Dallas Blog

Look for the DMN to go the way of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer within a year. If all they're going to do is print items from other newspapers & news organizations, why should anyone pay them what is an ever-rising price???

Are these bonuses taxed as payroll income? Are they taxed as income or capital gains?

CEO wrote: "The American worker should feel lucky."

Why is that? Because Montgomery Burns and Silas Marner are running the show and reaping the rewards? Or because corporate monkeys keep finding new ways to outsource jobs to countries that don't share our laws regarding fair labor? The American CEO is the one who should feel lucky.

Also: BELO pays 500 people? Hm, I guess all those commentaries and photos and cartoons, etc., from "contributers" and "citizen journalists" will be the first to go. Right?

Guys:

Please layoff Bobby, the raise it's thoroughly deserved, non of you lumpenproletariat understand how difficult it is for us CEOs to live in such trying economic times: the decision about whether or not lay off the maid, the pool boy, or the gardener can cause many a sleepless night. Just because our new company stock opened at $18.00 in April and now is trading around $2.00 isn't an indictment of our management, losing 90% of the value of the company is great, at least we didn' lose 100%. And by-the-way, the $42 million dollar cue cat makes great paperweights.

Get this -- for about the fifth time this year, my paper was nowhere to be found when I got up this morning. It finally arrived at about 7:30, a good two hours after it normally does.

But it gets better -- the entire section that is packed in the plastic bag (Parade, TV Guide, comics etc), was the version from January 4 (a month ago). The first clue was when the TV guide told me Florida would be playing Oklahoma in the BCS National Championship "on Thursday". The wheels have not just come off the cart at Belo, they have flown off the highway and into a culvert where they are submerged in 10 inches of mud.

The newspaper industry was always a closed society, one that considered itself to be so inviolate and lofty, that its leaders and, quite frankly, its unions and staffs just never saw nor heard the freight train coming.

I believe this was a result of self-adulation and self-involvement, not always such corrosive qualities for businesses.

Except when there's a powerful and inexorable adversary barreling down, and no one notices.

Paper newspapers are not disappearing because they are not meaningful, but simply because the Internet is free, offers limitless space for limitless stories and because readers, through blogs and posts, have finally tasted the joy of sitting at the opinion editor's desk.

In many ways, the online product is far more egalitarian for just this latter reason and, in absolute terms, it's a better delivery system of what people want: News, and when it's new, not a day later.

In far too many newsrooms NO memo has ever gone out over the past five or so years asking staff for ideas. Too bad, because it's staff out in the streets that would have been most likely to have had ideas on how to stanch the bleeding five years back.

Some say that newspaper people, for all their interest in what's going on, are also more resistant to change than many of us.

Now, it's just too late. Over the next year there will be a stark, awful, painful, terrifyingly precipitous slide in newspaper presence --- layoffs, slash-backs of services, bankruptcies, closings.

The sound of presses silenced with a sqeak.

None of this is because newspapers are not noble products; it's because things change. I think it would be a hoot now and again to have the Pony Express deliver my fuel bill and occasional Hallmark card; realistically, I prefer the postman -- or Internet.

Newspapers, I've always loved you. The whack of the bundle slapping the sidewalk before dawn, the suspenseful rustle as the pages are unfolded, the carte blanche invitation to spill coffee all over the product without recrimination, the clipping and sending of special columns or cartoons to friends in another part of the country.

Thanks, newspapers, for everything you've done to serve. There will never be another one just like you.

But we just have no future together.