Check out some of these numbers at the New York Times Co., courtesy of the Boston Herald:
About $6 million in total compensation each for chairman Arthur Sulzberger (up more than 150 percent over 2008) and president Janet Robinson (up 32 percent).
About $2 million for former Boston Globe publisher Steven Ainsley.
Just for the heck of it, let’s assume Sulzberger and Robinson, in deference to their company’s problems, had decided to get by with a paltry $1 million apiece in 2009. Ainsley, too. That’s $11 million — or 55 percent of the $20 million in union givebacks the company extracted from the Globe’s unions. We are talking about three people.
No question the Globe needed to downsize and reinvest in new technologies. No question it couldn’t support nearly as many staff members as it had once employed.
But the bonuses show, in case there was any doubt, that the cuts in pay and benefits was, for management, a war of choice, not of necessity.
The 12 people who actually care are offended that Charlie Baker won’t be attending the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in South Boston. Good for him.
Desirée Rogers, in White House kitchen, is to Michelle Obama's immediate right.
The New York Times fronts an article by Peter Baker on the ugly departure of White House social secretary Desirée Rogers. Go ahead and call it a classic “Who cares?” story, but I’m shallow enough to admit it’s the only one I’ve read in the Times so far today.
What really hit me, though, was this:
And while she [Rogers] is unwilling to discuss her story publicly, several associates shared her account in the belief that her side has been lost in the swirl of hearings, backbiting and paparazzilike coverage.
Go ahead and read the story. I have no doubt that Baker did, indeed, interview “several associates.” But it also seems crystal-clear that Rogers sat down with Baker and gave him an extensive interview, all of it premised on an agreement that she would not be quoted either by name or on a not-for-attribution basis. I believe that’s called “deep background” — not that there’s any agreement on what the term means.
The whole point to such an exercise is to provide Rogers with plausible deniability, and I don’t think Baker did that. Of course, assuming Baker stuck to their agreement, that’s Rogers’ problem, not his. Still, from an ethical point of view it’s at least worth chewing over.
A final caveat: I am, of course, guessing at what happened. It’s possible that Baker got Rogers’ side solely on the basis of interviews with her friends, and that she herself refused to speak with him. But that’s not how it looks from here.
The pain keeps on coming at CNHI, a Birmingham, Ala.-based newspaper chain that owns four Massachusetts dailies: the Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, the Daily News of Newburyport, the Salem News and the Gloucester Daily Times.
On the heels of a holiday furlough several months ago, Yvette Northcutt, the company’s vice president of human resources, is now telling employees they must take five unpaid days off between April 1 and June 30.
CNHI, as you may know, exists mainly to provide Alabama schoolteachers with a comfortable retirement. Those of us who live on the North Shore or the Merrimack Valley can ponder that the next time we wonder why an important local event didn’t get covered.
The full text of Northcutt’s memo follows:
We have chosen to implement reduced work schedules for hourly employees and reduced work schedules and pay reductions for salaried employees in the second quarter of 2010. The details are described below:
We will implement a reduced work schedule for hourly employees during the second quarter of 2010. All hourly employees must take five days off without pay between April 1, 2010 and June 30, 2010. It is expected that no work will be done during this time. This applies to full and part-time employees. Part-time employees’ work schedules will be reduced on a prorated basis. These days must be taken during the second quarter, and regular vacation, personal and sick days may not be substituted for these unpaid days.
A reduced schedule will also be implemented for salaried employees during the second quarter with a corresponding reduction in pay. Salaried employees already affected by the first-quarter pay reduction will simply see their current base salary roll forward. The second-quarter pay reduction will be applied over all pay dates occurring during the second quarter. In turn, salaried employees must take five days off between April 1, 2010 and June 30, 2010. Under this plan, the days off will not reduce the employees’ existing allotment of regular vacation, personal and sick days. Regular vacation, personal and sick days may not be substituted for these additional days off.
We are asking our unions to voluntarily agree to similar arrangements for the employees they represent. If our unions agree, this will help us avoid future layoffs.
In order to ensure staffing needs are met, these off days must be planned and approved in advance. Please submit the attached Request for Second Quarter Days Off form to your manager by March 15, 2010.
Thank you again for your hard work, dedication and support. Please contact Human Resources if you have any questions.
Media Nation has received a copy of an internal memo sent to GateHouse Media publishers by company executives with regard to the odd case of Claire O’Brien, the Kansas reporter who was fired in the midst of a dispute over confidential sources (earlier coverage). The text of the memo is as follows:
DATE: March 10, 2010
TO: GateHouse Publishers
FROM: Polly Grunfeld Sack
Brad Dennison
Gloria Fletcher
Stephen Wade
RE: Recent Developments at the Dodge City Daily Globe
As many of you know, Dodge City, Kansas reporter Claire O’Brien is no longer with GateHouse. Since leaving the company, Ms. O’Brien has made some accusations to the media that we strongly deny. They simply are not accurate. She has also made some gross misstatements of fact.
As a company we respect our employees’ privacy rights and are bound to confidentiality with personnel matters. Out of respect for the law and Ms. O’Brien’s privacy, we have chosen not to comment publicly in the press. It is not the proper forum in which to deal with personnel issues. Nor can we, in a memo such as this, address each such erroneous statement.
But we can assure you, without violating any privacy or confidentiality concerns, that GateHouse Media vigorously stood behind Ms. O’Brien during the recent, highly publicized court case, all at our cost and expense.
Recent developments are absolutely not related to any part of that legal battle.
Is North Shore congressional candidate William Hudak putting words in U.S. Sen. Scott Brown’s mouth again?
According to the Salem News, Hudak, a right-wing Republican who once posted signs in his Boxford yard comparing Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden, was the source of a rumor that former lieutenant governor Kerry Healey would run for Congress — a rumor that a former aide to Healey quickly denied.
Hudak, in turn, said he got it from Brown, whose staff would not confirm it.
Hudak, of course, got into trouble when he claimed that Brown had endorsed him the day after Brown’s victory in the special Senate election. Hudak has apologized, but he has never explained why he thought it was all right for his campaign to put out a press release falsely quoting Brown as saying, “Bill was with us from the beginning and is the representative the people of the 6th District need.”
The Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy writes an absolutely toxic column on Nomar Garciaparra, and I can’t say I disagree with all of it. But then there’s this, about the 2004 injury that contributed to his being shipped out of town several months later:
He developed Achilles’ tendinitis, allegedly after a ball hit him in the batting cage (nobody witnessed this).
There’s only one way to read that: Shaughnessy thinks Nomar might have been faking it. Why? Garciaparra was always hurt. There’s no reason to think that particular injury was any different. But Dr. Dan knows better, I guess.
There’s a fascinating story in GlobalPost today about a Vermont native named Theo Padnos, who moved to Yemen, pretended to have converted to Islam, and studied among radical Muslims for some period of time. Padnos explains:
I wanted to know about the Quran. I wanted to know about spiritual experience in Islam. I wanted to travel across the nation. I wanted to do all the things that the converts wanted to do. I just did not believe in the god and the prophet and all that stuff.
Among Padnos’ fellow students was Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, formerly Carlos Bledsoe, who later killed a soldier and wounded another at a U.S. military recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark., last June.
To be sure, Padnos’ tale is an unlikely one. So I was especially impressed with the efforts GlobalPost and reporter David Case undertook to verify it.
Paige Compositor. For more photos (including Mark Twain in Legos!), click on image.
Last week I had a chance to attend the premiere of “On Deadline: Is Time Running Out for the Press?”, a documentary about the near-death and uncertain rescue of the Bristol Press and the New Britain Herald, both in Connecticut.
The papers were owned by the Journal Register Co., which, as it was entering bankruptcy in late 2008, threatened to shut them down if a buyer couldn’t be found. (The company, whose largest Connecticut paper is the New Haven Register, exited bankruptcy in August 2009.) The papers were saved by Michael Schroeder, a veteran newspaper executive who, among other things, was a top executive at BostonNOW, a free tabloid that until its demise competed with Metro Boston.
The future of the Press and the Herald is by no means certain; Schroeder made that clear in both the film and in a subsequent panel discussion. But at least the papers have a path forward. The film itself, by John and Rosemary Keogh O’Neill, was enjoyable and worth seeing if you ever get a chance, though I found the drama over the papers’ fate more compelling than the overly nostalgic views of the newspaper business that were expressed by the principals. (Here is the trailer.)
In a delicious irony, the film made its debut at the Mark Twain House, in Hartford, a shrine to a great writer who, among other things, nearly went bankrupt because of his own involvement with the newspaper business. In the 1880s Samuel Clemens sank a fortune into the Paige Compositor, which he believed would make him a very wealthy man, given that it was 60 percent faster than the Linotype machine. The Paige, though, was prone to breakdowns, and it never caught on.
Technology has always been an issue in the newspaper business. It was the rise of cheap, high-speed presses in the 1830s that created the daily newspaper business as we know it. And, of course, it’s technology that is now rapidly ushering us into the post-newspaper age.
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that if Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick loses his re-election bid this fall, as seems very possible, it will tell us precisely nothing about President Obama, despite their surface similarities. The reason is that Patrick’s political troubles, largely of his own making, go back to the earliest days of his administration in 2007.
