I gotta tell ya, it is a real, “Where to begin?” situation following the no-ups and all-downs of the Star Tribune lately.
Indecision over where to begin may explain why what follows is even more scatter-shot and incoherent than usual.
1. As expected, Guild employees of the Star Tribune voted overwhelmingly yesterday to accept the paper’s terms for a buy-out offer that commences this Friday and closes at 5 p.m. June 1. (I was in error when I said yesterday that the “window” would open today. My apologies.) The company then has until the end of business on June 8 to post a list of those who are walking away.
2. A supreme irony of this latest round of “right-sizing” is the trashing or marginalizing of significant elements of the paper’s very expensive, (over seven figures) and absurdly protracted “redesign” which it unveiled in October in 2005. Don’t get me going on “re-designs”.
The joke at the Pioneer Press when I was there was that preparing for and working on the next re-design was every management regime’s best excuse for avoiding dealing with garden variety problems like under-performing beats, redirecting assets to better effect, yadda yadda. The standard response to any suggestion/complaint was, “We can’t get to that until we finish the re-design.” Then, once it was finished, the next one began.
But I think it is safe to say now, after 17 months, that the Strib’s 2005 re-design added little if any value to the paper. Circulation has dropped steadily if not precipitously in its aftermath. I know my first reaction to seeing it was a shrug. “All that time and money for this?” It was pretty much one, “Big whoop”.
But the Strib’s features section played a prominent role in the grand design. Yes, it came with the usual mantra of “shorter, shorter, shorter”. (Modern, design-driven managers are convinced all readers are averse to “long” stories, i.e. 20 inches or more. But they see the supposedly younger and more female audience for features sections being even more impatient and having almost no tolerance for words. Any picture and any list trumps every “wordy” story.) But under the re-design the Strib’s feature section was key to that other mantra, the preeminent, “local, local, local” babble.
(I don’t know which image is more appropriate to newspaper managers chanting, “local, local, local”, a sprawling turkey farm or a radical, head-bobbing madrassa.)
Anyway, the excising of what were once key locally produced components of the Strib’s Arts and Entertainment; TV, classical music, architecture, some percentage of theater, Randy Salas’s eminently readable “Web Search” and DVD columns, along with talk of folding in, cutting or “right-sizing” the whole jumble of “Scene”, “To Go” and all those other barely identifiable sub-sections effectively confirms suspicions that the vaunted re-design has proven a non-asset, at best.
For the record, the Strib is planning to continue TV coverage via syndication, classical music looks likely to move to some kind of free-lance status, architecture will get added atop a visual arts beat and while both theater critics, Graydon Royce and Rohan Preston will stay on, Royce will devote some yet-to-be-determined percentage of his time to editing.
The very ironic overall effect: However it is cut, the new post re-design Strib will be less “local” than previously.
3. A recurring theme from meetings Stribbers are having with bosses Nancy Barnes and Scott Gillespie is the two editors telling reporters they are making tough cuts in features because they simply have a “hard news” orientation. (Several staffers have expressed notes of sympathy for the two, quoting Barnes and Gillespie subtly pleading for understanding, saying, “We have bosses, too.”)
To be fair, Barnes and Gillespie are only following a tread-worn strategy first laid out by publisher Par Ridder’s father, Tony, across the entire Knight-Ridder empire through the 1990s. It was a re-organization plan that when matched with Ridder’s deal with Wall St. devils seriously undermined the quality of every Knight Ridder newspaper and eventually led to the entire chain’s abrupt sell-off. (I’m broad-stroking there. But the Tony Ridder survival strategy is an object lesson in how NOT to enhance the value of your product.)
There’s no point belaboring my opinion that regular, sustained coverage of suburban community minutiae is anything but, “hard news”, or that the Strib is open to serious criticism over how “hard” it has been on several very high profile, relevant stories in recent years. My point is only to suggest that Barnes and Gillespie might want to dial back the “hard news” talking point if they want to maintain credibility with their staff.
Based on my conversations with Stribbers there isn’t a person in the newsroom who believes these latest cuts (or the buy-outs before them) have anything whatsoever to do with improving the paper’s production of news, “hard” or otherwise. More to the point, if there is anyone in the newsroom who thinks Ridder and Avista are committed to producing a better, healthier, more relevant product, those people have no business or future in journalism.
Finally, 4. I have the utmost respect for reporters who take on Guild steward jobs. I was far too lazy and misanthropic to volunteer for anything of the sort. In the current situation at the Strib, Guild stewards are like exhausted, under-equipped smoke-jumpers mashing down forest fires with shovels. Forget about getting your day job done. It’s everything you can do to answer dozens of frantic, anxious questions from colleagues in between attending and holding meetings.
The concern here is that the Strib Guild not be played like the pre-Rahm Emanuel Democrats, who got flattened in every big game by ruthless operators focused solely on the bottom line. The Guild really ought to reach out beyond its usual legal representation/advisors to some aggressive local labor law firm for advice on a strategy that considers how best to play several key elements in the current situation, not the least of which is the impatience of Avista Capital Partners with a worse-than-expected financial performance of the Star Tribune and an expensive and an embarrassing civil law suit thrown at their publisher, Par Ridder.
Like everyone else in the world the Guild needs leverage, and there may be some to be had in toying with Avista’s impatience and their fear of discovery, if some kind of legal action can be mounted.
Guilds have been accused of playing easy on personnel disputes relative to their effect on the next contract negotiation. But in the current situation it would seem prudent to apply a worst case scenario mindset to that next (2008) contract and assume Avista will be even more insistent on guaranteeing return on investor dollar via truly draconian cuts in employee compensation and staffing levels.
Ten years ago laid-off newspaper people had some hope of sliding into another paper in another town. That ain’t happenin’ no more. At the risk of sounding hysterical, now is good time to approach all events leading to next year as though they were part of an end-game for an industry as we once knew it.
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