I had a cup of coffee this morning with Kim Underwood at Chelsee’s. Kim is the Winston-Salem Journal’s online guy and we had a great conversation. After coffee we walked over the the Journal’s building he gave me a tour of the newsroom and introduced me to a few folks. Someone asked me if I was going to write about the layoffs last week at the News & Record and when I said I wasn’t sure she said something to the effect of "you should, especially since you haven’t been shy about writing about us."
Good point, but my reply to her was that I didn’t feel as comfortable writing about internal goings-on as "public facing" events. For instance I have no problem critiquing the newspaper’s web re-design because I’m the audience and my opinion matters as much as anyone elses. On the other hand, I don’t work at the newspaper, don’t know the financial situation, don’t know the personnel situation and so I don’t feel qualified in evaluating the specifics of the layoffs. (For what its worth, I took a similar tack last November when the Journal had their own layoffs.) On the other-other hand, if some of the stories coming out of the layoff action are true then I can say that in those specific instances the individuals who were laid off got a pretty rough deal. Here are two specific cases that I know of:
- One N&R library staffer was laid off and he is getting ready to enter cancer treatments and is apparently going to need a bone-marrow transplant in the future. I’d originally heard this as a rumor, but now Ed Cone has posted an appeal to help Marcus Green pay for the COBRA expenses for the procedure so I guess it’s true.
- One reporter was hired, started last Monday and was laid off at the end of last week. Four days on the job! How the management at the N&R let that happen is beyond me. At best it’s poor management and at worst it’s callousness of the grossest kind.
As for the rest of the layoffs I don’t really have much to say. It’s obviously a business call that the folks at Landmark felt they had to make, but it doesn’t make the situation any easier for the folks now looking for employment.
In general terms one thing I’d like to see, just once, is a case where a senior exec takes a personal hit in order to save the folks working for him or her. I’m not talking about the N&R here, I’m talking about all the companies out there who are downsizing in an effort to improve their financials. Is there one CEO out there willing to say, "You know what, the buck stops here. Before I lay off 30 people making $50,000 each I’m going to give up my $1.5 million bonus, and together we’re going to fix this business"? Somehow I think we’re more likely to hear, "It’s unfortunate that we have to let go 30 fine people but rest assured that as your all-star CEO I’ve created a contingency plan to have those same functions fulfilled by 60 people in Bangalore for 1/6 the cost, which is why my $1.5 million incentive is returning a tremendous ROI."
Oh, and by-the-by, the folks at the Journal were really nice to me, especially when you consider that I’ve not always been so nice to them. Either they take a more charitable view of we bloggers than many of their brethren, or they know exactly what I am: an opinionated person with enough ego to think that people might want to read his opinions, or seen another way, a guy who’s a few slices short of a full loaf and knows how to type. Either way, they treated me well and I had a good time checking out their digs.
Befuddled 