Peoria Pundit

From a source:

“Today, Suresource Inc’s Peoria call center shuts down. As of 4pm, I and my fellow employees are unemployed.”

Here’s the scoop on Suresource, by way of their LinkedIn profile:

SureSource, LLC provides direct-to-consumer ecommerce solutions for brands. It offers direct channel planning, multi-channel commerce, merchandising, marketing programs, and supporting services. The company also operates and manages storefronts for consumer brands and licensed properties. In addition, it provides distribution, customer, merchant, search engine optimization, promotions, consumer surveys, and product registration services, as well as service plans. SureSource, LLC was founded in 1989 and is based in Shelton, Connecticut.

They have offices in the New York area and in Peoria.

And they have a spiffy Website.

My sympathies to the soon-to-be-unemployed.

UPDATE: This is not MY employer. My job is secure, the last I heard anyway. Three people have expressed sympathy to me today over having lost my job and they cited this post.

Via the Record Eagle:

TRAVERSE CITY — Ten staff members were let go at TV 7&4 as its parent company reported an “extremely challenging” business climate due to the economic downturn.

Nine full-time staffers, including some on-air positions, and one part-time job were eliminated by the local NBC affiliate this week, station president and CEO Jill Saarela said Friday. The station is owned by Barrington Broadcasting Group LLC based in Hoffman Estates, Ill.

Same old, same old at Peoria’s one and only newspaper of record.

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.