Saturday, June 07, 2008

Where there's smoke...

A couple of weeks ago I posted about an email that I received claiming that 230 layoffs were coming at 1 Herald Plaza. Well now Miami New Times editor Chuck Strouse is reporting that there's more smoke with regards to the possible layoffs fire:

Rumors have been swirling around the newsroom for the last two or three weeks that McClatchy is considering a 10 to 15 percent cutback in Miami and Broward – which could mean as many as 50 members of the newsroom staff – which is somewhere around 320 – according to sources familiar with the budgets...

At least one staff member has approached Herald editor Anders Gyllenhaal with the idea – and he responded noncommittally. “He really didn’t know what to say,” the Herald staff member recalls.
Bob Norman has more at The Daily Pulp (which incidentally has not put Herald Watch on his blogroll despite the fact that he's been on mine since the inception of this blog).

H/T to McClatchy Watch for the Pulp link.

3 comments:

Richard Jennings said...

Yes things seem bad statistically but like my dad always said, it only takes one person's will to get a job and one person is not a statistic. Lots of 100K jobs -

http://www.realmatch.com
http://www.monster.com
http://www.6figurejobs.com

See!

Anonymous said...

Richard,

If you have one job opening for every 200 layoffs, the statistics tend not to add up.

Henry Louis Gomez said...

Carlos,

I'm sure it was tough for blacksmiths when steel mills came along but if we had worried about preserving their jobs we'd still be riding around in Horse & buggies. We live in a dynamic economy and you have to change and adapt your skills to what that economy requires.

The Herald's failure to embrace the future is what's causing these layoffs. The internet has been around for mass consumption for more than a decade now, plenty of time for execs at 1 Herald plaza to determine a course of action that would preserve the institution. Instead they attempted to preserve to a distribution model this IS GOING AWAY like it or not.

That and alienating and attacking its readers is what's causing all this pain now.