The lengthy list of editorial staff fired yesterday by the Star is available for public viewing. Also the list of folks forced to go part-time, with consequent cuts in pay and benefits.
The list can be found on a great media blog - Bottomline Communications.
My question: why do I have to go to an independent Internet blog to find out who's been canned? Why didn't The Star publish that list itself? And is it true there's been a witch hunt at 18th & Grand as the powers-that-be try to figure out who's been e-mailing the info to the rest of the world?
How cock-eyed is that? This bastion of the First Amendment, which regularly extols transparency while shaking its finger at those they believe to be opaque, is pulling the same crap.
And don't tell me this is a personnel issue. I got fired once and The Star wrote about it. It's a regular subject in the pages of our newspaper - except, it appears, when it's the newspaper itself doing the lopping of heads.
The Star article announcing my humiliation to the world, by the way, did a lot for my then-state of mind. Made me crawl in a little deeper into the black hole of worthlessness and "What the fuck do I do NOW?"
So I know firsthand what these folks are going through. Add to it the fact that the newsrooms in which they have worked are slowly being squeezed dry and the vehicle in which they have plied their profession is disappearing fast.
Not only are they thrown into the biggest unemployment pool in decades, they also have to watch something they love die.
That sucks.
And don't even get me started on what this means for local news coverage...
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
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