Coping with today's trying times

Newspaper bosses in Akron and Cleveland are talking this week about how to get along in hard times.

In an interview for Weekend Diary, the Plain Dealer's podcast about local business, new editor Susan Goldberg talks about managing through hard times -- the San Jose Mercury News, where she's been for eight years, has gone through buyouts, layoffs, and the decline of the tech industry -- as well as managing for change and encouraging creativity.

She likes Clark Hoyt but hates whiny people who live in the past. That may include most viewers of this blog.

A couple of points from the interview:

On her management style: "I don't have any problem with dissenting views. But what I always have the most trouble with is -- I could summarize it by saying, 'whiny people who live in the past.' They drive me crazy. Because, there's nothing we can do about the massive changes in our industry. ... Just whining and moaning about the way it used to be will not solve anything. ... I find as time goes on and our problems become more and more apparent, and our need to change becomes more and more apparent, my patience for 'whiny people who live in the past' becomes shorter."

On coping with layoffs and cost-cutting: "As painful as any kind of cutting can be, the upside is that it does force you to focus on your priorities. ... You really need to think long and hard about what makes you special in your marketplace. In San Jose, one of the things that made us special was our technology coverage. So, if that's at the top of the heap, than maybe something else falls off the bottom so you can keep doing technology coverage incredibly well. So in Cleveland, perhaps that would be coverage of the growth industry here -- the medical industry."

On Clark Hoyt, former Knight-Ridder Washington editor, now public editor of the New York Times: "What I most admire about Clark is his, just, innate sense of right and wrong, and not getting pushed around by the administration and bullied into telling the story that they wanted to tell, but telling the true story. Knight-Ridder was really the only organization in the country that questioned the whole run-up to the war in Iraq with WMD."

Check out the interview on Cleveland.com which will lead you to the podcast. You can listen to the audio of the interview online or download to listen at your leisure.

Our very own Beacon Journal publisher Ed Moss talks about adapting to change while telling the Akron Roundtable that the future for the newspaper is highly focused on local news and advertising in print and electronic versions.

“There is no doubt that we are going through a transition period that has seen newspaper readership decline, newspaper revenues and profits fall,'' Moss said. ``In fact, just last week we all read about significant reductions of people at newspaper companies in Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Baltimore, Dallas. I could go on and on. There is no simple answer to these trends that have led newspaper companies across America to take a hard look at themselves and reinvent the way they do business.''

The Beacon Journal has gone through its own downsizing in the past 10 months, Moss said. The paper has cut 134 jobs across all departments, going from 734 to 600 people. He called the job cuts difficult but necessary.

Despite the reductions, Moss said he believes ”we are a better company. We are a more nimble company. And we are putting out a better product.... And we are positioned to be successful for years and years and years to come.''

He also noted that Ohio.com will allow readers to submit news items. Community groups will be allowed to control their own pages using Ohio.com tools, he said.

Blogger note: The real verb in the last sentence probably means encourage instead of allow.

Click on the headline to read more of the Goldberg interview

and click here to read to read all of business reporter Jim Mackinnon’s story on the Roundable speech.