If you thought the
Times-Standard’s
victory
in the battle of Eureka dailies meant a return to gluttonous days of plenty for the 154-year-old paper, think again. MediaNews, the Denver-based parent company of the
T-S
,
today announced
that all employees — company-wide — must take a one-week furlough sometime during February or March. That means an unpaid, involuntary five-day vacation for everyone from delivery van drivers to reporters, editors to publishers, even the bigwigs like President Jody Lodovic.
“It’s a reaction to the state of our industry within the current economic environment,” said
T-S
Publisher Dave Kuta. While it’s not necessarily a sign that the
T-S
is itself unprofitable, there’s not much comfort in being a healthy barnacle on a listing ship.
According to Denver’s
Rocky Mountain News
, MediaNews has been losing “roughly $4 million per quarter as the newspaper industry nationally continues a rapid deterioration.” That tidbit is merely an aside in the story. The nut is an allegation from E.W. Scripps, another lumbering media conglomerate, that MediaNews violated an agreement by borrowing $13 million from a jointly owned operating agency to make payroll at
The Denver Post
. MediaNews
vehemently denies
the allegation, but still, the financial picture ain’t pretty.
The effect these furloughs will have on the
T-S
remains to be seen. “We still need to produce a newspaper,” Kuta said. “Obviously it will be difficult. It’s like having several people go on vacation all at once.” He said they’ll schedule strategically and “cross traditional boundaries” to ensure they continue to produce a quality newspaper.
As for the fiscal impact on employees, Kuta said that it will indeed hurt — him included. “Right now I have two house payments,” he said. “It’s tough on everyone.” The company will re-evaluate its fiscal standing at the end of March. For now, like more and more companies in these bleak financial times, the
T-S
will have to figure out how to do the same job with fewer resources. “We’ll find a way to do it,” Kuta said.
This article appears in Hobart’s Children.
Ryan:
Being a former reporter at the Times-Standard, maybe you can give us some insight into the hardships this might cause in the newsroom. This means even less community news will be covered in our local daily, right?
Not necessarily, 5:08. It might mean shorter stories, though. In my experience, when a reporter went on vacation it meant everyone else had to work a little harder to cover his/her beat. This might result in a reporter writing three stories rather than two on a given day, which of course leaves less time for each story.
Wonder if Rob Arkly is waiting in the wings for the bankruptcy and the selling of assets so that he can come back in and reclaim the paper war. Would be impressive, and locally owned…never underestimate a fierce competition…
Print news media is on the way out. It’s a fact that this new media we are engaged in will see to that. Most people get their news from the radio, television, internet, and this allows them to consume media that better reflects their world view. I don’t read the Times Standard or any other news pulication because they all list so far to the left. The Seattle Times isn’t much better than the P-I, I subscribed to both for a while in WA and found their reporting so biased that I began to refuse free copies. The Times Standard will adapt by becoming an online enterprise or it will die like other black and white press outlets.
First thing the TS needs to do is get a new server, or quit with the overloaded ads and popups that cause it to hang for 2 minutes while loading.
Bothered by ads and popups in this day and age?
1. Run Firefox (or another modern browser) with a pop-up manager.
2. Install a JavaScript manager (enable JavaScript on your frequently visited sites).
3. Install an ad manager. I use it to manage animated/Flash ads, but you could block out everything if you choose.
Simply switching to a modern browser should get all important sections of the T-S page fully rendered within seconds while a few tidbits (the “media center” and such) fall into place a little later.
What I see at the T-S on an unprotected visit is peaceful compared to the visual assault encountered when I clicked on CJ’s name and landed at Rense.com. (Three screens of garbage before even showing me links to the feature stories? Really?)
Thanks for the tips AJ, this computer stuff is kind of new to me. You must be a well paid computer professional by all your lingo, we need more of your kind of people in Humboldt to help the economy. I will call Jeff and let him know about his site, he likes Humboldt.
Visit http://www.getfirefox.com. At a minimum, that gives you a pop-up manager.
I’ll all for supporting content producers by allowing their ads to be viewed… but we have tools at our disposal to say “no” to the most obnoxious behaviors out there today.
You are such an ass, Copernicus.
If he was being snide, I agree Hank, but for the reason that he was originally complaining about issues entirely under his own control. I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Ok, ur right dandy, always bustin my chops, but the Linux zealots are the same as the mac or pc zealots. Even with the popup blockers the TS webserver lags -pingtime.I do think AJ is the kind of self-styled Internet based companies we need, babycloths and all- and that wasn’t a slight.
¥€¥
Serves me right for trying to help. I’ve learned my lesson.
Ciao.
{guilt}