After almost nine years of McClatchy Co. ownership, each of the remaining employees at The Kansas City Star must feel like he or she is carrying a donkey, not riding one.
Since 2008 — two years after McClatchy bought The Star and the other 31 daily papers in the KnightRidder chain — the employees have seen at least one buyout and several rounds of layoffs.
Six weeks ago, The Star laid off or offered retirement to four editorial employees, including ace energy reporter Steve Everly, and art critic Alice Thorson.
Fannin
Then today, or possibly yesterday, editor Mike Fannin put out a memo saying The Star was having a round of buyouts, with those taking the package getting a maximum of six months pay.
Here’s how Fannin’s memo began:
“Regrettably, I have some difficult news to share this morning. Given the economic pressures we’re facing at the start of 2015, we have to cut costs in the newsroom. This is not a failure of our terrific journalism, just a financial reality.
“We are all familiar with those realities. While we are seeing growth in key areas like digital revenue and digital readership — and while this will be a year of energetic change for the news division as I outlined recently — other areas are still hurting.
“So, for the first time since 2009, The Star is offering a voluntary severance program to fulltime employees in the newsroom. This plan is similar to other programs we have offered in the past and is not a reflection of the value of anyone’s work or personal contribution to the organization. We are also in the process of trimming other newsroom expenses, including freelance, travel, etc.
“Employees who elect will be eligible for two weeks of severance for every year of service, capped at 26 weeks. They will also be eligible for company subsidized COBRA (continuation of health insurance) for three months after leaving the company.”
Eligible employees who wish to take advantage of the offer must announce their intentions by next Monday.
Fannin’s memo doesn’t say what the qualifications are, but I presume it turns on some “magic” number — such as 70, 75, 80, 85 — that combines age and years of employment, or maybe a minimum number of service years plus an age minimum.
This offer could take out a lot of good editorial employees, and the quality of the paper — still pretty good — could suffer dramatically.
On the other hand, this is probably a day of rejoicing for the employees who qualify for the buyout. With The Star’s plummeting fortunes, along with those of many other metropolitan dailies, a lot of long-time employees have been waiting and hoping for a buyout, and now that they’re got the opportunity, I think they will jump on it.
Besides the overall decline of daily newspapers, another big problem for The Star is that McClatchy paid way too much for the KnightRidder properties — $4.5 billion. The company’s debt still stands at $1 billion, even after reducing debt by $523 million in the fourth quarter of 2014 by selling Apartments.com, Cars.com and the Anchorage Daily News.
At random and off the top of my head, I’m going to throw out some names of staff members who may qualify for the buyout.
I’m sure I will miss some obvious people who will qualify, and, as I said, I’m just speculating on eligibility. (Feel free to suggest additions to the list of potential candidates.)
In any event…
Political reporter and columnist Dave Helling; courts reporter Mark Morris; general assignment reporters Eric Adler and Rick Montgomery; general assignment reporter and former columnist Mike Hendricks; police reporters Glenn Rice and Tony Rizzo; general assignment reporter Matt Campbell; education reporters Mara Rose Williams and Joe Robertson; assistant metro editors, Jesse Barker, Elaine Adams and Donna McGuire; feature and celebrity writer Lisa Gutierrez; features editor Sharon Hoffmann; photographers Keith Myers and John Sleezer; copy editor and “Monday morning poet” Don Munday; columnist Mary Sanchez; all three business reporters, Diane Stafford, Joyce Smith and Mark Davis; all three business editors, Greg Hack, Steve Rosen and Keith Chrostowski; and all four editorial board members, Lewis Diuguid, Yael Abouhalkah, Barb Shelly and Steve Paul. (If all editorial board members left, I guess Publisher Mi-Ai Parrish would write the editorials in addition to overseeing the entire newspaper operation…Nose to the grindstone there, Mi-Ai!)
The desk that would get off easiest would be sports, which is nicely stocked with a bunch of young reporters and relatively new columnists Vahe Gregorian and Sam Mellinger — both standouts.
**
Before I retired from The Star in 2006 — at age 60 and with almost 37 years of service — I had been hoping for a KnightRidder buyout. And then along came McClatchy. I remember vividly when then-CEO and president Gary Pruitt came into the newsroom to talk to us about his vision of The Star under McClatchy ownership.
Naturally, he saw panoramic horizons and clear blue skies. When he finished his spiel, he asked if anyone had any questions. I raised my hand.
“Mr. Pruitt,” I said, “are you planning on any buyouts?”
Many in the crowded newsroom laughed because they knew what I was thinking, and some of them were hoping for the same thing.
“Why, no,” Pruitt said, with a puzzled expression on his face. “When we buy properties, we plan on growing them…adding staff.”
Then, he smiled and said, “Why, were you hoping for something?”
…At that moment, I knew that I had to make my own plans and could not hang around and wait for money to fall out of the sky.
So, a few weeks later, I gave my notice, and three days after the McClatchy purchase closed (June 27, 2007), I walked out of The Star for the last time.
**
I worked with a lot of the editorial employees who are still at the paper. I like a great many of them, and I’m happy that some of them will get to “retire” before being shown the door.
Naturally, I worry what’s going to happen with my beloved newspaper, but whatever happens, we’ll keep getting our news somewhere. Not in the quality and quantity we used to get it…or even the current, diminished quality and quantity. But we will get it, and The Star will continue to muddle along.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Readers, I apologize for your inability to post comments up to this point. The “allow comments” box in my administrative area got inadvertently unchecked. It’s checked now, so fire away, if you want to weigh in.
If you had only waded through nine more years of misery, you’d have gotten your buyout! ;)
That’s a good one, Jason! (But I would have been laid off; I was a bureau editor, and all the bureaus were shut down.)
I guess you chose…wisely.
Shameless reference to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Mike Fannin owes Elvis Costello an apology for looking like him.
What about that guy on channel 9 that looks like Andy Dick? I think his name is Rosenberg. LOL
Photo added…but not of Elvis. This post is too serious for that.
What he said^^^^^.
The problem is that the wrong people are taking the buyouts. Guys like Everly take a hike leaving behind the Diuguids of the world to continue to suck the life out of the paper. Worse yet, every senior reporter who leaves takes with them an irreplaceable institutional memory of their coverage area.
Another question in my mind, in addition to the useless editorial board, do they still have too many chiefs for the dwindling supply of Indians? And why, in a time of scarce resources would you waste money on a position for a “public editor” or whatever they’re calling the Donovan kid these days. Everyone knows it’s a joke, so why bother?
John Altevogt hates Derek Donovan.
We get it, dude. But it’s fun to picture you moping around the house, kicking the dog, and muttering about Derek Donovan under your breath all day.
Anyway all fun aside: the whispers are that a major advertiser up and pulled out quite suddenly, taking a substantial portion of revenue with it.
But rumors is rumors.
Thanks, Buckpasser…John is a bit over the top about Derek, but Derek is, indeed, a pitiful readers’ representative. His columns are feathery and superficial.
He’s also got extremely thin skin, which you cannot afford to have when you’re taking slings and arrows from readers and others.
In 2010, for example, I wrote a post about The Star’s policy on corrections, and I sent Derek an email asking if he had any comment.
“Nope,” he wrote back, “I don’t have any comment. I learned the hard way that interacting with anti-Star bloggers is a losing game for me.”
As you can see his comment went well beyond “no comment.” And he didn’t say anything about his response being between him and me or “off the record.” He simply responded to a blogger’s question.
So, when I ran his “comment,” he was furious. He wrote me an email saying something like, “I can’t believe you quoted me on a personal, private email…I will never talk to you again!”
When you answer a blogger’s question, you’ve got to assume your response is not “personal and private,” unless you so specify. Fact is he fucked up by weighing in with his editorial dig, and it came back to smack him on the ass.
…John has carte blanche with me to slap Derek around all he wants.
What? I pointed out that Derek is a waste of resources. If you could have another good reporter by getting rid of Derek (or simply sending him back to the library) would you turn it down? He’s a joke at his current position precisely because of situations like the one Fitz had with him which I suspect is why they changed his title from being a Reader’s Rep to whatever it is now.
Same goes with the editorial board. Is anyone here prepared to trade a good reporter to keep anyone of those duds? It has nothing to do with hate in either case. I’m looking at it as a theoretical exercise about what can rationally be done to improve The Star. We all have a stake in having a good daily paper in town.
Oddly enough, the only two people I can think of that I actually hate are both in the same family, Milton Wolf and his goofy cousin Obama and what Miltie has made clear is that all of the things I detest in Obama came from his mother’s side of the family.
Finally, whatever I think I at least sign my name to it, something most of the folks who comment here also do to the great credit of the environment Fitz has created here.