CSotD: In newspaper industry, Cheese cuts YOU
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What, twice in four days? Well, yes, but this Ed Stein comic is his syndicated strip, "Freshly Squeezed," about a family dealing with the new economy. Friday's praise was for Ed Stein's editorial cartoon about Europe dealing with the new economy.
What can I say? The dude's on a roll.
Ed is one of the talented journalists put out on the street when the Rocky Mountain News was shut down in 2009, after a bloody newspaper war with the Denver Post. So, when he creates a comic strip about the impact of a failing economy on a family, he doesn't have to do a lot of research. He just has to stay in touch with his friends and search his own memory.
This one brings back some memories for me and I was 2,000 miles away from the Rocky. But we, too, had a visit from the Big Cheese, back in the late 90s.
The chain we were in had been profitable, but the little preferred-stock parasites who were living off their grandparents' legacy had gotten together with Warren Buffett to find out how to squeeze more money out of their inheritance.
Let's be clear: The issue wasn't whether any of them would have to go out and actually get a job. The issue was how many polo ponies they could have in their stables. And more is never enough.
So they started slicing and dicing, and suddenly a chain of little community papers began to fall apart, with, I would note, only slight help from the Internet at that point. People tend to blame shifting media habits entirely for the fall of the newspaper industry, but newspapers were just as prone to the perils of greed as any other industry of the time and, once they had been identified as having strong pump-and-dump potential, the go-go leveraging bubble was as much to blame for the destruction of the medium as was the growth of the Internet.
Anyway, the Big Cheese came and we all gathered in the break room for a little cake, punch and pep talk and he told us how well things were going, and someone asked him if that meant we'd be getting Cost Of Living Adjustments again, after two years of pay freezes, and our publisher assured us that we had been receiving them and we knew goddam well that we hadn't and, yeah, where were our watches?
(This was a few years after they had shut down the pension program and converted to a 401k with the promise that they would contribute to it, and a couple of years since they had announced that they would no longer contribute to our 401ks. Anyone needing a weatherman at this point was ill-suited for the business of news-gathering.)
The thing was, there were Big Cheese meetings going on all over the industry, so jumping from one frying pan into another didn't seem that appealing. My own rip-chord moment came about two years later, when our publisher took a retirement package and the New Guy came in.
I had been out of the newsroom for six or seven years by then, doing an educational program that was quite successful locally and had gained some national attention. When the New Guy arrived, we went back into the breakroom for cake, punch and pep talk, and he shook my hand and told me how very important he felt Newspapers in Education was and what a big supporter of the programs he was.
And I said, "Oh, shit, where's my watch?" and, sure enough, they began to grind on me, cutting my program and trying to get me to quit so they could hire someone else and make the position part time. Which they did.
After a few months of corporate harassment, I had found a much nicer position at a newspaper that was part of a successful, small, community-oriented family-owned chain of papers. I had an office and an assistant and my program grew in size and scope until we were not only doing a bang-up job locally but even starting to generate some additional revenues by selling curriculum materials to other newspapers around the country and around the world.
And then the chain was sold to a corporation, and the publisher was forced to retire, and we all gathered in the newsroom to meet the Big Cheese, because apparently they didn't want to waste the stockholder's money on cake and punch.
It didn't really matter anymore. I hadn't owned a watch in years.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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