Doomsday at AJC?
July 11, 2008 at 10:54 am by Scott Henry in NewsWord is going around that something big will go down at the AJC next week – and nobody expects it to be a good something.
Cox honchos have spent recent weeks prepping the staff to brace for more cost-cutting at the paper. In late June, following a brutal round of layoffs at the Cox-owned Palm Beach Post in which a third(!) of the news staff was let go, AJC Publisher John Mellott issued a memo that offered little comfort:
“The economic factors affecting our business have worsened. The recession, the housing market downturn, as well as soaring newsprint and fuel costs have increased the urgency to reduce expenses. We will do so aggressively and in ways that make most sense for our market, our readers and our advertisers.”
It looks like the shit hits the fan next week. Managers have asked vacationing employees to provide contact information so they can be notified at the same time as the drudges in the newsroom. Everyone is expecting a bombshell to drop next week, but no one we spoke to seems to know whether it’ll be a SCUD missile, a neutron bomb or a Doomsday Machine.
Here’s some semi-educated speculation: Last summer, AJC second-in-command Hank Klibanoff was put in charge of the paper’s new “enterprise” division, a team of the paper’s top-tier writers dedicated to producing kick-ass investigative and long-form feature pieces. Apart from some stand-out work, such as the recent series, “Chaplain Turner’s War,” there’s been little visible ass-kicking emanating from the enterprise folks. Despite the reorganization, the paper seemed to fall back into the practice of giving its star reporters months to work on individual stories.
On June 24, Klibanoff announced he was leaving the AJC, even though he doesn’t have another job lined up. Our guess – based on little more than circumstantial evidence and our own cynicism – is that the paper plans to dismantle the enterprise team and put big-shot reporters on a more regular work schedule. The days when the AJC could afford to keep a corral of marquee reporters expected to write a small handful of important stories a year are probably over.
The worst-case scenario, of course, is a replay of what happened in Palm Beach, where reporters were offered a chance to volunteer to take a severance deal or risk being laid off. As we reported last year, the AJC extended buy-out packages to senior employees, eventually parting with about 70 of its higher-paid writers and editors. Depending on the new staff-reduction target, however, a buy-out could be offered to all employees. Last month, the newspaper rushed through a mid-year evaluation of all staff that we’ve been told was fairly unsparing. Employees probably have a decent idea by now where they stand with management.
Got any inside dope or conspiracy theories, such as the scuttlebutt Ken Edelstein heard that the AJC might lose its @Issue section? We’d like to hear your comments.
(Editor’s note: This article originally named an enterprise reporter as an example for writers who file few stories before learning she had been absent from the paper for personal reasons. We regret any misunderstanding.)
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