Andre Williams, Bacon Fat, live in Paris, 2008
via youtube.com
Writer. Some travel.
A war of musical chairs: NWA newspaper management sits first after merger | Editorial by George Arnold
Banner, Opinion — By Contributing Writer on October 27, 2009 at 11:27 PM
By George Arnold
Special to Ozarks UnboundWhen I was in first grade and the weather was bad, we’d be kept inside at recess to play indoor games. It helped burn off our childish energy.
One of the games was called “Musical Chairs.” You remember how it worked: We kids had to march around a set of chairs, always one less chair than there were kids. The teacher would play some music and, when the music stopped, all of us had to scramble for a chair. The one who didn’t make it was out of the game. Along with the kid, a chair was removed and the game went on. Eventually, it came down to two kids and one chair.
Musical Chairs wasn’t a particularly nice game. A lot depended on luck and where you were standing in relation to the chairs when the music stopped. But the game also favored the more aggressive kids. Anyone more willing to nudge somebody else out of the way — no outright pushing allowed, of course – tended to be the ultimate winner of the game. Dog-eat-dog was the idea. Be polite (or just physically smaller) and be sidelined.
I see where the newspapers in Northwest Arkansas are continuing their own game of Musical Chairs. The much discussed merger of the Morning News and the Democrat-Gazette goes forward. As usual in such business matters, more chairs are disappearing, too. The working stiffs marching to the music are now scrambling to make sure they still have a seat in the game when the corporate paperwork settles.
I lost my seat early on. Back in the spring, when the newspapers in Northwest Arkansas were bleeding money, a number of us newspaper types were let go. I was one of the fortunate ones. I’m older and I’d planned to retire sometime this year anyway. That didn’t make the initial blow any easier to accept. But I realize that my age and the preparations I’d begun to make on my own worked in my favor.
It’s my younger colleagues who must bear the brunt. Newspapering is shaking out in ways once never anticipated. Changing tastes and a grinding recession have cut into profits. Something had to give. Naturally, it’s those on the lower rungs who have to give the most. Only so many chairs in the game, you know.
For years, the employees of the papers – and readers, too – have been sold a bill of goods. They’ve been told the competition among the papers in Northwest Arkansas was a “war” in which, yes, the best would win, but the readers would come out ahead, too. This noble-sounding war involved no real bloodshed, just good old American competition.
We now see that it wasn’t a war in that sense at all. It was a game played by owners and management to see who could wind up with a lucrative business monopoly – the last chair. Now that the real winners are emerging, those benefits to the readers turn out to have been only temporary.
Here’s what a spokesman for management had to say this week: “Any time you have two companies merging together that by any industry standard was probably overstaffed due to the nature of the newspaper war, there’s going to be layoffs on both sides.”
Of course, a reduced staff will mean less news for the reader. And that’s not all. Subscription and advertising rates are expected to go up as well. The result? Both readers and advertisers will get less for more. But for those who will be out of their jobs – “down-sized” is the cold word for it — the effect will be more immediate.
According to the papers, all members of the staffs are having their current jobs terminated. Employees were being required to re-interview to get a job back. Not all of them will be left with a chair. So, when the spokesman said the companies needed a new business model to survive and prosper, he meant that the pain would be pushed downward.
It saddens me to see what’s become of the business to which I devoted most of my working life. Newspapers are looking more and more like the American auto industry. Once valuable and respectable parts of the national economy, both have been reduced to shadows of their former selves. These days, auto workers are negotiating away the remaining benefits they fought so hard for back in their heyday. Newspaper employees – those who will still be employed – are in no position to negotiate anything. They’re lucky they will still have a job. One way or another, they will be reminded of that every day from now on.
In a real war, the grunts on the front lines do most of the suffering, most of the dying. In newspapers these days, the working stiffs are the ones who catch it the worst. Those at the top always manage to hang on to theirs.
We’ll soon begin hearing which of the talented people on the staffs of the papers in Northwest Arkansas will lose their jobs in these unfortunate times. (We’re already learning about several of the higher-ups whose jobs are secure. No surprise there.)
The game goes on. Who keeps their seats this time?
George Arnold was a newspaper reporter and editor for 35 years. He writes from Springdale.
This image provided through the following Creative Commons license: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spine/ / CC BY 2.0
Just over a week ago, every person in the Times newsroom was sent out a buyout package via UPS Next Day Air. If 100 staffers don’t raise their hands by Dec. 7, there will be layoffs.
We got our hands on one of the thickish brown envelopes that went to employees’ homes. In addition to revealing the actual details of the buyout offer—generally, three weeks pay per year of service and up to two years pay for longtime employees—the packet contained an intriguing amount of detail concerning the size of the newsroom—and the wider company.
>>GET THE BACKSTORY ON THE TIMES' BUYOUTS FROM JOHN KOBLIN
One of the packets is basically a list of every Times employee. No names, of course. But each employee’s entry contains their department, job title, birth date and age. The list covers every sector of the company, including the printers, the security guards, the reporters.
Combing through the 61-page list—with roughly 46 names per page—the size of the New York Times, depending on your perspective, seems either impressive or absolutely mind-boggling.
According to how the human resources department delineates these things, here’s a snapshot of The New York Times, by the numbers:
Editors at the Book Review: 14
Reporters at Metro: 50
Size of the Opinion/Editorial
Department: 49Size of Sports Desk: 57
Critics in the Culture
Department: 18Editors at The Times
Magazine: 21
Average age of the Obituaries Desk:
58 years oldSize of Thursday Styles: 7
Size of Business Desk: 85
Size of Washington Bureau: 45
Size of the Dallas Sales/
Advertising Staff: 4Size of Week in Review: 5
Total size of Art Department: 113
Size of Dining: 5
Size of Metro: 103
Number of Pressman Journeymen
at the College Point plant: 106More from John Koblin:
New York Times Cutting 100 Newsroom Jobs
New movie takes aim at celebrity journalismBy JILL LAWLESS (AP) – 6 hours ago
LONDON — What do Amy Winehouse's flaming beehive and Guy Ritchie's self-inflicted black eye have in common?
Both stories appeared in the pages of Britain's tabloid press. Neither is true.
The two incidents were fake showbiz news tips phoned into newspapers by the makers of the new documentary "Starsuckers," to see whether they would be used without fact-checking. The fact that they were forms part of the movie's argument that the culture of celebrity has undermined journalistic standards and warped society's values.
"I didn't realize quite how much of our news is public relations, or lies, or on the basis of criminal acts," said the film's 33-year-old director, Chris Atkins.
"Starsuckers," which premieres Wednesday at the London Film Festival, takes aim at Britain's fiercely competitive tabloid press, but its real target is much broader. Atkins believes that society's obsession with fame — gaining it and being near it — has distorted everything from the way news is reported to our children's aspirations.
The film opens with the statement that "everybody is naturally and powerfully attracted to fame," and tries to show how big companies in entertainment, media and PR use that desire to create a world full of insatiable consumers.
Through a series of stunts reminiscent of Michael Moore's movie polemics, Atkins aims to show how dignity, truth and even the law go out the window in the pursuit of celebrity.
Atkins is particularly scornful of reality television — the way such shows distort reality and stretch the limits of what people will do to be on TV.
The film introduces viewers to a Nevada boy named Ryan, who wants urgently to be famous — at five years old, he is already a veteran of agents, auditions and public appearances.
In another sequence, Atkins set up a booth in an English shopping mall purporting to be casting for children's reality TV shows. The filmmakers recorded as parents happily signed waivers for their children to appear on shows with titles like "Baby Boozers" and "Take Your Daughter to the Slaughterhouse" — for which he filmed children cheerfully trying to decapitate rubber chickens.
Critics might say Atkins manipulates people in the same way as the shows he criticizes.
"We tricked people into being in our film," acknowledged Atkins, whose last film, "Taking Liberties," looked at what he saw as the erosion of civil rights under Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"Yes, we had moral qualms, but I firmly believe we're doing it for the wider point. There was subterfuge involved to serve a wider public interest."
Atkins uses the same defense for his attempts to dupe newspapers in a bid to prove that Britain's tabloids won't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Checkbook journalism and stories sourced to anonymous "friends" are long-standing practices in Britain's popular press. Even murkier tabloid methods have come under scrutiny since 2007, when a News of the World journalist was jailed for illegally hacking into the phones of royal officials. The newspaper insisted it was a one-off blunder, strongly denying claims that phone-tapping of celebrities was widespread.
"Starsuckers" suggests that some tabloids, at least, won't let the truth get in the way of a good story. Newspapers as far afield as India printed the too-good-to-fact-check claims that a blown fuse had singed Winehouse's signature hairdo and Ritchie had given himself a black eye while juggling cutlery.
Even more worryingly, perhaps, Atkins also secretly filmed tabloid reporters as he offered to sell them medical records of celebrities' cosmetic surgery.
Buying such records is illegal in Britain, but the reporters seemed keen. They didn't know that the documents offered by Atkins — purporting to prove Hugh Grant's facelift and Guy Ritchie's chemical peel — were fake.
"We're trying to turn the tables — to put the boot on the other foot," said Atkins of his stings, which also included covertly filming celebrity publicist Max Clifford as he talked about the famous clients who pay him handsomely to keep damaging stories about them out of the headlines.
Atkins said his tactics had prompted letters from lawyers, including those working for Clifford, threatening legal action against the film.
Some viewers of "Starsuckers" may feel that Atkins doesn't give people enough credit. Surely most people know that what they see on reality shows or read in the showbiz pages of tabloids might not be 100 percent true?
Clifford, whose clients include Simon Cowell, said a lot of celebrity stories are "25 percent reality and 75 percent exaggeration" — but that we shouldn't worry too much about it.
"It's entertainment," he said. "The public believe what they want to believe."
The subjects of celebrity stories are less easygoing about it. George Clooney, asked about "Starsuckers" by The Associated Press, said a combination of shrinking newspaper staffs and the Internet meant misinformation could spread instantly around the world.
"Somebody will write a story and it will be in 1,800 different outlets from one person's story," Clooney said.
"It'll be false, and you'll go, 'It's not true.' And they go, 'We're not saying that, we're saying that a London tabloid has said it.' They're just reprinting and reprinting things that aren't necessarily true."
Atkins says the problem is that the blurring of fact and fiction is not confined to celebrity stories. British newspaper editors are frequently former showbiz reporters.
It's hard not to see symbolism in the career of Piers Morgan, who went from entertainment reporter to editor of The News of the World and the Daily Mirror. After he was fired by the Mirror — for running fake photos of British soldiers allegedly abusing Iraqis — he became a celebrity himself, as a judge on "Britain's Got Talent," which launched Susan Boyle to stardom.
"It's the same journalists who write about Amy's hair who write about weapons of mass destruction," Atkins said.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
I'm a carnivore, but this film gave me pause ....
