Volunteers going and going

If the volunteers continue to leave, the jobs of at least half of those laid off will be saved. The sports staff, we are told, needs only one more volunteer to save its remaining laid off person. The job of copy editor Lisa Abram was saved.

Latest volunteer leaver is Kim Profant, copy editor and page designer, who is leaving quietly to join the foreign and national desk staff of the Chicago Tribune after seven years at the Beacon Journal. Information is being sought from other volunteers who are leaving. Guild Treasurer Stephanie Warsmith told the Guild Reporter last week that 13 have volunteered. Among the big names mentioned on the blog so far are Mary Ethdridge, Gloria Irwin, Jane Snow, Debby Stock Kiefer and Sarah Vradenburg.

If you got your September 15 issue of the Guild Reporter in today’s mail, you learned that:

Knight Ridder died, but the bodies keep falling

Here’s the Reporter story:

Knight Ridder officially bit the dust June 26, when shareholders approved its sale to McClatchy. But empires are not dissolved painlessly, and the death of this one continues to reverberate.

Perhaps most shocking was the decision of David Black, new owner of the Akron Beacon Journal—once crown jewel of the Knight newspaper chain—to show the door to a quarter of all newsroom employees. The announcement means that a news operation that had 197 employees as recently as 1999 will be limping within weeks with approximately 110.

Black, a Canadian, was viewed as a bit of a hero in Hawaii five years ago, when he rescued the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and explained, “I don’t have to make much—a dollar would do.” But times apparently have changed. Although the Beacon-Journal remains profitable, it’s making only half as much as it did just four years ago—when its profit margin apparently was in the vicinity of 24%—and advertising revenue has continued to decline.

Black affects a lack of concern about his ax wielding, channeling Donald Rumsfeld in late August when he told Reuters, “I don’t really believe that the quality of a newsroom is a direct function of body count in the newsroom.” But Beacon Journal employees quickly picked up on a companion thought, in which Black complained about the allegedly wasteful activity he’d seen: desktop tents sprouted throughout the newsroom earlier this week, announcing “No Coffee,” “No Chatting” and “No Fun Allowed.”

Guild members at the paper, represented by the Northeast Ohio Guild, had a dry run at this in 2001, when Knight Ridder laid off seven newsroom staffers, and many of the same responses have kicked in this time: job banks, financial counseling, fund-raising for the unemployed. But the size of the cuts is so much larger this time—39 people—and the ranks of those left behind so much thinner that there’s a sense this isn’t just a staffing change: it’s a seismic shift in the Beacon Journal’s identity, and not for the best.

How everything will shake out won’t be known until Oct. 21, the last day of layoffs—in this round, at least, although others have been hinted—and the deadline for voluntary resignations. As of this week 13 employees had read the writing on the wall and volunteered to leave, according to Stephanie Warsmith, the unit’s secretary-treasurer. Each voluntary resignation reduces the layoff list by one.

That's all, but click to see for yourself.