The Ledger-Enquirer will require nearly half of its employees to take a week off without pay beginning Sept. 6, said Valerie Canepa, the newspaper’s publisher, on Wednesday.Update: a reader points out all the savings will go toward the 4th quarter.
The mandatory furloughs impact 88 of 174 employees — including the newsroom — and will run through Dec. 12. Exempt are advertising sales employees, most production workers and the staff of The Bayonet, a publication that focuses on Fort Benning.
The furloughs come with the newspaper industry nationwide under financial pressure from the severe recession and print readers migrating to the Web for news.
“We have an excellent newspaper and a building full of talent, and I hate that we must require furloughs,” Canepa said in an email to employees. “But further cost-cutting is necessary to weather the volatile market conditions that make the business of producing a daily newspaper more challenging than ever before.”
The Ledger-Enquirer, owned by Sacramento, Calif.-based The McClatchy Co., has used employee buyouts, layoffs, a wage freeze and pay cuts over the last year to manage through the economic downturn.
.
13 comments:
So, this goes into Q4. More to come for *all* McClatchy papers? Maybe only papers that are pulling down the rest of MNI are going to start taking the hit worse?
But we are profitable! We made the turn and our best days are ahead! You lying right wingers are just making stuff up.
Yeah, we're doing great now that we got rid of the dead weight. This stock is going to the moon! I will probably throw my whole load at this baby and pay for an entire years subscription to the Wall Street Journal.
Attention fellow McClatchy workers: Tired of furloughs, pay cuts and pay freezes while your profitable paper ships money back to Sacramento to pay off Pru's credit card? Let's celebrate Labor Day by calling in sick. If you do not want to do that and feel you must go to work, you can engage in a slowdown and not worry about meeting deadline. It's time to send a message to Pru and the other corporate nitwits that we want our pay scales restored to the levels they were at before the cuts. Let's do this for every holiday for the rest of the year.
11:25PM - I am sure that will get your paycheck "restored". I have a better idea - Go get it restored somewhere else.
OK, Mr. Management. Love it or leave it. Gary Pru would be so proud of you for being a nice little lap dog who's ready to spout the company line.
9:29 AM - That's not a company line. I have never heard such from management. Simple logic dictates if you want more money and can't get it where you are, then take your skills somewhere willing to pay more. Otherwise, sit down, shut the fuck up and do your job. You've made the choice to stay.
That's a good boy. Now roll over and beg. Gary just might throw you a crumb or two from his banquet table.
I'm one of the staffers at the Ledger-Enquirer. It's sad. We've been consistently near the top of performers in McClathy but they just keep asking for more blood. Even strongly performing papers like ours are being gutted of our best talent just to pay for failures elsewhere. Maybe somebody will get the message when they see who all is getting ready to walk.
Even strongly performing papers like ours are being gutted of our best talent just to pay for failures elsewhere.
---
Not so. If your paper is making cuts, it's because it must in order to make its numbers for the year. Unlike Knight Ridder McClatchy doesn't make better-performing papers ante up for those that are underperforming.
Unfortunately there is a new wave of nervousness about projections for the rest of '09.
4:51PM - Amen! Each newspaper's management team made projections about performance and the penalty for not getting to where you said you'd be is cuts. Blame the management team in your building for being too optimistic.
To the commenter who suggested blaming the in-house management team for being too aggressive, you are misguided my friend.
Managers present projections based upon real-life, in-market conditions only to have those projections continually kicked back by corporate saying, "we need more." Projections are then elevated to the point of making corporate happy, while being unrealistic for the local market.
The Columbus Ledger is bringing its own house down. Of course, they won't take responsibility so they blame"Headquarters", the economy, and anyone else. Face the facts, subscribers don't want their embarrassing "sound off" columns, their writers opinions, or their poorly written "stories". it is a waste of ink and tree
Post a Comment