Newspaper employees begin losing jobs
Earlier this week, it was announced that the Department of Justice had cleared the way for the merger between Stephens Media LLC and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc.
Yesterday, the fate of many employees’ jobs was revealed and as expected, there were redundancy-based layoffs. Ozarks Unbound’s Christopher Spencer has been updating a list of those let go and among them are a handful of Northwest Arkansas Times employees whose primary focus was on Fayetteville.
Among them was Fayetteville City Hall reporter Robin Mero. It appears as though Skip Descant, her counterpart at The Morning News, has secured the position. At around 8:00 pm last night, Descant sent the following message on Twitter:
As of Sunday, I’ll serve as the Fayetteville City Hall reporter for the Northwest Arkansas Times.
The companies cited a dramatic drop in advertising revenue as the primary reason for the need to merge their operations in Northwest Arkansas.
More from the Web
- Paper cuts: Axe falls on newspaper employees, others return to the grind – Ozarks Unbound
- Newsroom Layoffs Begin At Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Morning News – Arkansas Business
- Body Count – The Iconoclast
- Sad News about News in Northwest Arkansas – Welcome to Roger’s Arkansas
Discussion
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By Michael on October 30th, 2009
And the traditional print news sources slip ever closer to being irrelevant. Feel bad for the ones who have lost their jobs but the writing has been on the wall for years that newspapers were dieing.
By um yeah on October 30th, 2009
1. @OU: Listing names of those who have lost their jobs = bad taste.
2. Opinion is easy to throw around when you are disgruntled and not even involved.
3. Skip ALSO posted this after his initial post “Soon, there will only be 1 set of eyes watching City Hall — mine— and that’s too bad. Good government needs many eyes.” He’s right.
4. Job loss is awful. It would be nice to see offerings of comfort rather than mouths spouting borderline slander (comments on OU).
By Innarested Observer on October 30th, 2009
No one’s making you read OU, “um yeah.” Those of us who have been in real journalism have the approach that the TRUTH is never a bad thing, even when the news isn’t good. We’re trained to tell it like it is, not spread lies like some places do or not show due diligence. The people who were let go know this. Just because you pretend something bad didn’t happen doesn’t mean it didn’t. Wake up. Or go back to Fox News.
By Christopher Spencer on October 30th, 2009
Hello, I’m Christopher Spencer, the publisher of Ozarks Unbound.
I appreciate your opinion about it being bad taste to list those who were laid off. Perhaps others feel that way as well.
I don’t mind explaining why I made the choice that I did.
1. More information, so long as it is accurate, is almost better than less information. The exception to this is when someone’s life is at stake and releasing information could further endanger that person’s life.
2. Accurate information kills gossip. Rather than idle speculation and piece-meal answers, an accurate source in a clearly visible place provides a place for documentation and comment. Ozarks Unbound is not an anonymous blog. Our writers have bylines and we stand behind our work. At the end of the day, it’s my name behind everything that is published there, for better or worse.
3. The newspaper industry in this equation will not or is ill-equipped to cover itself. Media, on the whole, tends to play nice with other media. I tell myself that a similar level of scrutiny would be applied when any larger local companies merged. Also, newspapers are not like other companies. They define how news is presented, how our viewpoints are shaped in society. This is the biggest transformation in a generation up here in the newspaper game.
3. This is a personal reason. When I was laid off from the Morning News in April, I actually took comfort in seeing my name listed among the others on Max Brantley’s Arkansas Times blog. I didn’t know who else was let go and I scrambled for information all day that day.
So those are my reasons for publishing the list of names. You might still think it was in bad taste, and I’m cool with that, but at least you have my thought process.
By Christopher Spencer on October 30th, 2009
The first point should read … “almost always better than” instead of how it does read now.