Parade of Falseness

So the Retch finally got a chance to listen to the Sam 'n' Randy show, a press conference held today for Tribune media reporters. In all honesty, there was not much news made. It was mostly Sam Zell and Randy "The Stooge" Michaels explaining how shitty the ad market is. It's bad, worse than ever, worse than the Depression. They can't afford reporters. They can barely afford pens.

Blah, blah.

The entire argument collapses on a single point. No newspaper is losing money. Each paper takes in more cash than it pays out. The problem is, they don't take in enough money to pay off Sam's $13-billion debt.

The Retch says this again and again: the problem is of Sam's own making. He made a bad business decision to take on loads of debt as the market crashed. Maybe he couldn't see the sky falling. Maybe he didn’t see ad revenues falling by 20%. Maybe he isn't to blame.

But who pays the price for his bad business decision? The reporters getting fired, of course. But also everybody else who depends on news. Whether you're a blogger or a grandma, somebody from LA or Ft. Lauderdale, a politician in DC or a soldier in Newport News, your local newspaper is vital to your town. We keep news flowing, bureaucrats on their toes, bad guys in check.

Sam's cut to news means that he makes his mortgage payments. But your neighborhood deteriorates. The property gets shabbier and shabbier. People begin to notice.

Notes, quotes and a cavalcade of lies follow the jump

Stories on the conference in the Hartford Courant (whose reporter did a great job confronting Zell), Newsday (soon to be free from the Zell yoke) and LA Observed.

Zell all but confirmed future, deeper editorial cuts at the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. He noted that at the smaller Tribune papers, the firings "were closer to being finished then we are to starting." Rumors at the two big papers is another trip to the abattoir after November elections.

• "We need to size our organization and our newspapers to reflect the realities of the marketplace. That's what we're doing," Zell said.

No, that's not what you're doing. It's not the realities of the marketplace. We're a private company, thanks to you. The reality is your debt. Your debt.

• "When it's all said and done, we have to have enough money coming in the door to turn on the lights and print the newspaper on a daily basis," Zell said.
  

False. We do have enough money to turn on the lights and print the newspaper. We don't have enough money to pay your bankers.

• "The reality is, what's my choice? Do I try and create a business that can be viable and preserve two-thirds of the jobs? Or do I let 100 percent of them go by the wayside because I'm not willing to confront the realities of the environment?"
  

Here's your choice. Declare bankruptcy. Sell the assets. Walk away from the crappy deal you made. Sure, your reputation as the Gravedancer suffers. Sure you strand your banker buddies with bad debt. But your communities will benefit.

• "I think we're sometimes as an industry a little too absorbed to what's happening in the print business, because it isn't just us. We're not the worst off. Look at GM," said Randy "The Stooge" Michaels.
  

Again, a false argument. Don't newspapers do more than make a product? Don't we add something—maybe a little something, but something—to the functioning of a town, a state, a nation?

• "I don't see the reason to write every story eight and nine times," Michaels said in speaking about the need to be more efficient.
  

Again, a false premise. Show me one story, anywhere, anytime, written at the same time by eight or nine different Tribune reporters. Is there duplication? Do the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times both cover the same Congressional vote? Yup. That's called smart business. Multiple internal teams competing on the same project. Sometimes, those multiple teams produce the same product. But sometimes, each comes up with something different.

• Randy referred to the "noise level" after Tribune managers decided to cancel a favorite reader column at the Orlando Sentinel. After complaints, they decided to put it back. Perhaps this is hopeful. Maybe if enough readers complain, they'll hire back some reporters?
  

• "The circumstances are dramatically worse than anybody could have possibly predicted," Zell said. "There aren't a lot of other options if you want to stay in business."
  

Right. If you want to stay in business. But we don't want you to stay in business. You obviously have no idea about either journalism, or the news business.

• "We need to become the breaking news authority," Michaels said.
  

They love breaking news. He spoke enthusiastically about setting up web sites that would amount to one-stop shopping for breaking news. Some questions. First, most Tribune newspaper sites already do that. Second, how does that make money? Three, breaking news is a commodity. Everybody breaks news. AP. City news services. Even the occasional blogger. That's a crowded market. Not so investigative reporting, in-depth analysis, any news story, in fact, that takes longer than a day to report. How is that not the business model?

• "I know that everybody hates the cutbacks. At the end of the day, we still have by far the largest news gathering organizations in our markets. We'll have the two largest local newsgathering organizations in America, in Los Angeles and Chicago."

Another false comparison. In comparison to their circulation, the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune now have a lower than average number of reporters, compared to other major dailies. Alan Mutter exposed that a week ago in his post titled "Cuts nip traditional news-staff ratio."