The Erosion of the Franchise

Get any group of journalists together, and you’re likely to hear a lot of belly-aching about the end of news.

Newspapers, we so often tell each other, are an endangered species with a shrinking habitat and no good source of protein. I mean, what about the aging readers? What about the… gulp… Internet? Clearly, newspapers are finished.

That’s bull.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that newspapers are in financial trouble, but news corporations are stuck in a whirlwind of their own making. Newspapers and media companies haven’t been swept up by some freakish storm. News isn’t the victim of some unrelenting force of nature.

Every day, good journalists all across this great country—and I would contend that almost no field in America has such a depth of talent and professionalism as journalism—witness the slow erosion of the quality and integrity of the news organization that employs them. Each ding is small. Each new affront seems minor. Maybe the coverage of your state legislature gets cut back, or two old jobs get combined into one. Or what was once a flagship beat gets rolled into the beat of an already over-worked reporter.

Does this sound familiar?

And as the staff has shrunk, so the quality has always… sometimes slightly… declined. Fewer copy editors. Fewer designers. Oh, you’ve heard your editor, defensive, insisting that the paper will always be committed to the highest quality of… whatever kind of reporting has just been hamstrung.

That… and nothing else… pushes news organizations toward the brink. When I was a journalism student, one of the best young reporters in my class said, “We trade in our word,” and I knew when I heard it that, as a journalist, “my word” was my franchise. If I respected it. Grew it. Protected it. Developed it. Then I’d be all right.

And the same is true of the entire world of media. We trade in our word. When we erode our word, we erode our value. And without our value, well, we’re worthless.

And no amount of cost-cutting can prop up the value of a product in consistent decline. That’s just common sense. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s a study about how fewer people trust news organizations.

Check this out. Here’s a story on “This American Life” about the outsourcing of local reporting.

Here’s another study about how advertising dollars continue to rise, but the short-sighted knuckleheads who run newspapers aren’t capturing much of that revenue.

And here’s a story about how Gannett cut costs aggressively to make its papers more “competitive,” and then turned around and gave those millions in savings to its top executives in bonuses.

Smart, huh?

On Strike! The Montana Newspaper Guild in 1974

“We managed to get a pension…. What’s the pension situation like at newspapers now?”

Carla Beck, a former president of the Montana Newspaper Guild and a reporter at the Great Falls Tribune in the 1960s and 70s, posed the question to me about halfway through our telephone conversation, and it put the divide between past expectations and modern reality into sharp relief.

I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing!

“What? No daily reporters in Montana have pensions! Lee Enterprises doesn’t even contribute matching dollars to 401Ks!” I said, adding, “I don’t know about Gannett.”

Gannett owns the Great Falls Tribune, where employees had been members of the Local 81 of the National Newspaper Guild from the mid-1930s to 1993. Lee Enterprises owns all but one of Montana’s daily newspapers—the Billings Gazette, the Montana Standard in Butte, the Helena Independent Record, the Missoulian and the Ravalli Republic south of Missoula. I worked at both the Gazette and the Missoulian over the years as a reporter. I also delivered the Gazette as a teenager, and I helped my mom deliver the Missoulian sometimes back when I was in grade school.

Here’s something you have to understand: Lee Enterprises, based in Iowa, is an anti-union media company, by which I mean that the company’s policies include instructing managers to break the law by intimidating or firing any employees who try to form a union. Maybe that’s not surprising, but it should be.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I called Beck after I got a letter from Ralph Pomnichowski (another past president of Local 81) with her phone number. He had read this blog about union talk among some Montana journalists and thought I should talk to her. (It turns out that she doesn’t live far from me in Maryland. It’s a small world….)

I wanted to talk to her about the unsuccessful 1974 strike at the Great Falls Tribune.

By way of background, you should know that the Great Falls Tribune, like most newspapers, produced (and continues to produce) tremendous profits. It was the largest newspaper in Montana and was available everywhere in the state. The employees wanted fair compensation for the people who made the company so profitably, especially the workers in the classified advertising department.

“Those little ads made, oh my… you wouldn’t believe how profitable those ads were,” Beck said. “We wanted more for those people who pulled in so much money for the newspaper.”

At that time, Local 81 felt strong, partly because it represented workers throughout the newspaper, except the typesetters and the press workers. Plus, the teachers’ union in Great Falls had recently won a tough strike, and the solidarity within the Great Falls labor movement was complete. People would flock to picket lines in support of other unions. So when the Guild went to the table to bargain a contract with the Tribune’s owners, and the owners refused to even talk about decent raises, the members voted to strike.

“Here’s what I’ve thought about a lot since that strike. All of us should have been a little scared,” Beck said. “We didn’t know what all that would be required. We should have known, because we were all basically researchers. I’m not apologizing, but when you go into a strike situation you need to educate your members so that they know what it’s really about.”

Carla Beck in 1971, photo courtesy of the Newspaper Guild.

Beck explained that the workers at the paper figured that a short-term loss of a paycheck would be made up by good increases, and that the newspaper company would be anxious to keep making money.

You see, when Local 81 went on strike, the Great Falls Tribune couldn’t put out a paper. Instead, the employees wrote, laid out and printed a weekly strike paper called the Great Falls Pennant from the strike headquarters, which were on the second floor of a bar across the street from the Tribune’s offices.

But the company that owned the Tribune, which also owned the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, replaced the old hot-lead typesetting machinery in the printing plant with new technology that needed a fraction of the workers. Plus, the company had plenty of cash from its other holdings, but the employees—especially the lower-paid workers in the classified department—felt tremendous pressure from the lack of that paycheck.

The enthusiasm that marked the early weeks of the strike began to wane. After a few months, some members began to cross the picket line and return to work.

Truck drivers, teachers, heavy-equipment operators, electricians and others marched on the picket line alongside striking newspaper workers at the Great Falls Newspapers Strike in 1974. Photo courtesy of the Newspaper Guild.

“Management knew what they wanted to accomplish, and they had the money to do it,” she said. “They wanted to break the Guild.”

It’s easy to understand why the corporate owners of Montana’s newspapers wanted to undermine the workers. Union workers in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s had negotiated good benefits and pay, and non-union companies like Lee had been obliged to offer comparably decent packages to forestall organizing drives.

In retrospect, the 1974 strike was the beginning of the end of the Montana Newspaper Guild, Beck told me, and that was especially true after Gannett bought the paper, “because they’re a union-buster all around,” she said.

The Guild continued to represent employees at the paper until 1993, when workers voted to disband as a union. Yet the Guild continued to have a strong positive effect on wages and benefits of journalists in Montana until 1993, and even for a few years afterwards.

By then, Carla Beck had long since moved on. She came to the DC area to work for Montana Sen. John Melcher in the 1980s, and now she’s retired in Maryland, living with her husband, who worked for decades as an Episcopal minister.

“Unions are a lot like churches. A lot of the work is done by volunteers, who all have jobs and busy lives with all sorts of time constraints. Just think of what the world is operating under today! Good Lord!” she said.

I asked her if she had any advice for people who were interested in organizing media workers in Montana these days.

“I’d stress the care and feeding of members,” she said. “You can’t have a successful union without a strong community of members. We shut down that paper for weeks, for a couple months, and yet we still lost. The members lost heart. The other unions lost heart.”

Still, the Guild managed to establish a pension and upped the health care coverage.

“That was a real winner,” Beck said. That’s when she asked about journalists’ pensions today. It was a subject on which we lingered for a moment, because neither of us have a doubt that Montana’s newspapers still produce incredible profits and could easily afford defined benefit pensions for retired employees.

Finally, Beck, who was a general assignment reporter, told me about some of her most memorable stories, one of which was a series in 1968 about how Alabama Gov. George Wallace had campaigned across Montana extensively as part of his presidential campaign.

“Oh, I tell you, he was up around the northeastern and north central part of the state. I interviewed all these people who told me the darnedest things, like what he can do and what he has done so well in Alabama, and, yes, quite frankly the racism would come out. The racism was there,” she said.

Then we talked about how Montana seems to have so many interesting political extremes, from socialist counties to right-wing separatists.

“That’s what makes the state such a wonderful place,” she said. “But maybe Montana’s not so different from anywhere else. I suspect that’s true all across the country.”

The Return of the Montana Newspaper Guild

Steve Schnall in Great Falls in1983 pedaling to raise money for a Montana Newspaper Guild college scholarship, which happens to be named after my grandfather, also Robert Struckman. Steve is now assistant athletic director at San Diego State University in California.

It’s an uncertain and insecure time for journalists in Montana these days, what with unrelenting layoffs and buyouts at the state’s newspapers coupled with more than a decade of below-inflation raises, when the staff received any pay increases at all. There have been furloughs at the Great Falls Tribune, and staff at the state’s five newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises have had significant benefit cutbacks, estimated by one staff member to equate to a 7 percent pay cut.

But here’s the funny part. Montana’s journalists have consistently produced top-quality news, year after year. The papers themselves have been beautifully profitable, earning dependable millions every year.

I can actually remember when pay stalled for Montana’s reporters. I was a bumbling and excited new police reporter at the Billings Gazette in 1998. As I got my first raise, my supervising editor explained that the paper’s corporate headquarters had clamped down on raises, just the previous year. Instead of good raises—I’m thinking maybe 5 percent or so—I would receive a fraction over 1 percent. It wasn’t me, my editor explained. It was company-wide.

It’s interesting to look back at that time.

Five years earlier, in 1993, the members of the Montana Newspaper Guild at the Great Falls Tribune—scattered among pretty much the entire staff outside the press room and the drivers—had voted out to disband. The Tribune had been an open shop for about 15 years, which means that employees could get the good wages and benefits that the dues-paying union members had bargained for, but without contributing a dime. Still, the members of the Montana Guild were skilled negotiators who won decent raises when the paper made solid profits.

Decades of research has shown that union wages raise standards at non-union workplaces. It’s easy to understand why. The Billings Gazette and other Lee Enterprises papers in Montana offered pay and benefits roughly comparable to the Great Falls Tribune, owned by the Gannett Company. Why? To retain and dissuade the staff from forming unions to gain the full benefits of collective bargaining.

If you don’t believe that Lee Enterprises fears the combined clout of its employees, consider this: Anti-union training is a centerpiece for all company managers, and anti-union videos are routine for new employees. I sat through an anti-union spiel at the Gazette in the summer of 1998. I remember it well. And, as I mentioned before, my editor didn’t hesitate when it came to breaking the law when he threatened to fire me just for talking about forming a union with my coworkers.

And here’s why Lee hates unions. It’s not rocket science. The company’s leadership doesn’t want any pressure to share any of the amazing profits it reaps. After the Tribune‘s union disbanded, Lee’s managers no longer even had to keep pace with the Tribune.

It’s abundantly clear to me now that while collective bargaining offers a rising tide, the reverse is also true. Without collective bargaining, employees experience a relentless race-to-the-bottom. It’s not a fun race, like that tricycle escapade above, but you don’t need me to tell you that.

And yet there is hope. As I’ve noted many times, Montana’s media corporations are profitable. News will also be important in Montana and across the country far into the future. In fact, media spending has been on the rise, even though the share spent on newspapers has been declining.

My point is simple. Newspaper employees—all media employees—from the press room to the advertising floor to the newsroom can still form unions. It’s possible. Membership in the Newspaper Guild doesn’t mean anything more than that each paper’s employees will be able to collectively bargain with management about pay, benefits and working conditions.

There are a lot of people in Montana who remember the Guild. I’ve been talking to quite a few of them. I’ll write soon about the 1974 strike in Great Falls, in which Teamsters, teachers, postal workers and even the young newspaper carriers helped Guild members in a long struggle with that paper’s management.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could form a union without taking an enormous personal and professional risk? Wouldn’t it be an amazing show of solidarity if those same truck drivers, mail carriers, teachers, electricians and public workers came together to help start a race back up from the bottom? The time is right.

And, actually, if anyone could identify the people in this photo, or share their stories, I’d sure appreciate it. More photos soon.

Both of these photos come from the files of the Newspaper Guild here in Washington. I’d appreciate any news about the photographs or the people in them. Feel free to email.

A Glimpse Into One Effort to Make Work Work for Workers

Into a megaphone held by New York Taxi Workers Alliance director Bhairavi Desai, Jamil Hussain, yelled, “End the isolation! Taxi drivers unite!”

The president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, opened the passenger front door of the taxi at the curb outside Queens Medallion in Long Island City, Queens.

Long Island City is the neighborhood that houses the taxi industry. Queens Medallion leases the second-largest number of taxi medallions in the city. Medallions are the permits required for cabbies to pick up street hails in New York City. Every one of the roughly 45,000 taxi drivers in that city must have one every day on the job, but they cost something like $30,000 apiece.

Trumka had come here, and I was with him, because New York’s independent cab drivers, who have been organizing for years, have put things into a higher gear. Since December, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance has held more than 50 demonstrations against the companies with the highest medallion and car lease rates and fees. The Taxi Workers also received the first new national organizing charter from the AFL-CIO in more than 60 years. The new organization is called the National Taxi Workers Alliance. The Taxi Workers needed Trumka’s help. He jumped out of the taxi and into a light rain. I handed him his suit coat.

Speakers wired and bolted to the outside walls of Queens Medallion blasted rock music over the heads of about 40 taxi drivers, who chanted and shouted on the sidewalk. TV cameras recorded the scene from beneath umbrellas held by reporters, who also struggled to take notes at the same time.

“They think they can drown out the truth with those speakers.” said Bhairavi Desai, the director of NYTWA and the NTWA.

Then Desai, who stands about five feet tall and has an amazing ability to sum up the injustices of the taxi trade, began to shout into a megaphone to shame the managers of Queens Medallion, who stood stone-faced by the open door of the building’s garage just a few yards away.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, right, tells the taxi workers that they’re organizing for what workers want everywhere–fair pay, decent benefits and a chance to work hard and get ahead.

“The brokers don’t own the drivers,” Desai hollered. “You don’t have to pay personnel or expenses. It’s all gravy for you. But we’ve had enough! We’re sick of the lies! We’re sick of the exploitation! Shame! Shame! Take notice! Your days over thievery and exploitation are coming to an end!”

Then Trumka, who wore a dark suit and tie, took the megaphone.

“I bring the greetings of 12 million workers in the AFL-CIO. They do everything to make this country run, just like you make this city run. God bless you for it,” he said. He drew parallels between the taxi workers and the plight of working people all across America. The taxi workers shoulder all the risk of rising gas prices and slow business. Credit card fees from the garages eat 5 percent of every transaction. It’s a whole system rigged for the owners, he said.

“This reminds me of the United Mine Workers,” said Trumka, who started in the labor movement as a coal miner in western Pennsylvania, just like his father and grandfather. “They made us pay for our tools. We only got paid for the coal we dug out of the ground, and they cheated us on that, too. But with our union, we changed those jobs into good jobs.”

The taxi workers cheered.

After about 15 minutes in front of Queens Medallion, the whole group walked down the street and around the corner to another garage, this one called SJS Jet. After more speeches and more chanting, the march continued to a third business, called Midtown Operating Corp.

Under the green girders of an elevated train track, the marchers chanted, “Lower the lease!”

The rain continued to drizzle. Low clouds obscured the tops of buildings. It was time for the afternoon shift change, so yellow taxis cruised in and out of the lot. Many of the drivers waved and honked. Two drivers left the queue in line for cabs and walked across the driveway, directly in front of the owners of Midtown. The drivers joined the march, turned around and shouted, “Shame! Shame!”

Many of the drivers said the managers at Midtown routinely refused to accept payment from some drivers at the start of the shift, and then penalized those same drivers with a $25 late fee later in the day.

“We’re your union! Taxi drivers unite!” hollered someone into the megaphone.

“Divided we beg! United we win!” yelled Desai in her clear voice. “We’ll be back!”

A few minutes later, the marchers began to disperse, so the drivers could work for a few more hours before the end of the day. Trumka patted his pockets but couldn’t find his reading glasses. He checked the taxi we had been in, to no avail. He asked me if I had noticed them in his suit jacket when I handed it to him. I had a sinking feeling that I had. One of the drivers, a Bengali immigrant named Jamil Hussain, jogged back along our marching route to Queens Medallion with me. Sure enough, the glasses—bent and scratched—lay there at the graveled base of a sapling in the sidewalk. Mortified, I picked them up, and we jogged back.

Gamely, Trumka sat in the taxi. He bent his glasses back more or less into shape and dried the lenses on his shirt.

“I’m sure I dropped them. I’m sorry I’m so damn clumsy,” I said. I felt terrible.

“It’s my fault. You didn’t know they were in the pocket. I should have said something,” he said. He put the glasses on his face. “They’re scratched, but they’ll do.”

The taxi pulled away from the curb and headed toward Manhattan to the first fundraiser of the National Taxi Workers Alliance. You can read more about the taxi workers forming a union on the website of the AFL-CIO here.

For Those Who Suffer for the Trust…

Check out that look of concentration as I asked questions and scribbled down the answers into my narrow reporter's notebook. Photo, I believe, by Scott Martin, one of Montana's delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

I’m sure you’ve had this experience—you catch a lyric in a song, and it suddenly embodies your struggle. This was my line: “They don’t pay me enough to suffer for the trust, I’ve got to take what’s mine before the cause gets just.”

The song was “Suffer for the Trust,” by a Chicago band called the Ike Reilly Assassination. It was the summer and fall of 2006. Early the next year, I quit my job as a reporter at the Missoulian, a job I dearly loved.

I don’t know what the musicians meant with those lyrics, but I sure as hell know what those words meant to me. “They” was Lee Enterprises, and “the trust” and the “cause” were daily journalism. That summer, I had learned that my annual raise would be something like half a percent, all and more of which would be eaten by the rising cost of our middling health insurance, even though the Missoulian had taken more than $5 million in profits that year.

The painful truth—that Lee Enterprises bled me every day because of my love of journalism—became like a bit of grit in my heart, an irritating piece of something that never gave me peace. I had a vision that my future was slowly being taken away from me. I mean that literally, not metaphorically. Instead of getting closer, my dream that I could raise my family and someday help my kids through college was slipping away.

You need to understand just how much I loved being a reporter. It’s deep within my blood. Before I could write or spell, I drew pictures and dictated stories to my mother, who then bound the pages into books with her sewing machine. And, believe me, I could bore you all afternoon with polemics about the importance of narrative, of accurate language, of the stories of a community.

I loved reporting and writing in Missoula, a town where I had spent much of my childhood and where two of my grandparents were buried. In those days, I taught a class each fall at the University of Montana’s journalism school. At that newspaper, I was able to do my life’s work….

The Missoulian is one of five Montana newspapers owned by a publicly traded company called Lee Enterprises. The company is based in Iowa, which gives an inkling of its small market roots. In 1998, with a fresh master’s degree from UC Berkeley’s journalism school, I got my first reporting job at the Billings Gazette (which I had delivered every morning during junior high school). Back then Lee owned a couple dozen daily and weekly newspapers mostly in the Midwest and the Great Plains. Rumor had it the Gazette‘s annual profit margin was an ungodly 40 percent, or at least the high 30s.

You’ve got to remember that by the late 1990s, pundits had been declaring newspapers “dead” for years, but nobody told Lee. If you retain one truth about this company, make it this: It’s leaders know how to squeeze dollars out of its papers. A lot of dollars.

For decades in smaller markets across the country, newspapers practically printed money. Prudent stockholders saw them as wise investments, with steadily rising stock values and generous dividends in good times and bad.

Yet almost every newspaper also held a special trust—a balance against its function as a business—as a community’s public record, the Fourth Estate. And publishers often felt that trust personally, its obligation. During the 1980s, that dynamic began to change.

Interestingly enough, Lee Enterprises—this chain of smallish backwater newspapers—helped lead the trend on the national media landscape toward a profits-at-all-cost approach. For instance, Wayne Schile, the publisher of the Billings Gazette in the 1980s and much of the 1990s, dramatically cut staff, raised subscription and ad rates and produced ballooning profits. The stories I heard about him… how he sacked the newspaper’s long-serving and dedicated librarian and then sent her life’s work of file cabinets and carefully cataloged clippings to the landfill… how he’d call one group of reporters into one meeting and fire the remaining, were moves that seemed designed to trash morale and heighten reporters’ innate paranoia.

This model of the no-frills newspaper spread throughout the Lee holdings, and across the industry.

Media was diversifying fast. The Internet was becoming a part of our everyday lives. News delivery seemed to shift overnight. And yet Lee continued its incredible profits, even as other newspapers in the early 2000s went dark in markets like Seattle, Denver and San Francisco, despite a real estate bubble that buoyed overall media incomes.

In June of 2005, Lee was the minnow that swallowed the whale when it purchased the venerable and ailing Pulitzer chain of newspapers. The purchase transformed Lee from an unknown, insignificant chain into one of the nation’s largest. It now owned the St. Louis Post Dispatch, one of the nation’s premier newspapers, and dozens of others, including some which had probably not been profitable for a decade.

The purchase was amazing because it was entirely financed, all $1 billion.

What was going to repay that debt? The incredibly profitable newspapers in Missoula, Billings, Helena and other places, like Sioux City, Iowa.

The logic was, if Lee could make such major cash in these small towns, just imagine what could be done on a larger scale!

And yet the opposite was true. Lee Enterprises thrived in isolated markets against little or no competition. In a market like Missoula, the newspaper has a handful of competitors for ads. In major urban areas, a newspaper has hundreds of quality competitors.

The summer of the Pulitzer purchase, I had been working as the business reporter at the Missoulian for a year and as a journalist for six or seven. My Lee stock, which was my retirement plan, was almost $50 a share. I remember checking the website of the Securities and Exchange Commission that June or July, and seeing a filing that said the Missoulian publisher had sold something like 100,000 of his own shares. That didn’t seem to bode well…. I wondered about that….

The details of the Pulitzer repayment plan required huge balloon payments to Deutsche Bank. Each of those payments seemed really big, as I recall, like a hundred million dollars or more. To amass money for those payments, our already austere paper got even tighter. Nobody could clock overtime. Reporters drove their own vehicles, and got reimbursed at less than half the government rate even as gas prices went through the roof.

Companies can only pull this kind of crap with an insecure workforce, and we were. I knew back then that the only way we’d have a fair shot at a decent life was by joining together. Without some leverage, none of us could negotiate for jack. Yet after only a few evening conversations with my fellow reporters about the nuts-and-bolts of forming a union, I got a wave from my editor Mike McInally (a man for whom I somehow still have tremendous respect and affection) calling me into his office. After asking me to close the door, he said, “I’ve heard you’ve been talking to people about unions. If I ever hear that again, you’re fired.”

His words (a textbook example of illegal workplace coercion) stunned me, my shit-eating grin frozen on my face. To save my job, I shamelessly disavowed my intentions, while my editor insisted that he loved my news stories and positive attitude and didn’t want to get rid of me. A few minutes later, humiliated and furious at myself, my heart pounding and my hands shaking, I returned to my desk and stared at my computer screen. I promised myself that I was done trying to help anyone else. From then on, I would do for me.

So maybe it’s no wonder that “Suffer for the Trust” became my anthem, that I left my job a few short years later, that wonderful job that didn’t feel like work at all, for a high-paying gig at a hateful little boutique communications firm where I didn’t last a year.

Later, as I bounced around in search of a new way to follow my calling, Lee Enterprises hit snag after snag. Each time it punished its workers—several of them my closest friends, and many for whom I have tremendous admiration and professional respect—with layoffs and benefit cuts. Still, Lee’s stock value kept dropping until it reached its nadir, a few cents over a quarter. My retirement portfolio—and more importantly, the portfolios of my friends and former co-workers—had become basically worthless. In late 2011, the corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

So it came as no surprise early this year when rumors foretold of more job losses. The news hurt, last week, when 10 of the company’s Montana employees confronted the sudden prospect of unemployment in this bleak economy, especially as word of the latest bonus of $500,000 for Lee’s CEO Mary Junck came out at almost exactly the same time.

It’s easy and appropriate to blame Junck and her thuggish clutch of publishers, including my old editor Mike McInally who served as publisher for a pair of papers in Oregon, last I heard. That class will never do right by journalism.

And yet the reporters and copy editors, the support staff and press operators continue to do as much as possible. In fact, I think the Billings Gazette, which has a fantastic editor and incredible writers, has been producing better journalism, including thoughtful and provocative editorials, than it ever has.

Buyouts, Layoffs and… for the CEO who caused it all… A Fat Bonus

The biggest national news story of the past four years is playing out in miniature among the Montana newspaper holdings of Lee Enterprise–the top boss gets a huge chunk of change while the people who actually do the work get the shaft.

Mary Junck, CEO of Iowa-based Lee Enterprises, dragged the company into a financial mess until the company finally sought bankruptcy protection… and this week she got a $500,000 bonus! For steering the company through these tough economic times!

And on the  same day as news of Junck’s bonus hit the Web, 10 of the chain’s workers in Butte, Helena, Billings and Missoula have been laid off or accepted cheap buyouts–one week’s pay for every year worked.

The three employees who took the buyouts face a mixed blessing. Sure, they’ll get after-tax final checks in the neighborhood of $20,000, but the buyout-receivers won’t be eligible for unemployment insurance. Plus, continued health insurance through COBRA will cost more than $600 per month, and none is near the age of eligibility for Medicare.

Award-winning reporter Donna Healy of the Gazette in Billings, who accepted a buyout, looked with fondness over her career. “I’ve had the sweetest beat in the newsroom for a very long time. I’m grateful for that,” Healy said today. She hopes to land a job with a Billings-based nonprofit.

Two were laid off in Butte. One of the five who was laid off in Helena yesterday said today that her head was reeling, especially because she was scheduled to work for two more days. (I don’t feel like including her name right now, unless you want to pass along job ideas. If that’s the case, email me.)

“I feel like I got dumped, but I’ve still got a bunch of stuff at the guy’s house,” she said.

Nobody I talked to had more than a vague idea of what would come next.

Oh, and the bonus for Mary Junck? That and the $250,000 bonus for the company’s CFO would have been more than enough to keep those workers on-the-job for more than two years.

And I should pass on a few more tidbits. Since Junck engineered the debt-leveraged purchase in 2005 of the Pulitzer chain of newspapers, Lee’s stock has performed a stunning dive from a high monthly average of $48.98 in June of 2004 to a low of $.29 in February of 2009. Lately, it’s been hovering a dime or so over a dollar.

Meanwhile, over the past five years the company has slashed its staff and benefits across all of its papers.

One Lee employee put it best, likening the raw deal to being hit by an exploding “shit balloon.”

You know journalists…. Always cracking wry jokes.

*A previous version of this post directed readers to another blog called “Lee Watch” which has gone dark. I’ll check more closely before steering you to inactive sites. Also, this version has the updated number of layoffs.

Views of an Intern

I made this line-drawing during a slow moment while interning at the New Yorker in the spring of 1994, when the magazine was still located at 23 West 43rd Street.

The New Yorker obituary of Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana who killed himself in the spring of 1994, includes a typographical error, if I remember correctly, in the second column.

I know this because I was an intern that spring in the magazine’s old word processing department, and, as the writing of Alex Ross went through the magazine’s meat-grinder of an editorial process, I missed a verb tense change. No one caught the mistake. The next week, I found the magazine open on my keyboard when I came to work, the offending words circled in red.

This is a perfect example of the unreliability of memory. I just re-read “Generation Exit,” and for the life of me I couldn’t find the error. How can that be? The humiliation has been burned into my soul. In my mind’s eye, the page still lies on the keyboard, the red markings unmistakeable near the top of the second column, or was it the third?

Or was it a different story?

I can tell you this. In the word processing department, after edits had been typed into the master draft, one word processor would read the paper copy of the old version with the hand-written changes to another word processor, who checked the edited version for accuracy. Here’s how we sounded aloud both punctuation and capitalization: “Up dumbness persisted pause but there were always scattered bands picking out weird rich chords and giving no thought to a major hyphen label future point….” This is how it would look on the page: “Dumbness persisted, but there were always scattered bands picking out weird rich chords and giving no thought to a major-label future.”

Sounds simple enough, once you get the hang of it, but sometimes I’d get nervous and, even when I spotted an inaccuracy, I’d mutely continue reading along. My oversight would be identified a few minutes later, and I’d berate myself, and then a week later I’d do it again.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The previous spring, as I prepared to return to Sarah Lawrence College for my final year, I dreamed of landing the only internship worth having, at the only magazine worth reading. I wrote to the magazine and included a packet of my short stories and nonfiction essays, and a letter of recommendation from William Kittredge. (That spring, I had weaseled my way into one of his graduate fiction workshops at the University of Montana.)

Incredibly, a letter came back mid-summer from Anthony Pisano at the New Yorker with a date and time for an interview in August after my return to New York from Montana.

With months to plan, I didn’t think to purchase a nice button-down shirt or suit coat. After all, I had one cotton, collared shirt, light blue, and a few pairs of slacks. On the day of the interview, I chose leather hiking boots over my battered basketball shoes. I wore a tie on the walk from my dorm room to the Metro North train, where I self-consciously removed it and stuffed it into my pocket of my stone-washed jean jacket. It was the only jacket I had. Here’s what makes it worse. Two years earlier, I had stitched fabric into an “S” and sewed it onto the back, for Struckman.

In the lobby of 23 West 43rd Street, I found that the dampness of my pocket had crinkled my tie like an accordion. I wore it anyway.

I should pause here to explain that I wasn’t consciously trying to be the rube from Montana. It’s simply who I was.

My style couldn’t have contrasted more sharply from that of the dapper and immaculate Anthony Pisano, who was the head of the magazine’s human resources department. He was amazing with beautiful shirt, suspenders, cuff links and dress shoes.

This photo, crudely imaged above and most likely taken by my friend Jay Lynn sometime in 1992 in Bronxville, NY,, features the same jean jacket I wore to my interview at The New Yorker. What the hell was in my pockets? Maybe a few sandwiches? I don't know.

On my cover letter, he noted the “e” at the end of the word “intern.” Yes. I had spelled it “interne.” I was that pretentious. It seemed more worldly to spell it that way. Pisano indulgently suggested I check my cover letter for misspellings. I explained it was a variant spelling. He checked his dictionary, and saw that I was right. I don’t remember the rest of the interview, but that afternoon he called me back for a second interview the next day with Babette Lazarus in marketing.

With only the one shirt and tie and no time for laundry, I wore the same clothes, including the jacket and boots.

Lazarus, who competed as a ballroom dancer, was welcoming. We talked comfortably about writing, and she told me that I would need to put in my dues in her department if I wanted to get a shot later at an internship on the editorial side. I jumped at the chance. I got class credit and a generous stipend. I came to the office three days a week. I dressed as professionally as I could, although I never purchased any new clothing. My co-workers were genuine and generous marketing professionals. We went for bagels together every week. Late in the fall, the department took me to a super-fancy lunch where the waiter wore a black jump suit, like some kind of chic, space-age mechanic, and Lazarus and I work-shopped my fiction on a weekly basis. My assignments were interesting. Once, I spent several weeks analyzing southern California magazine ad sales.

Every now and then my marketing internship would take me down to the 18th floor, where the writers and editors existed in quiet offices. Papers and books spilled off desks and into the halls. Stacks of books covered benches in the corridors. I was in awe, and I couldn’t wait to get down there.

Sometimes I ventured down there on business of my own. Several times, I hand-submitted poems to the poetry editor, who gave me encouraging hand-written notes in response, although she didn’t accept anything.

Just before Christmas, I met with Justine Cook, who headed the word processing department. She was known as the “steel hand in the velvet glove.” I’m not sure why I ended up talking to her. Pisano had OK’d the move, and Lazarus arranged the interview.

I couldn’t believe my luck. I got the second internship, too. Everything seemed great. My schedule remained the same, and my stipend improved.

But on the first day, only Cook was friendly. A dozen people worked in the large, airy room. My co-workers were in their late-20s and 30s. All were aspiring writers. None greeted me or returned my friendly overtures. Almost immediately, one of them told me to return “to the minor leagues.”

Without my own desk, I bounced around from one work station to another, depending on which was free that day.

The bright spots were the times the writers came into the room. I found David Remnick to be a warm person while he shepherded his articles through the editing process. He was so friendly that I assumed he couldn’t be important, until the day he won a Pulitzer for his book about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lenin’s Tomb. And John Seabrook, a tall nervous guy, always seemed to have just had a fascinating interview with a source, which he eagerly talked about with anyone who would listen. Plus, at that time, Seabrook’s stories never seemed to make the cut. He’d call the word processing room to ask me to check their status. And it was fun getting a font designed by Art Spiegelman into the pages. Spiegelman was passionate about getting it right, and he treated me with respect.

Some of the writers were terribly precious, handing in sheaves of type-written pages with train-of-thought impressions on subjects like boxing, but with no information, only brackets with the letters “TK” indicating  facts to be supplied by  the fact-checking department.

Everything involving the writing and editing was exhilarating.

The careful and meticulous attention to every detail—from the grammar to the nuances of language and the accuracy—lived up to my idealized notion of the magazine.

But the rest of the internship was miserable. The department managed stories from the first draft through dozens and sometimes hundreds of revisions. Occassionally drafts would be taped or stapled together, as old-school editors relied on us to type the changes and to pass around clean, up-t0-date versions of the stories back to the writer and editors. (I heard lately that the word processing department has long been disbanded. Good riddance.)

It was a den of vipers, of literary hangers-on who all seemed to be going through a belated adolescence. I’d overhear them talking about getting drunk on the weekends and doing stupid things, like sitting on a flight of stairs exclaiming loudly that “my legs don’t work!” Those were the kind of juvenile hijinks that I had pulled back in high school. Honestly, I was too self-absorbed to notice if they were critical to each other, but they were merciless to me. They’d offer scathing comments on my clothes or my hair or look stunned if I cussed. One was a comparative lit PhD dropout from Columbia University, who specialized in James Joyce. Another had two masters degrees from the University of Iowa, one an MFA in creative writing.

I don’t think I wanted anything more than their approval and acceptance, not because I admired them particularly but because I had never encountered any group of people who had shut me out so decisively.

I never got it. For five months I tried and failed to join their club.

After work, they’d meet at a bar or one of their homes to read and critique each others’ writing. The next day at the magazine, they’d rehash the sessions. Once, I asked if I could come. The answer was blunt. “No.” I tried to join their conversations but was met with silence, or the conversation would just sort of die until I moved on.

As I grew more insecure, my work suffered. I missed a lot of edits. My meanest colleagues picked me apart, and the worst part was, they were right.

To comfort myself, I’d fantasize about beating up the meanest one. Or I’d return to campus and telephone my girlfriend in Boston.

Once, as I was working at the desk of a petty man who I will always hate, I snooped into his personal files and read his poetry. In my defense, he saved this stuff on his work computer. What an idiot. One poem described him raping his mother in violent and bloody detail. In another poem, he railed at his “pathetic” and “disgusting” self. I was creeped out, but delighted to find out how miserable he was, how tortured by angst.

The final weeks passed, numbly. Graduation approached. And then it was my last day.

The poet with the mother-rape fantasy happened to get on the elevator with me as I left. Downstairs in the lobby, he said something bland like “good luck.”

I can’t even tell you how uncomfortable I was with him. I have no idea why, but in reply I said, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

He probably thought I was the freak.

The Re-Introduction of Bill Foley

Back in 2007 and 2008, rumors swirled around western Montana of a billionaire from the financial industry who had purchased a massive, storied cattle ranch near the town of Deer Lodge.

The billionaire’s name was Bill Foley, then the Chairman and CEO of Fidelity National Financial.

Some of the rumors were typical, the kind you hear about rich people with more money than sense. For instance, Foley had supposedly hired a golf pro and former manager of a hot dog cart to oversee the construction of a new complex of buildings on the ranch. (Had he been the manager of outside vendors at some California golf course? That’s what someone told me.)

Other rumors had a sharper edge. I wondered what reality might lie beneath them. One story had the construction manager first hiring and then blithely firing a bunch of Deer Lodge locals for the construction crews.

That’s not all. Later, at the Deer Lodge rodeo, some of those hired-and-fired construction workers supposedly spotted the construction manager where he sat in the stands with his wife, and then tossed pebbles at him to get him to come down to get his ass kicked!

There were other tales that skewered Foley and his pals as out-of-touch outsiders or truly sharks with hearts of stone, but curiously I sometimes heard a competing storyline, one that surfaces from time to time about characters like this. This is it… that Foley was “down-to-earth” and a “regular” guy.

I enjoy a thorough, well-reported profile as much as the next guy, and Foley seemed to present an interesting case study, so I geared up to write about him. I wanted to find out as much as I could. I studied Foley’s businesses. I talked to business analysts. I called his old friends and acquaintances. I interviewed Foley by phone and in person, and I called a number of people who he directed me to. I did my best to be fair, and to sort through the bullshit to find the truth.

In the end, my research revealed a portrait of a man who managed to consolidate an industry and make a massive fortune for himself on the strength of his trend-spotting abilities and his unscrupulous heart. The thing that really struck me about him was the way he talked about firing thousands of hard-working employees. It was necessary, he said, to strengthen the company, which paid him hundreds of millions for his cut-throat business sense.

Still, I don’t believe Foley gave a damn for wrecking the livelihoods of the people who actually did the work at Fidelity National Financial!

Is that wrong? Who am I do say? But I can tell you that I would never be able to behave like he did. Or if I did, I’d probably struggle, as he appears to, to present myself as a “down-to-earth” “regular” guy.

Also, I thought it odd that he apparently missed the deep irony behind his business actions: His company made fortunes on housing transactions but in the process wrecked the ability of tens of thousands of employees to be home-owners. How will companies like Fidelity prosper if fewer and fewer people can buy homes?

Plus, Foley’s a tool. He actually tried to buy me off by offering me the carrot of a fat contract writing his authorized biography.

With that introduction, I think you’ll probably enjoy the heck out of this piece.

The excellent photography was by Anne Medley.

P.S. Is Bill Foley really a billionaire? Actually… probably not. At least, not according to Forbes and others who track the net worth of rich individuals.

Good Fun With a Simple Smoker

I idealize cool stuff like smoking my own meat, but the truth is that I owned a red Brinkmann smoker for years before I even understood how the parts fit together.

And then, last fall, after promising to smoke a turkey for Thanksgiving, I watched some wonderfully simple and informative youtube posts that taught me how the thing fit together and how to use it. After that bit of online education, a successful gobbler experience, and several subsequent and decent attempts to smoke fish and beef, I began to think of myself as “one of those guys who smokes meat.”

I believe pretty much anything is a good thing that gets me into the backyard for the better part of a day (except for doing actual yard work like raking or mowing or cleaning up all the toys and detritus back there), so I was in a great mood last week when a guy at work made me a present of a Styrofoam cooler imprinted with a simple red, white and blue map of Texas. Within the cooler sat two bags of wild goose breasts, dark red and frozen rock hard.

At home, the goose meat thawed in the refrigerator, then soaked in a brine. (One cup salt, some soy sauce, the juice of an orange, a couple garlic cloves, and a generous dose of Worcestershire sauce and enough water to make it work. )

I’ve learned that birds soaked in brine prefer to sit uncovered in the fridge overnight. It helps them develop a skin, tacky to the touch, that keeps them moist, even after hours in the smoker.

On Sunday morning, I started a charcoal fire in the base of my no-frills smoker. I filled the water pan, and made sure there was plenty of apple chips for the smoke.

These geese didn’t have an ounce of fat, and I worried about them getting over-dry, so I piled them together and draped bacon strips on top.

Goose breasts, brined and baconed and prepped for the smoker.

And… after about five hours during which time the simplistic thermometer on my smoker read “ideal,” the breasts were done, tender and smoky.

It’s the best meat there is. No preservatives. No hormones. No antibiotics. Just wild game, the ultimate free-range organic meat. Absolutely delicious.

Oh, but this story has an addendum. I brought about half the smoked meat to work, chilled and sliced thin. I sent out an email alerting people to the meat, and the email found its way into the hands of a local politics-and-media blogger, who posted an item about it.

Under other circumstances, I might have been irritated with the blogger’s behavior. (He emailed as if he were interested in a bite, without disclosing his intent, and so I told him how to get a few slices.) But his post seemed so harmless. Plus, what are you gonna do?

Don’t Blame the Rich. Make Them Pay.

It’s Superbowl Sunday. In a few moments, I’m going to light charcoal in the smoker in my backyard, and the rest of the day will be all about hanging out with my spouse and my son and daughter… while a pile of wild goose breasts covered with bacon slowly cook to perfection in the smoker….

So why do I feel compelled to toss another argument into the ether? I honestly have no idea, and I’m violating all the basic rules of blogging. I’m about to comment on something ancient—a week old—and I have no intention of turning my personal blog into a place to comment on issues of the day, so don’t come back often for more of this type of fare….

And yet, the lead opinion piece in the Washington Post last weekend was so ridiculous, so deeply and profoundly stupid, that I feel compelled to point it out.

I’ll begin with the basic premise behind the title, “Angry about inequality? Don’t blame the rich.”

Those two phrases paint a picture of petulant and lazy poor people, maybe all standing in line at the bus stop, who point an accusatory finger at a smart-looking couple driving to work in a comfortable car with leather seats.

The column says: If you were better educated, more disciplined and creative, you could have a nice car, too, you slob.

The piece then takes the reader down a narrow and illogical path, painfully avoiding honest analysis by silently re-defining the “rich” away from the truly wealthy and toward the educated middle class and repackaging a pile of old “blame the poor for poverty” yarns.

But I don’t “blame the successful.” And you shouldn’t either.

Yes, it’s true that the super-rich and corporations have rigged our nation to squeeze every possible dollar from the rest of us, both from our wages and where we spend our money. Yes, it’s true that the rich love corruption and hate a truly free democracy…. If you’ll notice, all of the “freedoms” loved by the truly rich invariably restrict the freedoms of the rest of us.

But we let them do it…. We let them pit us against each other! We let them trick us with cheap credit and the promises of the rewards of deregulation! We let them fool us into thinking that we could cut our taxes to increase our wealth, when the opposite is true! We let them target our rights and freedoms in the workplace!

That’s why the imbalance in our country has reached such severe proportions. It’s that simple. We let them off the hook, and we took on every burden ourselves.

So, no, don’t blame the rich.

We don’t have the time, really, for a bunch of finger-pointing. We need to rebuild our country, and for that we need cash. Let’s raise the money by making everyone in America pay fairly.

As our president said, it’s not a matter of blame. It’s simple math.

We’re not a bunch of lazy slobs in a bus line, pointing at the smart people and complaining.

We’re hard-working people who have been giving the lion’s share of our earnings to a bunch of over-sensitive prima donnas, and it’s time we stopped.