PD REPORTERS AWAIT EGGER AX AS 50 TO GO

Submitted by Roldo on Wed, 11/26/2008 - 14:23.

“There’s bad blood in the city room” says a veteran Plain Dealer reporter as the PD editorial staff awaits more employee cutbacks.

No wonder, the ranks soon will be much thinner. Many are looking over their shoulders, not knowing which will soon not be employed by the newspaper.

The axe, unfortunately, is about the fall again. This time 50 editorial staffers will be dropped. More than half, I’m told, already have signed up to leave. However, they have a week to change their minds.

In any case, the PD will drop 50 editorial employees total, it is said.

Among those leaving or having left: Sam Fulwood, Scott and Chris Stephens, Alana Baranick, Wally Guenther, Karen Sandstrom, Molly Kavanaugh, Joel Rutchick, John Campanelli, Fran Henry, Mary Vanac and Chris Seper.

Staffers are upset also about losing pension time. The PD, owned by the Newhouse family, has suspended pension credits for a year. One staffer said this has been the third time in recent years. A suspension of a year means that if you’ve been at the PD eight years, you have seven years credit under the pension.

They are also upset that while management gets health benefits after leaving, those cut now will not receive those benefits.

Soon we won’t have a daily newspaper, certainly as we have known it.

We complain about its deficiencies but it is the main source of community information is the Plain Dealer. It’s been that way since 1982 when the PD helped sack the Cleveland Press, an afternoon paper.

The decline has been swift, as it has at many newspapers around the nation.

“They (management) never saw the end coming,” as one staffer put it, pointing out that the PD in recent years built a $200-million new printing plant in Brookpark and new editorial offices downtown on Superior Avenue in Cleveland.

Publisher Terry Egger and Editor Susan Goldberg, old hands now at chop chop, will be making the decision. Some expect it possibly Monday, Dec. 1.

The “bad blood” can be attributed to the selectivity available to Egger, who came here from St. Louis, and Goldberg, who came here from San Jose. No one knows if their name is on the list to go.

Both Egger and Goldberg are short-timers here and both have had the necessary experience of cutbacks at other newspapers – Egger at the St. Louis Dispatch and Goldberg at the San Jose Mercury News.

Despite the long-standing representation of the Newspaper Guild, cuts don’t have to follow the traditional seniority rule. I’m told that there are several other factors that management can utilize for letting someone go before seniority. Therefore, long-time reporters could be among those dismissed.

The Cleveland union is known as Guild Chapter #1, chartered in 1934. In 1995 the Guild became affiliated with the Communications Workers.

In October, Egger said he expected a staff reduction this year of 38. That subsequently was increased to 50.

These reductions followed an earlier decline of 17 percent in the editorial staff.

Egger, as I’ve written before, “comes across as an amiable guy and plays that role well” but he turns out to be a “hatchet man for Newhouse, as I expected when he was brought here from St. Louis.

The loss is a community loss in addition to personal losses of reporters and editors.

‹ PD MOVES TO RENT SPACE, PARKING AT SUPERIOR OFFICESupPD SLICES DEEPER INTO EDITORIAL WORK STAFF ›
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New newspaper needed

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Wed, 11/26/2008 - 14:53.

At this point, running around NEO, there are 100s of seasoned news professionals looking for their next gig. And I know enough powerful people in NEO who are completely disgusted with the right-wing PD editorial slant and would gladly fund a new newspaper. So why don't we connect the dots... the PD can even print it at their big new plant, and handle the back office and distribute it for us... we'll just have very different takes on the news.

I'd work for that!

Disrupt IT

The “Antichrist Of Print Media” Is A 1975 Case Graduate...

Submitted by Charles Frost on Wed, 11/26/2008 - 21:40.

Craig's Quest

Craigslist founder talks about how far he’s come and where he still hopes to go

When Craig Newmark started e-mailing San Francisco Bay Area event listings to friends in 1995, he had no idea his “little hobby” would explode into craigslist, a mostly free service providing classified listings and forums in more than 500 cities around the world. Though he has no plans to go public or sell ads on his site, this hardcore Barack Obama supporter who blogged as he delivered the commencement address at Case Western Reserve University this spring is looking for ways to use his nerd values for good.

 

Craig Newmark, founder of the San Francisco-based Web site craigslist,talks about the future. Photo: Al Fuchs

Q: You’ve said you’re a bad investor and a lousy manager, that you’re withdrawn and your need for attention is lower than you thought. How were you able to found such a successful company with traits like that?

A: Well, one thing is that I’m not a good manager. Actually, as a manager, I suck, so my solution was to hire someone who was really talented and then get out of the way. My investment skills are minimal, but they apply only to me, not craigslist, so that’s worked well. All humans need
a little attention and everyone has a different threshold for it. My threshold is lower than I thought, but it’s only attenuated by my sense of humor.

Q: You’ve been called the “antichrist of print media,” and Stephen Colbert has thanked you for single-handedly destroying newspapers. Did you ever imagine you’d craft a business that would be bigger than newspaper classifieds?

A: I don’t know if we are bigger than newspaper classifieds. The whole success and growth of craigslist has been a surprise to me. When I hear about how successful we are, it’s flattering for five seconds, but then it’s back to customer service, which is what I spend time doing.

Q: Describe a typical day for you, from beginning to end.

A: I try to take enough vitamins to be healthy since I don’t eat a very balanced diet and don’t exercise enough. My typical day is that I get up around 8 a.m. and do customer service for as long as it takes, then I go down to a café and have coffee and read the paper. Then I’ll go to the office and do more customer service. I’ll have lunch there, then maybe run an errand and then go home. I’ll do more customer service in the evening, maybe watch TV and read, then more customer service around 10 or 11 p.m. Then I’ll go to bed.

Q: What do you mean by “do customer service”?

A: It includes removing spam from the site, particularly for dubious products and services. I do light moderation of forums, and I also help people with advertisements once in a while.

Q: Have you ever bought or sold anything yourself on craigslist?

A: I’ve bought and sold a lot of small electronics, but my biggest sale was my old car, a ‘92 Saturn SL2.

Q: Have you noticed any correlation between the types of postings on craigslist and the state of the economy right now?

A: We’ve seen a surge in people selling stuff they don’t need and selling gas-guzzlers that cost too much. Today, I filled my tank for the first time in a long while and I didn’t expect the bill to be as big as it was. What we’re seeing on the site is a reflection of that.

Q: You’ve said you’ve built a business based on “nerd values.” What are nerd values? And what would our country be like right now if we had leaders who embraced them?

A: The comment about nerd values is a facetious reference to a real phenomenon that my fellow nerds [and I have witnessed], that people will pay us money to exercise our skills—in my case, computer programming. Once we make a comfortable living there’s not much point in making more [money] and at that point it’s more satisfying to devote time to community service. That’s the spirit I think was embodied in occasional civic generations in American history—one that we’re seeing now among 18- to 30-year-olds in response to the Obama campaign. If more people embraced nerd values, we’d be helping each other out a lot more with things.

Q: How do you leverage technology to promote this sort of altruism?

A: This is a big year where we really need to fix government in Washington and need to restore democratic values. People have used Internet technology to raise funds, organize and get voters excited. But we’re trying to figure out how to use it to get people to help on an everyday level, and get their input to Washington on big issues. But once you get 1 million people involved in something like this, how do you find the best ideas? That’s not easy. You see examples out there of how it could work—Slashdot and Amazon come to mind—places where people are rating and measuring things like books or news stories. I think this idea applies to politics also, but there are practical problems to be solved. Because what happens when people try to damage the process, or post disinformation?

Q: What else can we expect from craigslist in the coming years?

A: We do one thing really well and we don’t want to screw that up. So we’ll be working on better customer service and fighting spam. We’ll also be in more cities and countries, and in more languages. We will improve our functionality incrementally, because the idea is to listen to people to find out what works. Sometimes we have what we think are bright ideas, but when we ask ordinary people about them they tell us just to stick with the basics.

Craig Newmark received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer and information sciences from Case Western Reserve University in 1975 and 1977, respectively. He lives in San Francisco, where he puts his nerd values to work with groups such as DonorsChoose.org, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (iava.org), and the Sunlight Foundation (sunlightfoundation.com).

From: http://www.case.edu/magazine/fallwinter2008/craignewmark.html