Friday, November 14, 2008

Flint Journal on the Booth restructuring

Following is the brief business headline item that ran Thursday about the new round of buyouts. I will give credit that at least this time they reported on their own news.


Flint Journal among eight Michigan newspapers to do restructuring, consolidation that includes buyout offers to workers
by The Flint Journal
Thursday November 13, 2008, 10:45 AM

Steve Jessmore | Flint Journal file photo
The main office for the Flint Journal in downtown Flint. (photo at website)

FLINT, Michigan -- The Flint Journal is continuing a strategic restructuring to streamline costs and continue its mission of providing readers and advertisers with a strong local news package, Publisher David Sharp announced Wednesday.

The Journal and seven commonly owned papers (The Ann Arbor News, The Bay City Times, The Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle and The Saginaw News) will consolidate some operations and offer voluntary buyouts to affected full-time employees.

News gathering and advertising opportunities so vital to a local paper will continue at The Journal and the other newspapers. The restructuring will also allow for more innovation on The Journal's affiliated Web site, mlive.com.

Economic conditions have led to the restructuring.

(Blog editor's note: The photo credit is Steve Jessmore, one of the finest photographers - and people - I have worked with was a 2007 buyout recipient.)

The link to the article and photo is:

http://www.mlive.com/flintjournal/business/index.ssf/2008/11/flint_journal_among_eight_mich.html

A blogger at the Jackson Citizen Patriot was writing about the cuts Wednesday but then took down the information, he left this comment:

Never mind
Posted by bflory November 12, 2008 11:05AM
An optical illusion: Some of you may have thought you read something different here earlier today. You may even have thought there was a link to some guy in Ann Arbor. Obviously, you were mistaken.

You can see it for yourself at:

http://blog.mlive.com/bradosphere/2008/11/big_inside_cit_pat_news.html

You can read what he originally wrote at the Paper Tiger No More link to the right and click on the article: "Nope, False Alarm"

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Jim: you probably know who this is but I'll keep myself anon anyway. Question: for the new reporters at the Flint Journal (I had applied this summer to work at the Flint Community News, only to be passed over for younger reporters), how are they being handled? Is it an issue that their pay is so low the paper can afford to keep them on?

I had told my wife around June or so that I hoped to get on FT making $25k a year. If that had happened (and that's a huge, hypothetical "if"), I would probably have been laid off by now or be given a choice--take a big paycut or get severance pay for a few weeks.