Copley Newspapers today (March 17) announced deep cuts in health care coverage for retirees. In trying to lure certain employees to take buyout offerings the last several years, the company had promised to pay 75 percent of medical coverage until the employee was eligible for Medicare. This will end March 31– giving these retirees only two weeks to plan. The company will cover 75 percent of the costs of COBRA, or temporary insurance, until the end of the year in most cases. COBRA permits employees leaving a company to continue group coverage, usually for a short period.

Publisher Ken Mauser said, “The layoffs were made in an effort to adapt to the changing nature of the newspaper business.”

Mauser declined to specify the exact number of jobs involved in Thursday’s action. The layoffs are effective immediately. The publisher did say that the personnel moves are part of a plan to strategically reposition the Journal Star.

Two paragraphs of corporate bullshit. Yeah, the “nature” of the newspaper business is changing from one in which the owners of a printing press in a monopoly market could pretty much print money to one in which they had to limit themselves to one yacht. And they are “strategically repositioning” the Journal Star from a somewhat quirky but good daily newspaper into the sort of rag that assigns their top columnist to write about lost dogs.

The names of the fired staffers will start rolling in soon. How the surviving reporters can possibly cover the remaining beats is beyond me. I expect them to eliminate the Monday edition before long, or outsource the copy editing to India.

But hey, the Journal Star might be firing, but Blog Peoria is hiring. I don’t pay anyone, but you can make a few bucks from Google AdSense if you get enough hits.

UPDATE: WEEK is reporting that the unions are reporting five newsroom employees and six from other departments.

UPDATE: I gather that not all of those who’ve been laid off have been notified. So, I’m not going to name any names for now. The union is supposed to be having an emergency meeting tomorrow to discuss wage concessions to prevent additional layoffs.

UPDATE: Reporter Kevin Sampier is among those shown the door. The loss of Circuit City as an advertiser is being cited as one reason for the cuts.

From the Turner Report:

Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicate that at a time when many GateHouse employees are wondering if they have will jobs a few months down the line, new President and COO Kirk A. Davis (pictured) will receive a base salary of $461,260.80. [Former chief operating officer Scott ] Champion’s base salary for 2007, according to a proxy statement filed with the SEC was $200,000. Even with $173,000 in bonus and benefits Champion made nearly $90,000 less than Davis’ base salary.

The SEC filing indicates Davis will normally receive four week paid vacation…except in 2009 when he will receive five weeks because he is carrying one over from 2008. Other benefits Davis will receive include vacation, sick leave, and participation in company medical and dental insurance programs. He will also be reimbursed for travel, meals, and accommodations, the proxy said.

Oh, and if he leaves the company for any reason OTHER than being fired for cause, he gets a year’s salary.

CEO Michael Reed earned $925,000 in total compensation in 2007,  which includes a half million in base salary. Of course, this doesn’t compare to the compensation he got in 2006, which was valued at more than $6.4 million.

Meanwhile, the company stock is selling for pennies a share and they just ended payments to employee 401(k) plans. And reporters are covering double beats because the company can’t afford to hire new reporters.

Let me suggest another focus for this column: A good reporter is a person who acts as a custodian of facts and operates with a discipline of verification despite working for news organizations that, as profit making businesses, all too often fail the primary purpose of journalism. A good reporter doesn’t let the MSM news organization strangle his good work and then sit on his ethical shoulders to take the credit for it. He finds a job in the new media instead.

I agree. The corporations that own the mainstream media think nothing of nickle-dicking their workers to death, knowing full well that many of their staffers will shrug their shoulders and soldier away as they cover multiple beats and work a few more hours off the clock to get the stories covered, thankful they still have jobs.

I worked for a newspaper organization — American Publishing Company — that was headed by the very same people who managed local GateHouse operations. This is how they operate. Their philosophy was the fewer reporters the better. They have had respect for the people to report the news. They didn’t value news all that much either, beyond meeting whatever minimum amount they feel is necessary to sell the ads.

This attitude didn’t suddenly spring into being when the stock price plummeted. This was the attitude that GateHouse’s business model was based upon: Own everything, reduce staff. Count on workers dedicated to quality journalism to continue to work their asses off. Profit.

Kirk A. Davis, who has overseen operations at GateHouse Media New England’s 118 publications and over 160 Web sites since 2006 has been appointed president and chief operating officer of GateHouse Media Inc., the parent company of the New England operations.

In his new role, Davis will be responsible for setting the strategic direction and overseeing all national operations of GateHouse’s 92 daily publications, more than 285 weekly publications and 260 locally focused web sites.

Dan Kennedy wrote in Media Nation:

I’ve interviewed Davis several times over the years, including, most recently, this past fall for a piece I wrote for CommonWealth Magazine. He is smart, passionate and an inveterate optimist.

I’m not sure anyone is up to the task of saving GateHouse — or, for that matter, the newspaper industry in general. But Davis is not someone I’d bet against.

cc

President-elect Barack Obama is urging Congress to postpone the Feb. 17 switch from analog to digital television broadcasting, arguing that too many Americans who rely on analog TV sets to pick up over-the-air channels won’t be ready.

Yeah, that’s just great. More months of scary, misleading ads.

* WHOI’s Tim McGinnis has a daddy/tech blog.

* Progress Illinois has been putting up YouTube clips of FOXNews being, well, FOXNews. FOXNews asked Google to pull the vids down, and Google, being the sheep that they are, complied. So ProgressIllinois is gonna sue. The difference between this and what GateHouse is doing to the New York Times is that ProgressIllinois is actually engaging in fair use to make comments about FOXNews, politics and news.

A Fox Chicago spokesperson said the media company issued the takedown notice because it believed the material violated its copyright.

But Kalven said that the brief clips constitute a fair use of Fox material. “These were not full segments from Fox broadcasts,” he said. “They were clips and snippets from longer reports and they were generally accompanied by links to their Web sites. We tried to drive traffic their way.”

Paul Alan Levy, a lawyer with consumer rights group Public Citizen, said the clips appeared to constitute fair use, based on the publicly available knowledge about them. Specifically, he said, the clips apparently consisted of relatively brief excerpts of longer broadcasts, and were non-commercial. “Under those circumstances, it seems like it would be pretty hard for Fox News to prevail,” Levy said.

Tomorrow’s Cannonball Friday programming is available online here. Well, probably. Or some site like it.

Here’s the story in a nutshell: GateHouse runs local Websites out in Massachusetts called “Wicked Local.” In fact, GateHouse has a history of putting a lot of emphasis on the Web, and they’ve been pretty successful out there. Well, the Boston Globe — owned by the New York Times Company — has launched some competition, a site called “Newton.”

The site includes links to articles from GateHouse newspapers, as well as a paragraph from the articles in question.

In other words, The NYT is doing to GateHouse what I do the Journal Star (owned by GateHouse). I link to articles and include one or two (maybe three or four) paragraphs. Here’s the difference: I’m not competing with the Journal Star. And I generally offer some commentary of my own.

The online world has responded mostly negatively to the suit. David Carr of Seeking Alpha practically accused GateHouse of being a bunch of Luddites:

I am not making this up. If this sounds like a court case that might have occurred in the early 1990s, when sites of all kinds were just getting used to the Intarwebs, that’s because it is virtually a carbon copy of some of those early cases. The argument in a nutshell is that GateHouse is mad because the Times (or rather, the Boston Globe, which is owned by the same company) is “scraping” its headlines and the first paragraph of stories, and then “deep-linking” to the stories themselves, thereby copying the site’s content and stealing its traffic (as Mike Masnick at TechDirt points out, GateHouse is also apparently suing for breach of contract, because its articles are Creative Commons-licensed, but with a non-commercial license).

Jeff Javis was especially harsh:

The more I think about it, the angrier I get at Gatehouse for its dangerous and hypocritical crusade against links.

Links are the bloodstream of the web, carrying its oxygen. Links are how original journalism will get audience, traffic, branding, attention, credit, and monetization. Links are a gift and a courtesy. Links are the means to better-informed communities. Links tie people together with each other and the information they need. Links are necessary. Links are good.

And:

So what should happen here? Should Gannett sue Gatehouse? Should we all just sue each other for linking to each other – for doing what the web is all about?

Look, GateHouse certainly isn’t a very sympathetic character. But I think Jarvis is refusing to see both sides in this.

But I found one blogger, j-blogger Noah Bombard, who sees where GateHouse is coming from:

The GateHouse suit addresses not so much the linking to their content, but what in some cases appears to be the almost exclusive use of its content to populate a site the Globe is theoretically making money on. Without GateHouse content, the site would be much more sparsely-populated. GateHouse alleges they’re doing all the work by reporting on local issues and news while The Globe is doing little more than putting up their own site and taking GateHouse content.

Well, when I visited Newton today, I saw only two links from any Wicked Local site, so it wouldn’t be all THAT scarcely populated. Still, there is something uncouth about a news organization with the resources of the New York Times Company creating a ad-laden portal page that’s based almost entirely made up of content from other news sites and blogs. I don’t think Newton is anything like a search-oriented news aggregation site like Google News, and it sure isn’t some blog using “fair use” to  comment on the local media.

In other words, I don’t blame GateHouse for being mad as Hell.

He also noted that stock for Nexstar Broadcasting, parent company to WMBD 31 in Peoria, dropped 32 cents to $1.04 per share Thursday.

The newspaper company has launched a news operation in a town where the local (non-GateHouse) paper had largely ignored the web: Batavia, New York.
TheBatavian.com is an online news site that’s all local and 100% paper-free. By eliminating one of the greatest sources of expense – the printed paper – the startup in Batavia increases the chances of breaking even and – imagine that – making a profit in a business far too many people are writing off as too expensive.

I’ve been saying this for years. It costs just too damn much to deliver news on paper. The Internet is cheaper. A newspaper’s value isn’t the paper itself, but the news that’s printing on it. Instead of making readers subsidize the cost of printing and delivery, just have them pay a small subscription fee to get the news from the Web.

Here’s the problem. There’s no change at all to use The Batavian. There is just one ad. So, they aren’t making any money right now on it. And they have to compete with the newspaper.

So here’s my challenge to GateHouse — although it really isn’t if you think about it. Instead of looking for markets where the newspaper of record isn’t taking the Web seriously, trying going all online in a market where GateHouse owns the newspaper of record. That means closing the print version, and selling ads and subscriptions. The only “challenge” is having the guts to be the first do it. But without any real competition, success is more likely than it is in Batavia.

Here’s an idea: LINK to the award-winning entries, if possible.