Perry Flippin worked at the San Angelo (Texas) Standard Times. The columnist was summoned to see the publisher last month and told his job was being eliminated. Adios Perry -- your last day is Jan. 4 -- thanks for the memories.
His final column leaves nothing unsaid about the state of the traditional media and its view of journalists as disposable commodities to be axed whenever the profit margin starts to creep below 20%. In other words, corporate publishers are right up there with the worst of the Greed Masters.
For 42 years, I have chased stories and looked under rocks and aspired to do good. My reporting aimed to help people be better citizens.
Times change.
They do indeed. Informing citizens does nothing to enhance revenue.
Publishers sold their souls on the notion that only the immediate bottom line matters. I believe newspapers are slowly committing suicide to satisfy corporate moguls and grasping stockholders.
How do CEOs earn fat bonuses? In part, by putting loyal and talented employees such as me on the street.
Happens every day in this great land and in industries across the board. We are all expendable. We are all one bad quarter away from being downsized or outsourced or just plain dropped. We are disposable.
We are on our own.
Flippin says in his column that you have to have reporters to cover City Hall and the local high school football game, that the corporate moguls just can't get around that. But they are certainly trying.
The Miami Herald just recently decided to outsource some of its copyediting work to India. And a paper in California decided to cover its city council by having someone in India watch a TV broadcast of the proceedings and write a story.
Maybe they save a couple bucks doing that. In the end, nobody is going to bother to read a report on the latest zoning controversy from some guy on the other side of the world who has never even been to your town.
When employees are regarded merely as interchangeable parts, casualties such as me become collateral damage in the never-ending drive to maintain unrealistic profit margins.
I believe the lives and health of Americans are being sacrificed in the interest of corporate greed.
The problem is much broader than the newspaper industry. Similar conditions prevail in retailing, medicine, education, transportation, manufacturing - practically any endeavor that preaches the heresy of "do more with less."
Let's be truthful: We're doing less with less.
Indeed. The Orlando Sentinel, which is just down the road from Daytona Beach, home of NASCAR, announced yesterday that they are no longer going to cover NASCAR. The Sentinel's longtime and respected NASCAR reporter has left the paper.
Sentinel subscribers will be treated to wire service stories about the weekly races. But I'm sure the paper will improve its bottom line for 2008.
I remember the good ol' days, before everyone was obsessed with 40 percent "retention" and a thousand points of marketing bullwhiz.
I remember when winning statewide writing awards meant having job security.
It's hard to remember when people loved newspapers more than they loved money.
Let us speak no more of riding for the brand, a quaint notion of mutual loyalty between employer and employee. Such an ideal vanished with the Linotype.
My publisher reminded me that I am expendable.
It's hard to imagine that anyone can reverse this trend. Only one candidate is even talking about it -- John Edwards. Maybe even President Edwards can't change it, but he might make a dent.
At the very least, he'd change the paradigm. People like Perry Flippin would no longer be viewed simply as unfortunate collateral damage.