Are employees at The News Tribune and The Olympian being squeezed to the breaking point?
Previous:
.The TNT copydesk and a handful of folks from The Olympian who were transferred to Tacoma will be putting out both papers tonight back-to-back, with deadlines an hour apart.Is there anywhere else - McClatchy or not - where one crew is producing two papers every night?
Previous:
15 comments:
I can pretty much guarantee you that the current arrangement won't last. One person will decide that it's just not worth the stress, and quit. Then everyone else will find their workload increased, and the avalanche will have started.
This is the cold logic of
cutting and cutting and cutting and expecting to still get the job done; eventually you have cut away too much and the system will fail when one "component" fails.
I am shuddering at the prospect of being pushed into a super stressful position, knowing in the end you will lose your job anyway. Add to that, there are few other jobs available. This is a form of torture. I don’t know how Gary Pruitt sleeps at night. He is still pulling down big bucks, no bonus mind you, but still big bucks.
Did some of these overworked employees have to take a pay cut?
How many pages of these papers are the same? How many slugs is each copy editor handling per night? If it's two papers, but only the front pages differ, then why would you have two copy desks? But if it's two totally separate papers, then there's a big, fat, obvious problem.
3:08 PM
Those are good questions, is it the same paper except the front page? Perhaps someone can answer that question.
Yes. Hilton Head and Beaufort have combined all resources, and the copy desk there produces two papers 365 nights a year. They have different front pages, but everything else is identical.
As Peter Lorie said in Casablanca, “Poor devils”
3:08 -- The papers are going to start sharing content(e.g., having pages interchange with each other, same typeface). I foresee that eventually, The Olympian as a separate paper will most likely be eliminated and end up as a zone for the TNT, which is probably what Tacoma had in mind from the time Pruitt and Co. purchased The Olympian.
So much for the anti-trust thing back in 2006, McClatchy now owns almost every major rag in western Washington.
is Jerry Wakefield mute or what?
I remember how, every morning, former executive editor Vickie Kilgore would post a copy of the TNT in the news conference room, right next to The Olympian (and the Seattle papers), and mark up The O with a big blue pen to highlight every actual and/or perceived fault.
There we were, with perhaps one-fourth the circulation (and about one-fourth the staff) of the TNT, and almost every day was a litany of "why can't we be more like" our mortal enemies, the TNT.
At long last, Vickie's wish has come true.
Olympia has pretty much lost its local newspaper. The readers will wake up tomorrow and find the TNT with a different front page.
It won't take them long to figure out the shell game -- and start missing their "Daily Zero."
I wonder what they will all say tomorrow morning.
Jerry Wakefield is just trying to save his own job.
Think of the captain standing on a sinking ship, pushed crew members into a harsh sea just before stepping off onto another ship.
2:29 ... All employees at both newspapers took a paycut recently. Didn't EVERY McClatchy employee take one last round?
"Didn't EVERY McClatchy employee take one last round?"
Employees making under $25,000 did not, but that would be very few employees. Right?
What Jerry Wakefield's front-page editorial said:
http://www.theolympian.com/southsound/story/826349.html
We also decided to change the slogan at the top of the page, which for years was "Serving Washington’s South Puget Sound."
We think the new one, "Serving the Washington state capital for 119 years," better reflects our long history in this unique community and our commitment to its future.What the new slogan at the top of the page actually says: "Serving the Washington state capital since 1890."
http://media.theolympian.com/static/images/todaysfrontpage/frontpage.jpg
Post a Comment