With only five days to go before the McClatchy newspaper corporation flips the keys to its’ once flagship property, the Star Tribune, to the Avista immediate-return-on-investment corporation, a terrible virus has infected the newspaper’s connections to the internet. Something wormed into the Strib system Wednesday cutting off access to the net, and by Thursday it still hadn’t been completely knocked back. “Its still running really slow, kind of like being connected to AOL,” said one Stribber.
The thought of some nasty cyber toxin prowling the tubes of the Stribs’ internets goosed the already high levels of profane gallows humor affecting the building. (The imagery of The Strib infected with an STD, as a result of a quick, tawdry union of McClatchy and Avista was amusing.) As noted here several times earlier, since no one has a clue what Avista is really all about, every professional skeptic in the place presumes the worst. And with good reason. There simply is no available precedent that encourages high hopes in the current situation. Private equity companies typically want to mine their downward-trending old media companies for profits, usually by rigorous cost-cutting … I mean, “localizing”.
Comments over the weekend by new top editor, Nancy Barnes, essentially confirming the prevailing view that Avista is a strip-and-flip squad intent on getting acceptable profits out of the Star Tribune in “three to six years”, wasn’t anyone’s idea of a comforting bedside manner.
Point being that next week will be a big one in the lives of dozens of Strib employees, who have seven days, until March 12, to decide to take the contractual voluntary buy-out, or hang on and hope they aren’t reassigned to covering feral cats in Woodbury stories. (A rumor working the Strib today was that Avista was planning to summarily whack all merit pay, sending veteran employees back to union scale salaries they haven’t seen in decades. By the end of the day consensus was that there was language in the current contract prohibiting such an action, or at least most of it.)
One other move of interest, the Star Tribune’s D.C.-based reporters, Rob Hotakainen and Kevin Diaz, were formally reassigned away from the Star Tribune, Hotakainen to the Kansas City Star and Diaz to McClatchy papers serving Alaska and Idaho. Both will remain in D.C. Among a host of mysteries is whether Avista plans to build its’ own D.C. bureau. The presumption is they won’t.
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