like most newspaper over the past 20 years. Their priorities was their union, fellow workers, and their political agenda. Once the readers and subscribers figured that out, they left. Our own Kansas City Star added another priority, they built a brand new expensive building so that they could become irrelevant in style. Stupid is what Stupid does.
Nice. Journalism schools are essentially leftist domains. The public domains inhabited by these graduates of the past 50-years are taught that Unions, the DNC and socialism are the three tiers of rule. They are taught to hate republicans, conservatives, people who believe in God, and those want to raise and home school their own kids. The government has failed. Part of Trump’s strategy to revamp schools at the college level is to put the schools financial skin in the game for school loans, coupled with the EO of free speech, the president is off to a good start.
I was in the newspaper business for 25 years as reporter and editor, and I can tell you that I never used shoddy attributions like “experts say.”
And I strongly discouraged any young reporters I coached from doing the same.
Once in a while I’m tempted by an article that appears to relate or explore a historical occurrence eg the Wright Brothers or Apollo 11.
But the writers are hopelessly PC. They simply cannot write simple exposition without inserting opinion, usually of the sexism, homophobia, climate change variety.
This, in turn, prompts another question: if schools are so effective at PC conditioning (read: brainwashing) why can’t they apply at least a fraction of that apparently powerful ability to delivering lasting empirical knowledge?
Top editors are the ones with the most connections... they're traditionally liberal and their sources are liberal. When downsizing comes, they're kept. Institutional knowledge etc... That means in the short run connected liberal editors are most important - in the long run their liberal bias shuts down the whole operation. Excellent analysis relictele
The Dayton Daily News, for one, was a Midwest Pravda.
Actually, that’s a cliche unto itself for which I apologize.
What do we call ‘newspapers’ that print lots of words but refuse to print actual news ie facts? I’m speaking mostly of papers that purport to cover their home cities - with some scraps thrown to suburbs where the actual readership/advertising demographic resides - but refuse or actively avoid printing the unblinking details about crime and criminals? Most US inner cities are war zones abandoned after 5 pm or abandoned altogether yet their problems have been routinely ignored for decades - mostly by the very people claiming to be members of the same ‘community.’
Dayton Daily News, by the way, was all for making a brave noise about businesses and residents coming/staying within the city limits...until they built a production facility 20 mi south of those limits. Hypocrites will out.
We had two newspapers in Pittsburgh at one time too.
One of them was killed off by unions, who conducted a lengthy strike at a very inopportune time.
I laugh at the layoffs. hahahahaha. May the “news” collapse into nothingness.
“Newspapers are not in the “news” business, they are in the advertising business. News is the content that bring the eyeballs to their ads.”
Not really. It’s actually the advertisements that give the newspapers any value at all. We get the weekend paper, Fri-Sun, exclusively for the ads. The paper is so repulsive, so biased, that I read the Sunday comics, and a little bit of the sports page. Mrs. Brownsfan is the one who wants the ads.
The paper recently expanded “weekend” subscriptions to Fri-Mon, and then kicked the price up, as if we wouldn’t notice what they’re doing.
Every single time I get bored and venture into the paper to look at the “news” or the editorial page, it raises my blood pressure. Such epic bias and stupidity.
It has come to the point where the local once a week free paper has much more value than the daily newspaper.
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