Let me show you how The Star’s owner, McClatchy Co., conducts business in these days of newsroom salary contraction and staff reductions.
Over the last decade or so, since the Internet began killing newspapers, McClatchy has fixed on a cost- and newsroom-cutting formula. It generally revolves around hiring relatively young and inexperienced editors; putting them in big jobs that pay significantly less than what comparable editors were making a generation ago; then ordering them to preside over layoffs.
A perfect example of the strategy played out in northern California this week.
A year ago, 36-year-old Lauren Gustus was executive editor at the Fort Collins Coloradoan — owned by Gannett, another ball-busting chain — with an average Monday-Saturday circulation of about 16,800.
In other words, it’s a piddly paper.
Lauren Gustus
Always on the lookout for young, fresh meat, McClatchy snatched up Gustus last June and made her vice president and executive editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. And just like that it was…Welcome to the big time, baby!
With average weekday circulation of 75,000, the Star-Telegram is one of McClatchy’s largest papers.
Meanwhile, financial problems were brewing at McClatchy’s flagship paper, the Sacramento Bee — also known as the SacBee — and McClatchy executives needed somebody to come in and take out some bodies.
Who better than young Gustus? In February, then, Gustus, with all of eight months’ experience at a major metropolitan paper, was summoned to McClatchy headquarters in Sacramento and put in charge of all five of McClatchy’s California papers.
In addition to the SacBee, the jewels in her crown included the Fresno Bee, the Modesto Bee, The Merced Sun-Star and The Tribune in San Luis Obisbo.
The combined, average weekday circulation of those papers — including digital subscriptions — is about 226,000.
So, in less than a year’s time, Gustus had gone from overseeing a less-than-20,000-circ paper to five papers with more than a quarter of a million daily subscribers.
Hey, Lauren, welcome to the big, big, BIG time!
But no sooner had the hangover from the welcome party subsided than Gustus found a big, fresh turd on her plate…And so this week, under marching orders from HQ, Gustus announced the SacBee had laid off 23 employees — 15 editorial staff members (I read 14 elsewhere) and eight production people.
The casualties included business writer Mark Glover, a 34-year veteran of the paper, and Stephen Magagnini, a 32-year veteran who covered ethnic affairs, race relations and immigration.
In a letter announcing the layoffs, Gustus “told her colleagues the layoffs were part of a company restructuring seeking to foster greater collaboration between editorial staffers at different company papers.”
…What? Lay off people to “foster greater collaboration”?
Insane.
The letter went on to say several new people would be hired “with specific expertise to fill critical roles.”
Translation: Just as at The Star and other McClatchy papers, young reporters champing at the bit to break into the business would be hired to replace senior, high-paid employees with irreplaceable institutional knowledge.
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I wonder how Ms. Gustus feels this weekend…Dirty, used? Or that she had shown McClatchy executives she was up to the lofty status they had bestowed on her?
Maybe she feels a little of both.
Either way…welcome, Lauren, to the nasty business of journalism at failing, publicly owned newspaper chains.
