The news this morning wasn’t good. With the closing of the sale of the Honolulu Advertiser just days away, we finally got a clearer understanding of what’s going to happen. And it was in a story by Advertiser’s Rick Daysog.
Francis said yesterday that Star-Bulletin editorial staffers, who have a union contract, will be retained when the papers merge. In a filing with the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations last month, the Star-Bulletin said it could terminate as many as 150 Star-Bulletin workers once it completes its merger.
The company has not said how many Advertiser workers would be laid off when the merger is completed, but the cuts at The Advertiser could exceed those at the Star-Bulletin given the job redundancies at both papers, Cahill said.
So the Star-Bulletin staff will become the core of the remaining newspaper, due to their existing Guild contract, perhaps with a few Advertiser newsroom staff selected to fill particular niches.
There’s lots of dismal irony here for the long list of former S-B reporters and editors who jumped to Gannett’s Advertiser in search of stability and safety.
Remember a decade ago when David Black was warning about the dangers of becoming a one-newspaper city? He warned of higher advertising rates and lower news quality as a result of the lack of competition.
From the American Journalism Review:
The fight to save the Star-Bulletin was quickly framed as a battle against mammoth Gannett. Honolulu Weekly Magazine published stories revealing Gannett’s history of aggressive practices against competitors. Copies of Richard McCord’s book, “Chain Gang: One Newspaper versus the Gannett Empire,” were passed around as locals became well-versed in how Gannett allegedly “murdered” its competition in Green Bay, Wisconsin; Salem, Oregon; and other cities. Only twice had Gannett been beaten: in Little Rock, where its Arkansas Gazette was outgunned by the Arkansas Democrat and gave up; and in Santa Fe, where Robert McKinney, who had sold his New Mexican to Gannett in 1975, won it back after a court fight. The key question: Could Hawaii join them?
From my “been there, done that” file, here’s a flash-back to the days before the end of the JOA and closing of David Black’s purchase of the Star-Bulletin back in 2001.
What to expect from the new Star-Advertiser?
I’m unfortunately with the old adage: The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
I think we’re going to suffer from a deep news shortage. I would love to be proved wrong. One friend over at the Advertiser goes further, predicting it’s going to be a wild time with little reporting and even less accountability for those in positions of public and private power.
Molly Ivins might be saying, “hey, stealin’s in, boys!”
Moving on.
Over at the capitol, the 2010 legislative session will end on schedule tomorrow. And the memo has already gone out announcing that most office phones will be disconnected on May 15 and stay out of service until mid-December, when preparations start for the 2011 session. When the phones are unplugged, you know it’s over.
From a reader in response to yesterday’s look at Honolulu’s Clean Water and Natural Lands Commission:
Today’s report on Mufi’s end run is brilliant.
To continue the football metaphor your defensive positioning is well played indeed.
Thank you, for it is my world you are defending in reality.
I thank you,
my son thanks you,
my grandson thanks you,
my granddaughter thanks you.
And I thank you for sharing that thought.
Another of my short commentaries aired on Hawaii Public Radio this week. It was a rewrite of an entry here a couple of weeks ago. You can find a list of these commentaries and listen to any of them on the HPR web site.
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Looking at it another way, Gannett is finally getting what it always wanted: a monopoly. By virtue of the $40 million loan it is making to Black to finance the purchase, Gannett will be a de facto owner of the merged paper, at least until the debt is paid off. It sheds one of its few properties hampered, in its view, by competition and union contracts. I wouldn’t be surprised if it even bought the merged paper back some day.
Well, it trades the large liability (including the debt for the new printing plant) and instead gets an asset (the large IOU from Black). That’s a big shift on the corporate balance sheet.
It’s a pretty nasty assumption that the Star-Bulletin reporting staff will simply give up on its responsibilities. The SB staff, despite being half the size of the Advertisers and with a small fraction of the Gannett paper’s resources, has still managed to stay neck and neck with the competition in terms of coverage and awards. If we had given up, we would have gone to work for Gannett long ago.
Pretty smug assumption to think that so-called competitiveness had anything to do with this. The Bulletin lost the content race years ago, it has not been a viable product from day one of the Black era. It’s been getting charity journalism awards for years locally, on the impartial national level the Bulletin has been a complete no-show for the past decade. It is the loser paper, and it would not have to buy the more profitable paper to create a monopoly if it wasn’t.
There is some disgusting irony that the union contracts turn out to be the important factor here, when the Advertiser’s employees have been paying the lion’s share of the union dues since black decimated the Bulletin’s staff and cut pay.
This is a travesty in every sense of the word, and no amount of rationalization from petty newsroom snipers will change that.
I have been paying $12 per month at a time for the Bulletin because I don’t know how long it will exist. I am paid up til mid-May. Does anybody know how much longer the paper will exist?
I prefer the Bulletin to the Advertiser, so I only subscribe to the Bulletin.
I prefer the Advertiser. So this is indeed a bad, bad day.
As for how much longer the Star-Bulletin will exist, I believe Ian just confirmed for us that it will basically continue indefinitely. They’ll probably just slap an “Advertiser” on the nameplate where “Bulletin” is now.
Ummm…hey Koa, the SB reporters have earned more than the Tizer reporters for the last couple of years. I love the comment of “since Black decimated the Bulletin’s staff”. I believe it’s been fairly public knowledge that Gannett has not only cut the Tizer employee count by 100’s in the past couple years but fired nearly 10,000 employees company wide. Oh, and please tell us about the “national” awards the Tizer has won over the last decade? Must have missed those Pulitzer announcements. As for calling someone “petty”, your comments seem to strike that chord as well. Relax.
Nice try, but as THE POST I RESPONDED TO said, the Bulletin staff is still half the size, even after the layoffs. The pay concession only went into effect a year ago. There’s no two ways, the Advertiser staff has been funding the larger share of the union that Bulletin workers can now thank for their jobs while Advertiser workers get screwed.
Yeah the Pulitzer is the only national award, right? Good journalism requires staffing and resources, and the Bulletin just hasn’t had it. The Advertiser has been turning out the more compelling product for years. The subscriber and sales numbers prove it.
There’s nothing petty about gross injustice.
Koa, you forget that many of the Advertiser’s finer reporters and editors moved to the Advertiser when something like this happened back in 1999-2001. They are Bulletin trained staff, many of whom remain good friends with Bulletin staffers today.
As far as national awards go, you may not have been paying attention to recent news. The Bulletin’s Allison Schaefers is one of the three national winners of the prestigious Society of American Business Editors and Writers’ Best in Business Contest. So yes, there are national awards outside of the Pulitzer.
And many of those local contests? Many are judged by mainland journalists, like the Hawaii SPJ awards, just as Hawaii SPJ members judge mainland newspapers for their “local” contests.
I would agree with you this is a travesty. But your rhetoric does nothing to calm and quell the confusion and sadness that many are experiencing today, in both newspapers.
Funny you should mention Allison Schaefers … where did she work locally before the Bulletin? OH YEAH, the Advertiser.
I’m really, really worried about the lack of local investigative journalism that this is only going to make worse.
Having volunteer journalists like Ian is great, but we need people doing this to. I think it might be time to subscribe to some of the local magazines that support some such work.
Even though I was wary of the possible result of a Slom and Zimmerman purchase of the S-B, I liked the sound of what they said they wanted to do—local investigative journalism.
Looking back, the real winner is Thurston Twigg-Smith who sold The Advertiser at the right time for more than $100 million. The lesson in all of this is timeless: stay light on your vocational feet because the pace of change is accelerating.
For those who honestly believe the Star-Bulletin has stayed neck-and-neck with the Advertiser’s news coverage during past decade, do yourself a favor and ask more people who worked for the Bulletin newsroom during the past decade. Maybe you’ll actually hear the truth rather than just post your feelings and back them with weak arguments. Neck and neck — oh please.
Aaron,
You can glance at the Hawaii Reporter website if you want a taste of what Slom and Zimmerman consider “investigative reporting.” Or remember back to the days when Malia’s stories were published in PBN.
They might call it “investigative reporting,” but what you’ll get will be rightwing smear jobs.
The people who couldn’t handle doing journalism for the Star-Bulletin simply quit or went to the competition, it’s true. They weren’t pampered enough. It’s all about them, not about the product or serving the public.
This “Koa Millbrae” troll has registered burlidiocy.net as their Web address. Stay classy!
Most of the Tiser news staffers are NOT expecting to be picked up by the S-A. Once all the earlier layoffs are rehired, there won’t be many spaces.
But a few WILL be hired, and nobody’s sure who they might be. So until all is revealed, it would be smart for people to avoid making broad-brush characterizations of one newsroom or another. If there was ever a time when saying less is more, this is it.
Absolutely agree Nahoaloha, thank you. In this case, silence may in fact be golden.
I feel great concern that Honolulu’s only large newspaper will be owned by a non-American who possibly would not have Hawai’i or America’s best interest in mind. A good example is FOX news ownership resulting in “trash & sensationalism resporting” with tragic results….IGNORANCE!!!!
“The people who couldn’t handle doing journalism for the Star-Bulletin simply quit or went to the competition, it’s true”
Hmmmmm. So this applies to Daysog, Perez, Vaughn, Apgar, Ruel, Vorsino, Pang and many many others who left in the past decade. hahahaha. These people just couldn’t handle the Bulletin’s journalism! Not. Mahalo for posting your feelings and backing them with weak arguments. And good luck to ya in the declining publication business!