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Update: New round of buyouts includes Daily News AND Inquirer
Update: New round of buyouts at Daily News AND Inquirer--Inquirer to take the biggest cuts. But inside source says there is a sense of relief in newsroom because it could have been worse.
Update: New round of buyouts includes Daily News AND Inquirer
Yesterday, journalists at the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer were offered buyouts in the city's latest round of newsroom downsizing. According to a letter from Daily News management posted at poynter.org, “those eligible are all current full-time Guild Daily newsroom reporters, columnists, writers, editors, artists, photographers, copy editors, make-up persons and desk assistants.”
The buyout also includes The Inquirer, according to one newspaper employee who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the matter's sensitivity: three Daily News buyouts from any department and seventeen total from the Inquirer, including five “non-protected” positions (mostly management, like editors).
The buyout is open until September 21.
While we sometimes have scruples with the two dailies (that’s what puts the alt in alt-weekly), these papers serve a crucial watchdog role in Philadelphia. And they have incredible reporters, from Mike Newall’s crime writing and Chris Brennan’s inside look at local politics, to the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that uncovered rampant police corruption.
"It is certainly disheartening to see buyouts of journalists," Temple professor of journalism Andrew Mendelson writes to City Paper. "The buyouts are likely foreshadowing layoffs and other restructuring. This has been happening widely in journalism but it always seems worse when it is local (and many of the potential people affected by this are Temple alums) and at a publication that is more working-class-focused in its history."
This is one more sad day for Philly journalism, coming one year after The Philadelphia Media Network purchased the papers (and philly.com, with which City Paper has a content sharing agreement), which had gone into bankruptcy.
But perhaps it could have been much worse.
“I see this as a good thing, in that it gives us some idea of what the company is planning once the no-layoff clause expires at the end of the month,” according to an email from the anonymous source.
"Before this news yesterday, no one was sure how many people might be in trouble from that.
Now, we know that they're cutting (which people are obviously disappointed in considering how many cuts this place has gone through), but at least it's not a HUGE number. Any job losses suck, but losing 20 people out of hundreds isn't the apocalypse.
Anyone who thinks we can't put out great products with 20 fewer people is wrong.
As for feeling in the newsroom, I think there's a sense of 'waiting to see who's going to take it.' No one wants to lose a co-worker they've had for 10, 15, 30 years...but unfortunately that's going to happen for a few folks."
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