No reader, writer or subject of the Journal Star should escape the poignancy of Sandberg being to sole dissenting vote to Midtown and it being the underfunded monthly and unpaid freelancer that were on the right side of this issue. But I draw a parallel to Midtown being reamed through the asses of the little people over the prophetic words of one councilman around the same time that the same councilman was one of the only Peorian’s who volunteered to drive to Springfield and testify on my behalf before the ARDC.

Losing sucks. But even that day, the losing before a panel of three “judicial administrators” who reminded me of the city staffers, mayors and other councilpersons before whom Sandberg routinely scored his 1 to their 10, there was that special comraderie only felt only by those who are knowing that they are going to go down, but that history will record that they went down together and that they went down for the side of right.

I don’t recall the number of attorneys who told me before and after my experience with the ARDC that they would never even represent someone before the ARDC because they felt it would have the potential of causing a liability for them with the attorneys within the ARDC who could more directly affect their livelihood and families than any other person. After, my own attorneys admitted that they pulled their punches with the ARDC for the exact same reason.

But the “press”….. Admit it…it is the exception to have a kid with more than a mediocre SAT to end up in a school of journalism. At least it was that way by the time I went to Bradley University. And the so called journalists of Peoria had not the intellect to comprehend the legal arguments, the moral insight to suspect the broader motivations behind the conflict I was in, nor the backbone to stand up and ask questions rather than simply defaulting to authority.

I often wondered how my story and Sandbergs would have gone if Jim Baker had been around. To this day the best reporting I have received in Peoria, not just regarding my circumstance, but that on many issues has been from an overweight, overworked and completely unpaid blogger who shall remain nameless.

So I would close my rant with a paraphrase of a famous stanza:

they came for Midtown and I analyzed nothing;
they came for Sandberg and I said thought nothing;
they came for Ingersoll and I defended nothing:
finally, they came for my job and since I had no readers…..I was left with nothing.

Employees did, ultimately, get to vote on the proposed sale to Copley, based on the number of shares they owned in the Peoria Journal Star, Inc. That only happened after The Newspaper Guild and Mailers Union had their attorneys send a letter to the publisher threatening a lawsuit if there wasn’t a vote. (The unions themselves apparently had no standing to sue, but they would have bankrolled the litigation on behalf of all employee-owners.) The vote to sell to Copley was unanimous, or very nearly so.

I did OK in the sale and can’t complain. But the seeds of the sale were sown in the way the ESOP was constructed in 1983. Majority owner Henry Slane made sure that the biggest beneficiaries were longtime managers. It was his paper, and he could do what he wanted, but different provisions might have led to a more durable plan.

I’ve often asked myself the last three or four years what things would be like if the paper were still employee-owned. Frankly, I think employees would be in a panic. The huge recent declines in newspaper stocks would certainly be reflected in the annual appraised values of the Journal Star and, therefore, in its share price.

For all its virtues, an ESOP is basically a 401(k) plan invested in the stock of one company, which the shareholders also depend on for their paychecks. To find out how devastating an ESOP gone bad can be, just do a Google search for “Foster & Gallagher.”

http://people.forbes.com/profile/william-l-stakelin/67622

Stakelin is the CEO of Regent Communications, btw, another company trading stock at pennies per share, and owners of five radio stations in the Peoria market.