The Star-Advertiser certainly gave itself a glowing report card yesterday as it marked the first anniversary of the merger between Honolulu’s two rival daily newspapers.
Publisher Dennis Francis said the newspaper has been profitable since the beginning, they’re investing in upgrading technology and giving staff “all of the tools that they need to do their jobs well,” and even shared “$1 million or so” with the community. The result, Francis said, is that 82% of its readers are “satisfied” with the product.
Wow. I have to wonder whether we’re talking about the same newspaper.
Compare the rosy financial projection with the company’s stance in ongoing union negotiations, where the company seems to be trying to cut back, take back and, overall, talk “poor mouth.”
According to a “bargaining bulletin” dated May 27, 2011 from the new Pacific Media Workers Guild, created by the merger of several Hawaii and Northern California newspaper guild locals, the company is seeking:
• A 30% cut in paid holidays.
• Elimination of overtime for more than eight hours of work in a day. Overtime would only kick in after 40 hours per week.
• Reduction in number of vacation days, with a maximum of four weeks for workers with more than 15 years experience.
• A 50% cut in annual sick leave.
• Elimination of seniority as a factor in layoffs or recalls in all but a few cases, leaving management to consider “all relevant factors” in deciding who gets the axe.
• Larger share of medical premiums to be paid by employees with two-person or family plans.
The company is also offering raises of 1%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5% and 2%, a total of 7.5% over the five years of the proposed contract. That’s actually an increase from an earlier company offer.
Meanwhile, the Guild is asking for “adequate training” at company expense for anyone assigned to jobs requiring multi-media skills, including audio and video recording, and social media use, apparently reflecting that such training is not currently provided. The guild is also asking that no-one not originally hired to perform this kind of work be disciplined for “performance issues” related to the technology.
The company has rejected the Guild’s call for a two-year “no layoffs” deal, and four weeks advance notice, along with economic justification, before any layoffs.
At minimum, the Star-Advertiser’s negotiating stance seems quite at odds with the picture Francis attempted to paint of a profitable company looking at growth and prosperity in the year ahead, unless he’s figuring that the prosperity is going to come at the expense of their own employees.
Negotiations continue later this month.
And here’s another amazing little Star-Advertiser vignette, told to me by an old friend. He called the paper to talk to a reporter he knows, and his call was routed to the city desk. Then, according to my friend, he was rudely “grilled” by a woman he believes was a city editor, who demanded to know who he was, why he was calling, and why he wanted to talk to the reporter. Now, my friend was a well-positioned and knowledgeable source back when I was writing for the Star-Bulletin, and I’m sure he continues to be a good source today. He was stunned by the experience. Why in the world would city editors be aggressively inserting themselves into contacts between the public and reporters? Have they not heard of cultivating sources?
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On the other hand, my canary expressed complete satisfaction with the paper. Very functional.
Seems like the real David Black has come back to life. If this new union is anything like the Newspaper Guild we had at the Advertiser then I would say they have already lost the battle for a good relationship with the company and they should expect the worse!
Aloha Ian,
Any thoughts on the paywall they plan to erect?
I know it probably isn’t the most surprising news; but for all the glowing business stats from the report, their monopoly newspaper (that already dominates Ad sales) charging readers for web content seems a bit ambitious. Or maybe just too soon by my eye.
Thanks for the post,
Bobby
I’m surprised that Ian made no mention of this. I agree it isn’t the most surprising (the New York Times paywall, for example, becomes operative July 1) but the S-A ain’t the New York Times, to state the obvious.
I’m curious how it will work and look forward to seeing it discussed here.
I only read on line the few items that are of interest. Otherwise as a source of news SA is a looser..
Looser than what?
I’m about to cancel my subscription. There’s no way I can justify $52 every three months for that product.
I think it is very telling that your friend, a potential source of insider information, was grilled by a city editor, a seemingly inexplicable and inept practice. This sounds like a flashback to the centralized and paranoid yet fumbling “no leaks” Bush White House, or to Mufi Hanneman’s micromanaged yet totally disorganized stint as mayor.
This also shows the true colors of the Sadvertiser. The usual criticism of that paper is that it is a “typical pro-union liberal rag”. Well, it might be a rag. But the mentality behind the paper seems to be characteristically right-wing and reactionary, despite the populist and progressive rhetoric. So don’t believe the hype. What we find in the Sadvertiser — and perhaps in Hawaii — is almost a kind of “Peronism”, with a strong populist flavor tinged with xenophobia, along with centralizing and even authoritarian tendencies.
I’m not sure we have to stretch to “Peronismo” to explain the paper. Traditionally, frontline reporters have tended to be liberal. A good reporter has to be able to understand the motivations and lives of a wide variety of people, as well as tolerant of human foibles. This reinforces a liberal mindset.
Papers have almost always been owned by conservative publishers. The editors may fall anywhere along the political spectrum. They have to keep the publishers and, ultimately, the advertisers happy. But they also need to maintain credibility for the paper with the broader public.
In towns with multiple papers, there are incentives for individual papers to carve out a special niche demographic, so it is in their interest to develop different political voices.
The Star-Advertiser is a pretty good reflection of the “voice” of our “City Fathers,” the corporate outlook which guides governance, ensures continued corporate domination, engages in small-town “boosterism” for the main industries, tourism and military occupation. They set the bounds of “reasonable opinion,” which helps isolate more radical thinking about our problems.
The “paper” is “liberal” in the sense they support creativity in the arts, work against racist divisiveness and care (somewhat) for the protection of Hawaii’s natural beauty. They are not “pro-union” and can only be viewed as such by those with a more virulent anti-labor hostility. They preach the softer version of the anti-union perspective: “unions ONCE served a valid purpose, but are no longer a positive force. They still guard against some management abuses, but are more often a drag on the economy of upon managements ability to respond, flexibly, to changed economic conditions.” (This is NOT my opinion).
Since the unions are a fact of life, they prefer to not confront them directly, but rather undermine them through insinuation. Of course, “back in the day” when they now say unions WERE necessary, both papers were openly hostile to the unions.
I found it interesting that in its story praising its first year of operations the marketing director proudly alludes to the Star-Advertiser being No. 6 in readership nationally and reaches more than a “half-million Oahu” readers a day — all figures attributed to Scarborough Research. But, in a full-page ad in the A section, there’s an asterisk after that same claim, and at the bottom of the ad the Scarborough Research is said to be from 2009 and acknowledges the “Star-Advertiser reach is combined, unduplicated readership of Honolulu Advertiser and Star-Bulletin.” The Star-Advertiser should use its own numbers to sell to the public/advertisers rather than those from 2009 when there were two independent dailies. I highly doubt the Star-Advertiser, despite its best intentions, was able to maintain the Honolulu Advertiser’s readership numbers.
Has it already been a year since the Star-Bulletin laid me off, two days before the big merge (when I came in on my day off — again — to help them prepare)? My goodness, they grow up so fast …
This is disconcerting. I don’t know about the numbers, but I wish the newspaper, staff and management well and hope they’re able to work out their differences. The sacrifices we all made for more than a decade mustn’t be for naught.
A community needs a daily newspaper, and the online-only options, while valuable, don’t cover the basics of daily news reporting, such as cops, sports and breaking news. (That’s not a put-down — they have different business models.)
We need the Star-Bulletin.
Ian, perhaps you could foster a dialog here on just what it would take to get a really appeal online news source. I love Civil Beat, but the outlay is so boring and there is no spice to the variety of things to browse over. Even for someone as boring as myself who is not interested in sports or recipes or fashion, I like to see that kind of stuff on the fringes of the paper, kind of like walking through a good department store or shopping mall and soaking up the ambiance even though I am not shopping or even window shopping, just heading to the shoe store or the food court and then going home. I even miss advertisements because I am so used to them. I guess I like tinsel.
I think that there might be some overlap between Civil Beat and the alternative weekly crowd, so it would be nice to have a section on upcoming events and alternative lifestyle information and articles.
In terms of sports, there could be an unpaid blog on non-professional sports and not on big-money commercialized sports like college football (which is really semi-professional). This would help fill the news void for local coverage for sports like soccer and rugby, which are present but unaccounted for in the local media. Sports should be a matter of love, so lets keep the sports amateur and the coverage of the sports likewise unpaid for.
A tech writer would be nice, not the usual David Pogue or Walt Mossberg piece on the latest gadget, but in regards to policy, like developing serious tech in Hawaii, both as an industry and within government and academia here. The policy side of technology seems to be eclipsed by the fetish side.
And finally, if it bleeds, it leads. A couple of crime writers who report daily crimes but also get into particular cases and show how they relate to bigger issues would be welcome.
Let’s give the Honolulu Weekly and the SA a run for their money!
Thank you, Ian, for presenting the other side.
I am unhappy with the “paper,” but am not in a position to suggest what they could do better, given the economic pressures they are subject to.
I know several people who work there and I am very sympathetic to what they accomplish under difficult circumstances.
The Star-bulletin editor, at the behest of the very conservative publisher, destroyed the middle-of-the-road Op-Ed team nearly two years ago and replaced the staff with clueless know-nothings who parrot right-wing policy statements. They have no discernible personality except arrogance, and have no spine when it comes to real issues.
I think the S-A offers better benefits than my husband’s company does.
I didn’t realize that they have been giving MORE THAN 4 weeks vacation, so to me, limiting it to 4 weeks sounds great. How many companies offer even 4 weeks?
Also, overtime pay for working more than 40 hrs per week sounds great. My husband works from 7 am – 5:30 pm M-F and gets NO overtime pay!
Referring to more than four weeks of vacation is a red herring; the only workers receiving five weeks are those who have worked there for at least 25 years. I doubt there are many of those, especially with the management-forced turnover of recent years, and besides, after that much service they probably need that fifth week.
And comparing hourly wage workers to salaried employees is not a realistic comparison, as there are other factors at play. For example, I was one of the former at a newspaper for nearly two decades and unlike some salaried workers I’ve read about, never once saw a bonus, Christmas or otherwise. For those who are otherwise not compensated, paying overtime after eight hours is the only way of ensuring that very long working days don’t become the norm.
I believe you have to have worked there more than 20 years to get that extra week of vacation.
Dave is partly right. It’s 25 years of combined service — all journalism experience that’s credited to the employee, whether at that paper or another.
I saw this article yesterday morning, and I had to laugh at their “tooting their own horn.” I’ve seen this funny numbers game played before. I’ve long given up subscribing, but I do look at the online version daily. On and off, I see issues such as links in error for days at a time, strange page formatting, and worse, lack of news on an issue such as the record-breaking rain we had last weekend. More and more of the content is from other sources. I understand the economics of newspapers today, but if they are doing so well, why isn’t there better coverage on these things?
Nice to see they want to give raises though. I never saw anything of the kind in the 4+ years I worked there. In fact at the end, they wanted to cut my commission.