The Oregonian's parent company has rescinded a long-running "no layoffs" promise, according to Editor & Publisher this morning. News comes after the Oregonian offered generous buyouts for long-serving staff last August:
Publishers at the chain's 20 daily newspapers, which include The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.; The Oregonian in Portland, the Staten Island (N.Y.) Advance and The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, broke the news to staffers Wednesday."We wanted to communicate to employees that this is coming," said Steve Newhouse, chairman of AdvanceNet, the chain's online division, and a member of the Newhouse family, the company's longtime owners. "We have had a pledge not to layoff employees for economic conditions or advances in technology."
But Newhouse said recent industry problems have forced the company to rescind the pledge. He said staffers are being told today that the pledge will remain for six more months, and then layoffs could occur.
Sounds like Valentine's day could be a downer next year. So: What does the Oregonian need to do to get its head back above water? Few know it, but I am secretly a business consultant working for McKinsey & Company in my spare time, as well as an undercover FBI agent who sometimes receives messages from God through his teeth. With such credentials I should be able to turn a major daily newspaper around in a jiffy, so here's my quick and dirty prescription:
1.Cut all wire copy from the printed edition. You're wasting ten eight six four pages every day on content that most of your readers can hear about on TV, or read on the interwebs. I don't care what your "older, rural" readers say—tell them to suck it up and get broadband.
2.Quit the videos. Nobody wants to watch videos on your website, so why bother trying to up the video content? To sell advertising? On something nobody's watching? You're not a TV station.
3.Invest in your local, long-form coverage. Nobody else can afford to pay a different writer to research and write 4000 words on a given subject five times a week.
4.Cut the "business" section. Most of it's from the wire, anyway. Run your next Pulitzer package on Oregon's (struggling) "Pioneer Economy," instead.
5.Get some arts writers who don't write sentences like "The blissful hand-holding and considered, thoughtful architecture is enough to make one seek the audacious, if not to disrupt the potential for entropy then to shake things up in a design and architecture landscape stirring for more."
6.See 5. Seriously. Get people who sound like they actually live in this city and state.
7.Your beat reporters are awesome. Tell them so. And push their blogs and opinions harder. I like nothing more than seeing what an experienced beat reporter thinks on a given subject.
8.Are you still sending your sales staff on a ski trip with their clients once a year? Oh, you quit that. Well then, hire Alec Baldwin to give 'em a motivational speech over lobster. "How much does that cost," you ask? Just melt down a few pair of Fred Stickel's cufflinks. It'll right Jack Lemmon's morale, a touch.
9.Hire some new reporters. When was the last time there was a new face in your news room? God knows you hardly even need to pay them, these days! They would bring needed energy, a sense of the future, and of course some hip clothes.
10.Push: Xanax, Zoloft, Effexor, counseling. Repeat.
11.Stop acting like it's the end of the world. We can all have a little party while the ship goes down, can't we? But if everyone's going to insist on being morbidly depressed, at least restrict it to "the world's gone to shit Fridays." Have four motivated days of the week.
12.Your publisher. Wonderful man. But perhaps he's getting a little old for this? That's probably illegal, what I just said. But you know, there are ways around the labor laws...
13.The Kindle is going to do NOTHING for anybody. Forget it. In fact, you could do worse than publish the entire paper on old-fashioned presses at the IPRC. Market it as "vintage," get your newly-hired arts writer to wax lyrical.
13 was weird. So I think that's probably enough advice for the time being. Still, I'm not disputing that the Oregonian is a grand old institution in this town. There's a feeling, walking past the offices, that it's been around forever. That it will always be around, in some form or other, and I'm glad. But now's the time for some bold moves over there. God told me so this morning, through my teeth. Your further prescriptions are of course solicited in the comments.
