MORE CUTS AT THE PLAIN DEALER

Submitted by Roldo on Mon, 03/23/2009 - 19:39.

 How far away can the end be?

 
Plain Dealer publisher Terry Egger announced pay cuts and 10-day furloughs for non-union employees with 8 to 10 percent pay cuts, according to a Plain Dealer story for tomorrow’s paper. See here:
Non-union employees will see their first $50,000 of pay cut by 8 percent and above that amount by 10 percent. (Guess unions still do mean something.)
Meanwhile, it was announced today that another Newhouse newspaper, the Ann Arbor News, in business since 1935, will end its print publishing and go to a web site. The Newhouse family has owned the Plain Dealer since 1967.
 
Recently, a Time magazine web story theorized that the Plain Dealer was one of 10 newspapers in the nation that would end its print edition and go out of business or become a website only news publication.
 
Egger brushed off the prediction as untrue. The author of Time website article was Douglas McIntyre. Some tried to discount his prediction as just something done by a blogger.
 
McIntyre has a background, however, not easily dismissed. A magnum cum laude graduate of Harvard University, he has a fairly substantial background, including as the first president of Switchboard.com, which was the 10th most visited website in the world at one time and a member of the board of directors of TheStreet.com and Edgar Online.
He was also editor-in-chief and Publisher of Financial World Magazine. His background can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-a-mcintyre
 
The PD discounted what he had to say about the PD by noting that he hadn’t called Egger or contacted the Plain Dealer for his article. However, his posting noted that he had spoken to people at Advance Publications, the Newhouse news business.
 
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Ann Arbor folds

Submitted by lmcshane on Tue, 03/24/2009 - 04:08.

 

Ann Arbor News folds...same publisher.

 

PD

Submitted by PoorRichard2 on Tue, 03/24/2009 - 06:04.

I am shocked that pd management would "mislead" it's readers and employees.

PD made him sound like a crackpot

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Thu, 03/26/2009 - 11:09.

Thanks for posting that - I sort of took the PDs word that McIntyre was not conducting a good and impartial analysis... he sounds well qualified to consult on these matters to me.

I'm curious, of the newspapers going to online only, do any of them have their own print plants, like the PD (especially such a new and expensive one)... I would expect the first papers to go would be the ones where they contract out printing to another company, as eliminating that "contract" service is not such a disruption as shutting down and fireselling huge facilities and firing 100s of press operators, etc...

Disrupt IT