No one can accuse us of not loving a good media spectacle, but the annual meetings in midtown Manhattan of newspaper executives trying to impress stock analysts aren’t where we usually look for fireworks. Until this morning, when MoveOn.org tried to crash the party.
Inside the comfort and warmth of the Crowne Plaza hotel near Times Square, Tribune Co. executives droned on to stock market analysts about more job cuts they anticipate in 2006, using the almost Orwellian language of “greater efficiencies” in news-gathering, “focus on cost management” and “redeploying resources.” Outside the hotel, frozen MoveOn activists who had gathered 45,000 signatures opposing the company’s already announced job cuts in newsrooms were forming a plan.
Huddled on the sidewalk outside the hotel were Adam Green, civic communications director for MoveOn, a few placard-clutching volunteers, and Todd Gitlin, media activist and professor at Columbia’s Journalism School. Green and Gitlin made a few remarks for the clutch of reporters and photographers who tried to keep their hands warm scribbling notes and avoiding gawking Times Square tourists. Then it was time to crash the party.
Picking up two cardboard boxes containing the 45,000 signatures and heading through the doors to the hotel — followed dutifully by a couple photographers and reporters — Green headed off for his rendezvous with destiny. Sort of. Met at the foot of the escalator by a security guard, Green identified himself and headed up, trailed by a couple of security guards. Once the group hit the second floor, where the conference was being held, a few more security guards — who refused to identify themselves — pushed the procession right back toward the “down” escalator, and into the lobby. There, they were met by even more security guards who, apart from being in a pretty bad mood, seemed to relish a little bit of action. They kicked the group back outside, where it regrouped on 49th street.
Green told me that, having failed to present the boxes to Tribune Chairman Dennis FitzSimons, the new plan was to give the boxes to a Tribune employee known only as “Max,” who had been following them. But when Green turned, with cameras ready to record the moment, Max — no fool, he — reversed course and headed back inside the hotel.
Meantime, inside the conference room, execs from the Tribune Co. were announcing that by the end of the year, it will have cut a full 4 percent of its workforce — a total of 900 jobs, 800 of which will be in the publishing unit.
Tribune Co.’s publishing operations are taking the brunt of the cuts, according to Dow Jones, even though “[p]ublishing revenue [for Tribune Co.] is flat year-to-date…while broadcasting is down about 5.5 percentage, although both are generating solid cash flow.” Indeed, the company’s publishing division made a profit of $595.9 million in the first three quarters of the year, a $93.6 million increase from the same period last year.
Despite the Tribune’s decision to cut costs by cutting staff — and thereby putting at risk the quality of the product it offers readers — readership for the newspaper industry as a whole, as the Wall Street Journal reported today, “remains strong … On an average weekday, 77 percent of adults in the top 50 markets read a newspaper at least once daily, as do 68 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds. And in general, newspapers have successfully embraced the Internet; they operate 11 of the top 25 online news and information Web sites — at a time when one-third of the entire Internet population visits newspaper Web sites.”
This entry is a trainwreck:
1) Why should the company or the analysts care what 45,000 Moveon folks, who have nothing to do with the company, who would always sign a petition against a large corporation, have to say?
2) What's Orwellian about cost-effincies and focusing on cost management? What kind of sinister plot do you think they have that they're trying to cover up? That they hate employees?
We'll see if the CJR daily is any more responsive to outsiders than the Tribune is.
Posted by Joseph Weisenthal on Wed 7 Dec 2005 at 06:56 PM
Why should company analysts care about 45,000 customers signing a petition to protest planned management actions expected to downgrade prduct quality without changing product price?!
The comment author should go run a business -- a small busness where management can't be so isolated from customers -- and see how well that attitude works. Or save time (and bankruptcy) and just re-read Peter Drucker.
Posted by Jim Kornell on Sat 10 Dec 2005 at 09:12 AM
Moveon and their ilk don't have a clue as to the real world. As to the cut of staff, it is due to cuts in circulation. As to the cuts in circulation, it is due to the fact that editors will not practice balance and allow opposing views and balance in their stories, particularly on Global Warming.
Posted by johnfwd on Sat 10 Dec 2005 at 09:53 PM
As a signatory to the MoveOn petition, a longtime LA Times subscriber, and a shareholder in the Tribune Company, I believe that I have a perfect right to inform the Tribune Company that their practices are not to my liking. The untimely dismissal of Robert Scheer, for example, is just the thin edge of the wedge for their "restructuring."
Posted by jkcohen on Sat 10 Dec 2005 at 11:00 PM
As another signatory to the MoveOn petition, a subscriber to the Chicago Tribune and a shareholder I object to the charaterization above. The "need" for this cost cut being based on lowered circ maybe true but, I see it more as based on reaping merely "insufficient" profits. I am a businessman and fully comprehend the need to always be vigilant about expense control - but, excuse me a publishing division with 600 million in profits that cuts 800 jobs, (at $125k per) could INCREASE profits by over 100 million - and I do "get" the math. The question is the VALUE that might be diminshed by such cuts. Asking if there are not other ways to save then by removing a crucial piece of the news gathering enterprise is a VERY legitimate question for a SHAREHOLDER and customer to ask. What ever happened to the concept of a free press having a role in society the is based on something other than pure profit motive? Should there not be more as stake here?
Posted by jlarryb on Wed 14 Dec 2005 at 06:07 PM
Readers who pontificate upon the hard-nosed reality of running a business as a defense of the Tribune Company’s decision to let go 800 or 900 workers, could really benefit from actually speaking to someone who works at a Tribune paper.
I have a friend who works for a Tribune paper that has recently enjoyed a profit, a paper which has increased its readership. Her paper’s popularity hasn’t stopped her Chicago overlords at Tribune headquarters from firing people in her newsroom. She and her colleagues are being asked to work more with a smaller support staff because newspapers in the Tribune family in other areas of the country are losing eyeballs to some tough competition.
At my friend’s paper, the threat of losing one’s job demoralized both the main and satellite newsrooms. Why work hard, the thinking goes, if you’re going to get fired because someone else, at some other paper, contributed to lost market share or didn’t sell enough ad space? Constantly worrying about losing one’s job creates an atmosphere where it is hard to efficiently gather the news.
The reason why that should matter to those of us who don’t work at Tribune is that Tribune, besides being a for-profit business, it is also a public service. Readers of the Tribune papers need to know what is going on and a smaller news staff really is less able to present the news.
Posted by skeptic on Tue 20 Dec 2005 at 05:59 PM