Details are now clear on the newest round of Journal Sentinel downsizing. The number of people cut was smaller than past ones, especially in the newsroom, which lost six people. That’s small comfort, though, to a staff whose ranks are half what they were at the time the paper was created 16 years ago with the merger of the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel.
In the end, four took buyouts and one staffer was laid off involuntarily. Reporters Tom Held, Doris Hajewski, and Amy Hetzner accepted buyouts along with Bob Helbig, an editor in the business section.
Held was a general assignment reporter who in recent years has written extensively about personal fitness and cycling in a community that sometimes seems to be kicking and screaming at the prospect of making room for bicycles in its traffic patterns. Besides his writing for the paper on those and other topics, Held has been blogging on them for the paper at “Off the Couch” — and he’ll continue that in his post-JS career.
Hajewski, who is retiring, has covered retailing and advertising and seemed to be well-connected in that beat, where she created the paper’s “Shop Talk” blog. As she noted in her farewell post last month, she wisely resisted an editor’s urging to make the blog about “deals” and instead used it to offer up news morsels about the evolving retail scene.
Hetzner covered education, a beat that has seen even more turnover in reporters than the Milwaukee Public Schools have had in superintendents — or in touted programs to fix the school system.
Insiders report photographer Benny Sieu was the involuntarily released staffer. Also departing was a newsroom secretary.
In a statement to union members, Tom Silverstein, president of the newsroom union, Newspaper Guild Local 51, sharply noted the tendency to cut at the bottom instead of the top. “I’m hoping we can keep our current numbers stable, but as we’ve seen, the company is willing to squeeze the newsroom any time it feels like its financial numbers aren’t up to snuff,” he said. “I remain dismayed that, with few exceptions, the newsroom cuts have been aimed at bargaining-unit employees and not management.”
There were also two positions cut at JS Online, which isn’t covered by the Guild.
Knowledgeable sources say that the most recent buyout was less generous than past ones. It offered two weeks of pay per year of service, but particularly noteworthy is that instead of giving a lump sum, it’s being paid out in the form of a check every other week. That would appear to be a measure to reduce the upfront cost of the downsizing.
When will it end? No one really knows. Despite pockets of good news, like the emergence of a new delivery platform [R.I.P., Steve Jobs] that is making it possible for newspapers to charge for online delivery, the principal source of newspaper revenue – ad dollars – continues to decline, continuing a trend that goes back five years now.
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