Landmark, the company that owns the News & Record, may be sold.
If it happens, and it isn’t certain, it will likely be a ways down the road — still, I got an awful sinking feeling in my stomach when I read the headline this morning, which is how most of the staff found out about it.
It’s not as though it’s a huge shock. As former N&R reporter Jonathan Jones points out at his blog, the company has been doing things that looked conspicuously like polishing up for a sale for some time now. The culmination — we had layoffs for the first time last year.
Still, I somehow wasn’t expecting it.
After the layoffs, in a pretty hostile meeting with the publisher, several of us asked point blank if the paper or the company was going to be sold. We were told that’s not what the layoffs were about — nothing can ever be ruled out completely, but a sale was highly unlikely.
After the meeting several people told me: “Unlikely my ass.”
These were smart people, and several of them went into other industries shortly thereafter.
Those of us who were not laid off and did not go elsewhere are doing the only thing we really can today: we’re writing for tomorrow’s paper.
I have friends who work on papers that have been sold — to giant chains, to venture capitalists, to the owners of direct competitors. It’s something that happens in this industry — and with greater frequency all the time. Viewers of HBO’s crime drama The Wire will get a look at sales, buyouts and layoffs in the show’s thinly fictionalized Baltimore Sun newsroom. The show’s creator and head writer used to be a cop reporter at the Sun — and from what I’ve seen the show’s treatment is dead accurate.
The McClathcy chain bought the News & Observer, one of the last great family-owned newspapers in the South, more than a decade ago. There’s a pride (and there used to be a feeling of security) in working for a private, family owned paper. But like a lot of things many of us loved about the business, those have been disappearing for a while.
Like the layoffs, which were sad news for a lot of people who lost their jobs, their health insurance, their stability and that of their families, the news has been greeted by a number of bloggers on the N&R site with .
I’ve had a nasty cold for a few days now, so I keep telling myself it’s that that’s making me feel ill and not the fact that so many people seem to get so much pleasure from the possible suffering of people they’ve never met.
1 Comment
January 8, 2008 at 3:14 pm
As a McClatchy employee, and to paraphrase one of your coworkers, “Pride and security my ass.”