If they would clean up the newspapers of lazy employees, especially in the sales department and hire managers that know something about managing and not pill popping, cocaine snorting addicts, their newspapers might stand a better chance of surviving.

You take a screaming raging crazy woman conducting a sales meeting and then ask yourself are you motivated to go out and sell advertising….not to mention her throwing things at the employees.

Wake up CNHI!!!

I worked at one of those CNHI papers for much of last year; I faced 10 days of furloughs. I learned of the first round as I woke up from a post-surgery nap.

I was able to find another journalism job, a miracle in itself, and almost waltzed into another round of furloughs. A gentleman who’d been hired just before I was did get the furloughs based on his hire date. Salary freezes or cuts, slashed benefits and tons of layoffs have been the norms.

Take a look at http://graphicdesignr.net/papercuts/. There’s a way to look by years — 2009 had about 15,000 newspaper folk lose their jobs. 2008 was about 16,000. Keep in mind this is not a definitive list.

Compare as you will. As Dan said, the pay has never been good. Some folks’d compare to teachers, who face long hours and lots of stress, work in an intellectually challenging job, often have advanced degrees, generally can offer gripes about the lack of internal support and resources, and are often seen as voluntarily forgoing some pay in the interests of a kind of community service. You can dispute any of all of that if you’d like.

But fact is there’s a metric buttload of veteran reporters who still earn far less than the starting salary of teachers, and have far lower benefits as well.

Again, you can dispute the comparison. And I mean no slight to teachers or reporters or anyone, especially as a reporter son of teachers.

I think that the newspaper biz, so far, has gotten off pretty easy. Obviously, things need to turn around for this industry, but they can’t expect to skate while employees in other sectors are taking ones for the team.

Isn’t the alternative no paper at all?