JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

The McClatchy Co., which has been mired in bankruptcy proceedings the last three months, is continuing to slash payroll and shove veteran newspaper people off its merry-go-round.

The latest cost-saving move was announced Wednesday: At the Tacoma (WA) News Tribune, both the publisher and the editor, with a combined 57 years of newspaper experience, were dumped.

Phelps

The ousted editor, Dale Phelps, has deep Kansas City roots. He graduated from Center High School and William Jewell College and spent 17 years in The Star’s sports department. For many of those years he was assistant sports editor.

Now, at about 60 years old, Phelps is faced with the prospect of retiring early or looking for work elsewhere. (I can tell him from experience that 60 is a good age at which to retire. Plenty of good golf left, if your health holds up.)

Phelps was appointed editor about three years ago by another Kansas City Star veteran, David Zeeck, who had risen to publisher of the News Tribune. Zeeck was lucky: He got to retire in December 2018, after 24 years in Tacoma. He and his wife, Valerie, purchased a home in Kansas City last year. (It wouldn’t surprise me if Phelps moved back, too.)

The ousted publisher in Tacoma was Rebecca Poynter, who succeeded Zeeck in January 2019. Poynter’s run in the publisher’s job turned out to be a measly 16 months. Like Phelps, Poynter, who is about 53, is faced with an uncertain future in the news business.

Last month, McClatchy announced the elimination of four executive positions, including another person who earned his spurs in Kansas City, Bryan Harbison. Harbison, a Kansas City area native, formerly was vice president of finance at The Star.

In recent years, McClatchy has fixed on a money-saving M.O. in which it replaces the editor and the publisher of a given paper with a new leader, who gets the title of president.

That’s what McClatchy did in Kansas City in October 2019, when Mike Fannin, then editor of The Star, was named president, and publisher Tony Berg was shuttled off to Wichita to become “president” of the Wichita Eagle.

The Star lost tons of credibility in its handling of Berg’s demotion by never mentioning Berg’s name or saying what happened to him in its story about Fannin’s ascension. Berg magically vanished.

Pedersen

McClatchy employed the same 1-for-2 tactic with its Tacoma move. The News Tribune’s new president is Stephanie Pedersen, who, according to her LinkedIn page, has exactly nine years of journalistic experience. She is about 35.

Before being catapulted into the top job at Tacoma, she was an editor for five years at the Ledger-Enquirer in Columbus, GA, and was executive editor at The Sun News in Myrtle Beach for four years. (Both are McClatchy papers.)

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All this moving and shaking within McClatchy is just a prelude to what could happen if and when McClatchy’s biggest creditor, the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, takes control of the company. Things seem to be moving in that direction.

A Feb. 14 story in The Washington Post summed up how bad things had gotten for McClatchy since its $4.5 billion purchase of the Knight Ridder chain in 2006…

“From the 2006 acquisition to 2018, McClatchy cut its operating expenses by nearly 60 percent. By mid-2019, it had cut 82 percent of full-time workforce from the time of the deal — shedding reporters, editors, photographers and other staffers across the country — going from 15,378 to 2,800. At the same time, advertising revenue fell by 80 percent and total daily print circulation fell 59 percent.”

Total number of employees down to 2,800. That’s just a few hundred more than The Star had as recently as about 15 years ago.

And watch out if Chatham decides to operate the chain rather than sell it off as a whole or sell individual properties.

If it looks grim now, it could be much worse in a year or two. There might not be anything left of the merry-go-round except the sound of a calliope.