There's a downside to being an edgy alternative newspaper. You can't go around eviscerating the establishment and mooning the mainstream media without occasionally looking in the mirror. Case in point: Last October, the Weekly Planet made a big deal out of a big deal — our purchase of the group of newspapers that had originally founded us. "Hah!" we declared. "Just watch us be simultaneously corporate and un-corporate at the same time." That's legerdemain we may yet pull off, but not without some pain.
By the time you read this, Creative Loafing in Atlanta, the oldest and largest paper in our group, will have announced layoffs of more than a dozen people. Vacant positions at our other papers, including Tampa, aren't being filled. Operations throughout the company are being restructured.
The bottom line — no, not that bottom line, but the one that has always counted most at the Planet, staff esprit — is shaky.
We relish making the mainstream media uncomfortable. It's a hallmark of alternatives throughout the nation. The media aren't doing a great job of reporting on anything nowadays — but the press really bottoms out at reporting on itself.
If we had seen smoke rising from another newspaper as it is from the Planet, we'd look for a fire. My editorial partner, Susan Edwards, and I decided to do just that. If the worst fears ended up as reality, we knew we could be putting our jobs on the line if we chose to print what we found.
The key question was whether "the deal" was in trouble. Had the mandate for profits — needed, we knew, to pay down a sizable debt — turned a happy and healthy newspaper into another media vampire?
What we found was complex: a number of nonrelated events at our six newspapers, plus some overarching changes in operations.
Also discovered were some grievous breakdowns in communication. These can't be brushed off as merely the byproduct of wholesale changes in our ownership environment. That explanation doesn't reduce the damage to staff morale.
In Atlanta, our group had to remedy many poor strategic choices from the past. Primarily, two zoned editions for Atlanta's suburbs were consuming a large amount of the paper's resources. The dozen-plus layoffs announced April 3 are largely due to this restructuring.
Tampa had its own collection of iffy strategic decisions. About three years ago, we tried an experiment — having three co-publishers. It didn't work. We ended up with decision paralysis, which was most evident in stagnant advertising sales. The experiment has been scrapped, and shortly after the corporate merger in October, we brought in a new advertising director, Philip MacMonagle.
Compounding conditions here, as the new corporate organization materialized, once chummy communications between our top executives and the Tampa staff deteriorated. We went from being beer-drinking buddies to near-strangers. This breakdown created considerable concern among the Planet's middle management.
Meanwhile, the corporation was exploring the benefits of pooling the resources of the papers in our group — Weekly Planet/Tampa, Weekly Planet/Sarasota, Creative Loafing/Atlanta, Creative Loafing/Charlotte, Creative Loafing/ Greenville, S.C., and the Spectator in Raleigh, N.C. Especially in areas such as classified advertising and designing and producing our papers, there are opportunities for realignment of staff. The company has undertaken several initiatives, including a centralized classified call center and pre-printing production hubs.
In another move, the Tampa paper is absorbing some of the administrative and production operations of the Sarasota Weekly Planet. This includes eliminating the position of publisher in Sarasota.
The moves created friction because there was little communication from top management.
Also, and this is the most repeated complaint of staff members, new company-wide pay and benefit plans were imposed with little two-way discussion. The plans generally keep benefits on a par with a scattershot variety of programs under the pre-acquisition ownership. Yet, there are some definite losses, such as decreased vacation for some senior employees and the withholding of a week's pay. There were also a few gains — for the first time, the company will match employee contributions to our retirement plan after a five-year vesting period.
That brings us back to "the deal." The company that was created after the October acquisition, Creative Loafing Inc., has sizable debt as well as very serious partners, including media giant Cox Newspapers of Atlanta and Dick Mandt, owner of The Flyer advertising newspapers.
The greatest anxiety of our staff was that we were in trouble, and many of the cost-saving plans of the company were crisis-driven. The group's president, Ben Eason, willingly disclosed the plans and status of the company to Edwards and me. As I've described, the plan is three-pronged:
1. Use technology and organization to provide higher quality and more efficient publications.
2. Boost revenues and make sure money is well spent.
3. Emphasize staff development.
That's Business 101 stuff, very basic.
Still, from the beginning of the acquisition, some have feared that corporatization would result in loss of individuality, autonomy and participation in decision-making, and that we would be forced into an environment that would value obedience, conformity and profits over quality and humanity.
After reviewing the financial and organizational information provided by Eason, it appears the business side of the deal is doing well and will do better once the impact of the organization's restructuring kicks in.
However, it is impossible not to conclude that this communications company has stumbled at communicating with its own staff. Inadequate communication reinforced fears, and some strategic decisions by top management took the form of micromanaging at staff levels.
Ben Eason, acknowledged: "I've not done as good a job at communicating the overall direction of the company as I would have liked and have freed myself up to be more accessible to the staff and communities we serve."
Our company certainly isn't unique among publishing companies. Many are going through painful and cathartic changes. The Wall Street Journal online service is laying people off. Reporters and editors at the once-proud Akron Beacon-Journal have accused their corporate boss, Knight-Ridder Chairman Tony Ridder, of ruining the paper by wholesale slashing of staff and resources. Reports last week indicated that other papers, such as the Dallas Morning News, are preparing to announce sweeping layoffs.
The news is bad news at news organizations nationwide. And readers/citizens are often the victims, losing an essential component to our culture and democracy as the giant media companies lust for 25 percent profit margins.
In one of the more bizarre tragedies in recent weeks, the highly regarded publisher of the San Jose Mercury-News, Jay Harris, quit, hoping his resignation would prevent Knight-Ridder, the paper's owner, from enforcing new and devastating profit mandates.
Prior to Harris' resignation, three Pulitzer Prize winners from the Mercury-News wrote a bitter missive to their corporate bosses. The corporate profit strip-mining, the journalists stated, "will wreck the newsroom and ruin the paper's ability to cover the community. Newsroom layoffs are not a self-cauterizing form of surgery — the bleeding continues as morale declines."
Every sensible journalist in America fears the same thing happening to her or his news organization. That's what prompted the Planet editors to probe our own company. Without being too self-congratulatory, it's obvious that our quality has not suffered in recent months.
Our strongly felt conclusion is that at a time when daily newspapers are losing staff, credibility and readership, we should advance our role in service to our communities' information needs. Our corporate bosses say that's what they believe too. Whether they will provide the resources to accomplish this remains to be seen.
My discomfort in writing this has many levels. I own stock in Creative Loafing, which makes up a part of what I hope to leave my children. In a sense, more profits would benefit me. My belief, however, is that quality newspapers have the best shot at being profitable.
I also believe in what we've tried to do, and I have tremendous admiration for Eason. What attracted me — and most of my senior colleagues — to the Planet was that Eason and the paper exhibited strong ethics and emphasized values beyond profits. Eason's ethical leadership has had a profound impact on Tampa, through projects he has initiated or supported as well as the newspaper he built from scratch.
It is my hope as an editor — and the hopes of other managers and staff here — that we can continue on our mission to be a gutsy, honest, and creative voice in the community.
Unless Editor John F. Sugg has been asked to fall on his own sword, he can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 109, or at johnsugg@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2001.