Blogatology

Now you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough, rich enough to forget my name
— Bruce Springsteen, “Youngstown.”

The newspaper business is changing, and not for the better, spinning into an abyss in which the only answer to its problems is less of everything — less people, less space, less commitment to doing anything other than hobbling along until the next round of reductions.

Yesterday — Tuesday, Feb. 16 — I was a victim of that change.

I was supposed to be off, but received an e-mail on Monday asking me to come in for a 1 p.m. staff meeting.

When I walked in the office, no one else in the sports department knew of any meeting. I guess that should have been the first sign, but I just put it down to the usual flaws in communication.
But a few minutes before 1 o’clock, when the top guy on the editorial side tapped me on the shoulder and said he needed to meet with me in HR, I knew. I pretty much slid into shock, but I knew.

At this point, layoffs in the newspaper are never a surprise. I’ve certainly talked about the possibility with friends, and I’ve seen plenty of other friends fall victim to the relentless cutting. The paper laid off 20 percent of its staff in November 2008, rolled back our salaries, and instituted a pay freeze. And I’ve watched the carnage around me at every other L.A. area paper.

But last week, the company announced a stunning new plan to take its three West Coast properties and eliminate all the copy desk and page design people — the staff members who take the stories from people like me, decide where to put them on the page, write the headlines and edit for errors.

Instead, a “universal copy desk” will be created in South Texas to handle those chores. Those people won’t have any local knowledge of the places they’re reading about, or for whom they’re writing headlines. And they won’t know their “coworkers” on the west coast, because they’re 1,500 miles away and have never met them. (There may be one or two people who accept the offer to re-apply for their jobs and relocate to Texas, but clearly, there won’t be many.)

This decision will wipe out 15 jobs at our paper, three in sports. (I say will because the jobs won’t be eliminated until May or June when they get this system set up.) I’ve worked with all three of them for years, one of them since 1985 when I was hired.
I felt awful for all of them, sickened by what it meant for the paper, and — like almost everyone else in the newsroom — saw it as the beginning of the end for the paper.
But I also figured that had to be it for the grinding, morale-killing changes. Whacking that many jobs in one spot had to be enough for a while, didn’t it?

I could not have been more wrong. Which is why I was stunned as I made that walk to HR.

“This can’t be good,” I finally said to the editor.

“I’m sorry, it’s not,” he said as we went into the little room.

The HR director was waiting, along with chairs for the editor and me, and a manila envelope.

The meeting was brief, mostly because I was stunned. I was told the envelope contained the “involuntary separation plan,” information on filing for unemployment, and my final paycheck — two weeks’ pay en lieu of two weeks’ notice, plus settlement of outstanding vacation time. And details of the severance package — which could be worse, but could obviously be a whole lot better for someone cast out into a state with 10 percent unemployment, and a resume of work in a dying industry that dates to age 14.

They offered the usual words of regret. Probably they even meant them.

The only question I asked was about the possibility of applying for one of those jobs in South Texas. They indicated that would be a possibility — but that signing the severance documents might complicate it, so I should hold off on doing so.

I doubt the meeting lasted five minutes. I walked back into the sports department, announced that I had just been laid off, and walked back to my desk — or the desk that had been mine until a few moments before. A couple of the guys indicated how sorry they were, but knowing how impossible it is to say anything truly meaningful at that point, they didn’t say much.

Initially, I planned to clean my desk out then and there, but I realized pretty quickly that I just needed to go. I’ll go back for my things later.

I closed the e-mail I’d been reading, posted the news on Facebook that I’d just been eliminated, and gathered up my 2008 U.S. Olympic Media Summit backpack, a memento of the last gasp of good times.

I said a couple of goodbyes, and received long, sorrowful hugs from Jean and Marjorie — and from Joseph, a photographer. That caught me by surprise, but I appreciated it. Jean walked me to my car. We talked for a few minutes, and then I got into the car and drove away.

I was one month and three days from the 25th anniversary of my hiring, wondering what comes next for a 50-year-old sportswriter.

More to come …

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 4:17 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.