Nothing beats newspapers for starting charcoal.
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.
I heard that overall newspaper circulation, for printed newspapers, has declined about 35% since the year 2000.
Internet subscriptions to papers has not come anywhere near making up for the loss of newspaper sales of the actual printed paper.
Part of this is generational, in that, relatively few young people read an actual printed newspaper, or would buy an actual printed newspaper.
Newspapers as we know them may not be here in 20 years. I’ve heard some papers are beefing up online presence and will plan to be online only in the future.
Simply put in Dr. Raoul’s maxim....
Bias = Layoffs
Academics in the journalism field are already starting to murmur and write about the need for PUBLIC SUBSIDIES for newspapers.
Since they are an “indispensable public resource” and all.
Be on the lookout for that.
The Plain Dealer did similarly with reference to the city of Cleveland and then built that facility along I-480. That hypocrisy was not lost on people.
“On the bright side, they could learn to code.”
Oh yeah, right, like these stupid union democrat handjobs are going to learn HTML, javascript, java, C++, Swift etc.
All urban newspapers have done the same thing. Their reporters are urban snobs, recognizing the existence of the suburbs only at election time and in local sports coverage. As you say, At 5:00, the city empties except for the gangs, including the reporters who live in the burbs. Downtown has restaurants and loft apartments, but no grocery stores. There is no community and yet the press can only talk about the latest brain fart from the Mayor. Newspapers are dead. Unfortunately, Facebook and Twitter aren’t the replacement.
It’s not just liberal publications. Salem media just laid off staff and is trading near it’s 52 week low. Rush and Sean syndicator is just now emerging from bankruptcy. Content doesn’t seem to be the only issue.
“I heard that overall newspaper circulation, for printed newspapers, has declined about 35% since the year 2000.”
That’s not enough...I want more.
Well stated. I used to LOVE to sit down on Sunday morning with the two hundred page local fish wrap and read for an hour and a half. But those Commie b@st@rds pushed taxes and gun control at every available opportunity, even local interest articles. Eff ‘em. It is indeed unfortunate that they have not yet failed.
“On the bright side, they could learn to code.”
Are you sure about that? I thought you had to have an IQ well north of the 80 that most of these so called “journalists” have in order to code.
Nothing beats newspapers for starting charcoal.
“Academics in the journalism field are already starting to murmur and write about the need for PUBLIC SUBSIDIES for newspapers.”
Of course they are. It’s the nature of the socialist to not correct their course of action, but to seek public funding for their follies.
That dog won’t hunt. Kids see papers as useless, for different reasons than I do, but the result is the same.
As another poster wrote, this death is a suicide.
You know you're in a terrible business when fewer and fewer people are even willing to read or watch your bullsh!t at no cost.
I want 100 percent.
“continuing decline in advertising revenue that has battered virtually all mass media, including television, radio and digital-first news organizations such as cleveland.com”
VIRTUALLY all, but not ALL all, because (except for TV) the hundreds of billions that used to go to the dying lying leftist fake stream enemedia have now almost all shifted to non-media digital platforms like google and bing ...
““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.””
uh, yeah, right ... we’re supposed to believe that even though they just laid-off 1/3 of their news-gathering staff ... unless “deeper coverage of key topics” really means publishing even MORE anti-Trump garbage from the wire services ...
Thanks. It’s funny you mention cost because MOST news sites have implemented the cheapest, laziest paywall technology - which reflects their cheap/lazy mindset but also their arrogance.
Using browser extensions that block JavaScript, manage/delete cookies and/or block ads, most paywalls are easily defeated and/or the silly ‘free article limit’ and incessant popups moaning about adblocking or subscribing can be wrangled. It’s not uncommon to see the adblock counter tick over 60+ ads (and trackers, beacons, etc.) on a single page!
For better or worse, some paywalls actually work, notably the Wall Street Journal which wages a constant war against Google backdoor access, Facebook access, URL spoofing, etc. It’s fairly airtight...they’ve even started blocking Outline.com.
Not really
Yes really.
The ads pay for the newspapers. Subscriptions never covered the cost of operation. So you are buying the news papers for the ads, good. But then you could just pick up the PENNYSAVERS (a cheap paper filled with nothing but ads).
I would say you are in the minority, and may very well be the last gasp of newspapers as we have known them.
In 1998, THE CLONING OF THE AMERICAN MAIN by B.K.Eakman was published. Even back then, it was apparent that education was being re-directed to following procedures without thought or value judgement. Is following a process learning how to think independently? I personally don't think so. What we see today is people who aren't just taught how to do things, they're taught how to react and how to feel.
“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.”
100% correct, but i’ll add that not only did newspapers become crusaders for the left, but they simultaneously dropped the reporting of actual news, the very thing that WAS bringing in the eyeballs to see the ads ... actual news gathering is expensive, pulling anti-trump crap from the wire services not so much, so virtually eliminating expensive local news gathering is part of their death spiral ...
and all of the above couldn’t have happened to a better bunch ... oh, and remember, every time a “reporter” is fired from a lefty outfit, an angel gets its wings ...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.