Monday, March 10, 2008
Al Diamon
Maine Newspapers:
Confession Time
“I thought of the business risks being assumed by the new ownership in taking over a family-owned hometown newspaper with a loyal audience at a time when all newspapers are grappling with exceedingly complex and difficult business problems,” McCarthy wrote. “I felt that emphasizing the layoffs in a story announcing the official transfer of ownership would confirm (unfairly in my view) prejudices I knew to be out there that the new owners were only interested in the bottom line.”
On the same day Sample assumed control of the Times Record, 10 employees, including one reporter, got layoff notices (see “That didn’t take long,” Feb. 29, 2008). Two of those people have since been rehired, according to McCarthy. The Forecaster weekly paper’s mid-coast edition was the first to report the layoffs and the lack of coverage. It noted that Sample had a history of slashing payroll at its other publications, including the Journal Tribune in Biddeford.
In his editorial, McCarthy said he alone made the decision to keep the news of the layoffs out of the paper, because, “I feared the lasting impression would be negative.” He said he didn’t consult with new publisher Chris Miles or former owner Doug Niven until after the paper went to press. Neither, he noted, was too upset about avoiding bad publicity.
McCarthy – who’s been at the paper for 23 years, the last nine as managing editor – justified his bias in favor of his employer by noting that a previous round of layoffs at the Times Record, 16 months ago, also occurred “without a single word in this newspaper.”
In contrast, both the Portland Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News have regularly published stories on layoffs at their respective papers, as have many major dailies in other states. And the Times Record has carried numerous stories about layoffs at other local companies, including Bath Iron Works and Parkview Adventist Hospital. McCarthy did not address the ethical issues involved in attempting to shield his own employer from similar scrutiny. But he was unapologetic about his decision.
“Yes, I chose to make [the article on the ownership transfer] a ‘positive’ story,” he wrote. ”Those who know me well know that if I have a bias, it is to look for the positive in everybody, in every occasion.”
Possibly because of that bias, the Times Record also didn’t report on subsequent developments relating to the layoffs. I had to rely on the Forecaster again for news that, as a result of the job cuts, Commissioner John Richardson of the state Department of Economic and Community Development was taking a second look at a recent decision by the Finance Authority of Maine (FAME) to grant Sample access to $7 million in tax free bonds to cover part of the sale. During a January public hearing on the financing request, a lawyer for Sample told the authority the bonding was necessary to “maintain current head count and payroll.”
In spite of Richardson’s statement, FAME officials indicated there was little chance the decision to approve the funding would be altered or overturned.
That may be because the layoffs were inevitable, regardless of who owned the paper. In his editorial, McCarthy wrote that Niven told him that even if his family hadn’t decided to sell, the rising costs of fuel, insurance and newsprint would have resulted in staff reductions.
The only question would have been whether the Times Record would have reported on them.
— Filed March 10, 2008
Al Diamon can be e-mailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
Posted on Monday, March 10, 2008 in Permalink
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Reader Comments:
McCarthy's piece talks about how unfair it would've been to the new owners if the paper had disclosed the layoffs. Nowhere does he mention being fair to Times Record readers. Last I checked, readers rely on the paper for the news, not the editor's slave-like devotion to either his sunshiny ideology or his new bosses.
Unfortunately slavish behavior by editors has become the norm at many of America's newspapers. Fast disappearing is the older culture of journalism in which reporters and editors gained their professional education essentially by apprenticeship. The ethos of honesty and fair play in the only business specifically addressed in the Constitution was instilled there as if by osmosis. The new development to hold selfish business interests paramount through dishonest reporting is small wonder when one considers that so many in this line of work today graduated from college "media studies" and other "communications" programs. These are the same programs where the majority of students go on to professional lives not in print journalism but in advertising and in public relations and other forms of spinmeistering. I was a reporter for 16 years at the old Waldo Independent in Belfast. This once lively and popular weekly began in the early 1980s as a reaction by a principled staff at a tired old paper -- the Republican Journal -- to the tawdry manipulations of that business's owners. The staff walked out and started their own newspaper. Sadly here, nothing lasts forever. A few years ago the always undercapitalized employee-owners made a devil's bargain by selling to Crescent Publishing, a newspaper holding corporation headed by a major neo-con figure in South Carolina politics. (Crescent had already swallowed up the Republican Journal as part of its other Courier Publications holdings along the Midcoast and in Augusta.) Last spring, Crescent fired two members of the small Waldo Independent editorial staff as a cost-saving measure, by the cowardly expedient of registered letter no less, and without even consulting the editor. When the editor resigned in protest, company management glossed over the matter to other press, saying only that she had left her employment for "personal" reasons. The new editor, a timid incompetent fellow seemingly much like Mr. McCarthy, parroted the company line as well. He never mentioned the layoffs in his article. For two laid-off people who were well known in the community, it was as if they had never existed. When I tried to write about this matter in the supposedly no-holds-barred column offered to me, the column was suppressed and two weeks later I was fired. It is deeply upsetting for me when I see how the Independent In Name Only is now no more than a mediocre shopper, a thin rag filled out with press releases and a few generally short dull accounts of only the most prominent public meetings. A once vibrant forum for public debate on the letters to the editor pages has dried up. A typical edition is remarkable if there are more than two or three letters where once there were 10 times that number. Obituaries seem to have taken their place. The biggest obituary of all should be for the paper itself. As for myself, after a career spanning more than 40 years in Maine journalism, I am now a carpenter. Sic transit gloria mundi!!!