The long-standing financial woes of Lee Enterprises trickled down to the Arizona Daily Star, and in a big way. The Star laid off about 20 people Thursday morning, in the process gutting its marketing department and taking a major swath to the news department.
The Weekly has learned the list of layoffs includes Shelley Shelton, Sarah Trotto, Fred Araiza, Angela Pittenger, Dave Skog, Dan Sorenson, Scot Skinner, Jeff Jackson and John Ames.
Lee, based in Davenport, Iowa, has been in the midst of major money woes for the last few years. It is in the process of attempting to realign a massive debt payment due in April of 2012, but has refused numerous options involving junk bond proposals in hopes of a better deal. If the company can’t come to terms, bankruptcy looms as a very real option. Sources involved in Lee negotiations suggested that possibility was on the table as a result of meetings with creditors
that have occurred over the course of the last two weeks.
Lee stock has tumbled from near three dollars in March to under a dollar in July. On July 8, the New York Stock Exchange warned Lee that delisting looms if it can’t consistently get its stock price above one dollar in the next six months.
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2011.
The Star is another example of a newspaper being its own worst enemy. It is so far to the left that it not only does not serve half of its potential readers, it actually allienates the hell out of them.
Sorry to see people lose their jobs, but the business practices of Lee, and locally the Star’s management and editorial board are part of the reason this paper is a loser.
It doesn’t matter what your political beliefs are, or how you view this paper, when good hard working people lose their jobs for no fault of their own, it leads to a poorer community in so many ways. My Brother-in-law worked there for 33 years and is now out of work. its really a shame.
WOW! I never knew that George Will and Jonah Goldberg were leftists!
Ouch.
The saddest part is all of the Star’s true dead weight remains gainfully employed and horribly overpaid. Like the online editor, who doesn’t know how the Internet operates and has admitted that, despite working in a Mac-filled newsroom, uses a desktop PC in his office because he’s ‘not too familiar with Macs.’ But he’s managed to convince the four people above him — four people who all, essentially, do the same job, that he knows what he’s talking about when he uses random computer jargon in staff meetings.
Please, running a few conservative national writers such as Will and Goldberg does not balance the paper when so much of their LOCAL coverage, both what it covers, and what it selects not to, almost always skews to or favors the left. The large amount of writers, columns, wire service stories from two main liberal sources, The WashPost and The NYTimes dominate the Star. When the Star reprints editorials from other papers, they are almost always from the left’s perspective. The agenda is pervasive.
Local editorials, endorsements, and the type of stories covered reflect a viewpoint that caters to the left while ignoring a good part of the Tucson/Pima County community.
If anyone thinks the Star is a balanced paper, he or she is not dealing with reality. The paper has the right to, and has selected its editorial viewpoint and sticks with it almost always. It seems not enough people subscribe to the paper and its view to keep all of its staff employed.
When the Tucson Weekly and the morning daily have almost the same perspective, it does not make for two profit making newspapers.
The Citizen’s move to the left over its last few years doomed it. Three papers all leaning to the left could not survive. The fact that the “Weekly” does not print daily helps keep the Star in business.
After many years, I’m glad I’m no longer working in the media.
Those who think that the Star leans left need to realign their telescopes. It is at least moderately conservative in the grand scheme of things. The Star ignores the vast majority of national and international stories that don’t fit with Arizona’s extreme right politics, and cuts almost infinite slack for the hysterical right. The only thing that it has going for it is that it does not create its own facts, as the hard right media do.
First things first, the Star’s troubles are hardly the fault of the Star’s employees. This post’s author explains pretty well how the parent company got itself into the mess it’s in.
But let’s dispense with this idea about the Star being a “liberal” newspaper. Its opinion page strives, like that of most daily newspapers, to mirror the electorate that comprises its readership. That’s what newspapers do. If you judge the editorial character of a daily paper by the content of its editorial pages, you’ll probably see some expression of it’s region’s voter registration stats. That’s why the Arizona Republic endorses more Republican candidates and carries more right-wing opinion pieces: because Maricopa County is more Republican than Pima County. (Indeed far more.)
The Star’s local news coverage is unquestionably (perhaps even unethically, as some of it is invariably false and never corrected) hostile toward the status quo of Democrat-dominated governance, particularly at the city level. There is nothing liberal about Rob O’Dell’s city news “reporting” or the conspicuous lack of a critical, county-level counterpart, nor is there anything liberal at all about their decidedly hateful, right-wing online audience. (Go look at the Star’s comments sometime.) It’s not a secret that they’re trying to do city government some harm. And it’s not hard to extract the supposition that the Star’s editors and advertisers long for a different kind of local electorate, and that a newspaper can be a powerful instrument for shaping such a thing.
Thank you for reporting today’s events, John. I didn’t know about Dave and Angela until just now. Such a sad day, handled with the utmost heart by my stricken editor Bobbie Jo Buel. Worked with her for all of my 26 years at the Star and I will miss her and everybody else who is working so hard at Park & Irvington and downtown. They are good, smart people. #anotherlaidoffjournalist — formerly known as M. Scot Skinner.
Scot: Best of luck to you. Sad to see you and all my other former coworkers on that list, especially my photo friends.
Tucson Terp Fan:
Anyone that thinks the Star has been far left, or anything close to left over the last ten years, he or she is not dealing with reality.
And yet they still kept Becky Pallack. Her coverage of the university reads as if it were written by a fifth grader.
I can’t claim to have read the Star as a baby, but I did read it when Pulitzer owned it and it was a much better paper than it is now. Lee’s business plan isn’t based on producing quality journalism, its based on distributing supermarket flyers. Its no surprise they are in trouble, their stock price has been in a decline for years. Newspapers flourish when they are owned by people dedicated to the paper. Like the Sulzbergers, or Katheryn Graham, or Joseph Medill, or Otis Chandler.
Hey, Pallack is good at tweeting. She’s also good at showing up to only half of the university meetings she is assigned to attend, and reporting as if she were there the whole time.
Rather than argue liberal or conservative why not focus on good or bad. None of the “stricken” editors at the ADS got canned, or took the blame for this blood letting at the Star — which continued to put out an inferior product with shrinking revenue. Only the foot soldiers who, like Lemmings, followed their leaders marching orders right over the cliff. Management, not workers should shoulder the bulk of the responsiblity for this mess. Maybe it’s just a natural market correction that is affecting the whole newspaper industry. Meaning the industry is doomed!
Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in Tucson by about 2 to 1. Letters to the Editor (the ones that are published) are about 8 to 1 in favor of Democrats and other liberals. This may not be accurate for every single day, but it is certainly true over any appreciable span of time. Can some of you liberals analyze this fact for those of us you accuse of not dealing with reality? And please try to do so with less of the usual sneering and condescension that appears in most of the liberal Letters to the Editor.