Skip to main content

SN&R reports that the Sac Bee is in trouble

Scoopy, the Sac Bee icon.
The Sacramento News & Review reports, in its Bites opinion column, titled "Exile on Q Street", in the 2/19/09 edition, that things are dire at the Sacramento Bee. It may be that as many as 33% of the newsroom staff at the Bee will be laid off as early as Mar 1.

According to the column, written by Cosmo Garvin, "Sources contacted by Bites put the number of firings around 50 to 75, with anywhere from 25 to 40 of those coming from the newsroom." In the column we are told that there are currently 268 employees who are members of the Media Workers Guild, and that there are around 1100 total employees at the Bee, headquartered at 2100 Q Street in Sacramento.

The SN&R has reason to think that numbers it has of possible firings may be low. Writes Garvin, "[H]ere's the spooky thing: A recent letter from [the Sacramento chapter of The Newspaper Guild] mentions the federal Workforce Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which kicks in whenever a company is contemplating mass layoffs" exceeding 33% by some special calculations. 33+% of the Guild workers would be 90 or more. 33+% of all the company workers would total 367.

More from the SN&R opinion piece:
The Guild’s letter attributes The McClatchy Co.'s attorney Bob Ford as saying the layoffs would be “on a scale exceeding anything before seen at the Sacramento operation.”

“It’s a very scary time,” says Fletcher. Not just for the Bee employees, but for Sacramento, too. People in town like to beat up on the daily paper, and they should. But without it, we’re screwed.

“There’s no way around it. There are fewer people keeping an eye on what’s going on. Some things are going to happen and we’re just not going to know about them,”
Fletcher explains.

“In the beginning, everybody was talking about doing more with less. Now we’re just talking about doing less.”

Reducing the number of pages in the daily paper, layoffs, pay cuts and mandatory furloughs are all said to be on the table. There’s even a persistent rumor that the Bee is considering going to a three-day-a-week publishing schedule, à la the Detroit Free Press. “I don’t know if that’s been seriously investigated, but I doubt it,” says Fletcher.
Any deep cut in its number of employees is sure to greatly reduce Bee reporting on homeless issues. Thus, furthering the neglect of aid for the homeless by the city and county.

It would be quite somethin' -- quite a very bad somethin' -- if our metropolitan area is left without a major, substantial old-style daily newspaper.

UPDATE 3/1/09: In a story on Feb 27, the Bee announced that it intended to layoff 34 Media Workers Guild employees and impose wage cuts. An unspecified number of workers outside the guild will also be laid off. If guild members don't vote to accept a cost-cutting plan, the number from their membership that will be laid off will increase to 53.

The McClatchy Co. is wanting to cut its operating expences at The Bee by an amount in excess of $100 million.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Loaves & Fishes implicates Buddhism and Jack Kornfield in its June Donations Plea.

The Sukhothai Traimit Golden Buddha was found in a clay-and-plaster overlaid buddha statue in 1959, after laying in wait for 500 years. It's huge and heavy: just under 10 feet tall and weighs 5 1/2 tons. At the beginning of their June newsletter , Loaves and Fishes relates a story, taken from the beginning of renowned Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield's 2008 book The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology . The first part and first chapter in Kornfield's book is "Part I: Who are you really?" and chapter 1 is called "Nobility: Our Original Goodness," which ought to serve as a clue to what the beginning of the book is about, not that that sentiment isn't strewn through-out the chapter, section and book such that what Kornfield is telling us should be crystal clear. Somehow, the not-ready-for-primetime management at Loaves & Fishes have managed to use Kornfield's wise and kindly words in a way that mangles th...
8 comments
Read more

In an act of Collective Punishment, Loaves & Fishes closes its park in the morning on New Year’s Day

Calvin [a "green hat" in Unfriendly Park] makes the argument for continued incompetent management. Hobbes represents me — only, in real life, I don't have that good a coat . In an act of Collective Punishment, Loaves & Fishes closes its park in the morning on New Year’s Day In one respect — and only one — that I can think of, Loaves & Fishes is NOT hypocritical: The management hates the way America is run and wants to turn it into a backward communist country . Consistent with that, Loaves & Fishes’ management runs its facility like a backward communist country. The People’s Republic of Loaves & Fishes. A seemingly minor thing happened on New Year’s Day. A couple of people smoked a joint in Loaves & Fishes’ Friendship Park and one of the park directors, or both of them, determined, at about 10am, that, in retribution, they would punish all the homeless there by closing the park for the day. This is something the managers of the park do all the ...
7 comments
Read more

Far-left visionaries at "Homeless Power Forum" hope to transform America [into Bulgaria?]

Poster from " Hobo Art Show " at Western Regional Advocacy Project website.  Paul Boden, a keynote speaker at the Homeless Power Forum, is WRAP's Executive Director. Yesterday, "Homeless Power Forum: Vision & Survival" was held at the Delany Center at Loaves & Fishes. Thinking it was about to end (I should read my literature, dummy!), I stayed for only the first hour-and-a-half of a 5 1/2 hour program. But that was enough to hear the "keynote speakers," Ethel Long-Scott and Paul Boden, and to sound alarm bells about the direction of the Safe Ground effort. Today, I believe that the confusion that is implicit in the many meanings that have been given to safe ground , also spelled capitalized [Safe Ground], and as one word [SafeGround], is intentional: to lead people in the homeless community in Sacramento from the most positive and favorable meaning, a legal homeless campground, to a hopelessly-naive political far-far left Utopian vision o...
4 comments
Read more