Will the recent cutbacks in the Syracuse Post-Standard be enough to help the lone daily newspaper in Central New York’s largest city survive the combined assault from the recession and the move to online, permission-based niche advertising?
Nobody can say for sure, but managing editor Stan Linhorst told a gathering at Thursday Morning Roundtable on March 19 that he was “still optimistic about our future.” Linhorst acknowledged that the paper is reducing services and staff, and conceded that “even with recent cutbacks, we will have to tighten our belt again.” He pledged that the paper would move forward with a “fanatical attention to local news.”
On March 23, just weeks after WTVH-Channel 5 shuttered its newsroom, and in the same week that The New York Times cut staff salaries by 5 percent for the next nine months, Post publisher Steve Rogers sent a memo to his staff addressing the “profound challenges during a time of tremendous economic pressure on the revenues that support our business.”
Using language that would make George Orwell proud, Rogers’ memo to all “full-time non- represented employees” announced “a program that will provide you with more time off from work and reduce our costs. We are implementing a four-day workweek, for a ten-week period, for all full-time employees, to be taken between the weeks of April 19 to October 11 (sic). You can use the day off to extend some of your weekends. This day off will be mandatory and unpaid, therefore you will be getting paid for four days, for ten weeks... You will also have the opportunity to take up to two weeks of unpaid vacation time this year.”
Hey, where can we sign up?
The Post is owned by Advance Publications, a Newhouse family company that operates more than 30 daily papers, most of them in mid-sized cities in the eastern United States. Staff at other Advance newspapers in Staten Island, Cleveland and New Jersey, were getting similar news that same week, and the staff and readers of Newhouse papers in Michigan learned that their papers would be cut to three times per week or, in the case of the Ann Arbor News, would vanish into cyberspace, becoming the chain’s first Web-only publication.
Reached by phone, Linhorst denied that Syracuse’s morning paper was moving to a four-day work week, instead calling the cost-cutting move a furlough. Interestingly, Rogers used “furlough” in his page one letter to readers on Sunday, March 29 that explained changes to come. Linhorst confirmed that Rogers had indeed sent out the March 23 memo referring to the four-day work week, but insisted that, “There is no four-day work week. It is a furlough. The effect is that instead of working five days, the employee will be working four days.”
Webster’s defines “furlough” as a leave of absence. The verb form of “furlough” should strike even more fear into the heart of Post-Standard personnel; it means “to lay off employees.” Until now the newspaper has avoided layoffs in its battle with hard times, managing to cut costs through retirements, buyouts and attrition.
Linhorst explained the difference between the furlough and the four day week. “Each employee will need to take it {their mandatory 10 unpaid days} one day each week so as not to take the hit in one paycheck.” Amid speculation that the newspaper was contemplating eliminating its Saturday edition, Linhorst denied that the cutbacks were a precursor to any such move. “We are not contemplating anything like that. We’re not going to a four-day work week all the time.”
Linhorst noted that the reiteration of the company’s policy of allowing unpaid vacation did not make such vacations mandatory. “This is a voluntary program that has been around for years. It is separate from the mandatory furlough that is in the memo.”
The company also made some adjustments to its workers’ retirement options, adding more to its 401k contributions while at the same time discontinuing contributions to its defined benefit pension plans.
–Ed Griffin-Nolan
