Strike Deadline Looms - Should Readers Boycott Philly Papers in Sympathy?

The clock is ticking on the future of journalism in the Philadelphia region....Will they or won't they strike? If they don't strike, will there be a management lock out instead (it is conceivable)? That is what everyone is asking about the Inquirer and Daily News.

Philadelphia Weekly reported a few days ago that the pickets are ready, and there is an ad floating around advertising for scabs. The deadline is November 30th, and if you review the Inquirer contracts online, it seems everyone has been walking the tightrope without a net since August, contract extension or no extensions? We have to ask again if these folks are asking for outrageous things, or just things we all need? And we have to ask again if the new owners really have any concept of how to run newspapers, or if they are doing the right thing or not, or do they care at all about something that isn't merely an investment, a bottom line? Do these new owners even get that a newspaper is a living, breathing thing????

We love our papers (local, national, regional), and most of us are news junkies. Don't we all deserve better and don't our reporters deserve better? If they strike, will we get rebates on our subscriptions until we can once again read the work of those whom we pay to read? Does our money matter? Should the public at large, the readership, offer up a sympathy boycott of the papers if they strike? Heeeyyyy, maybe that isn't such a bad idea....it's a little way to show support, but it can be easilly achieved....hmmmm...the power of the people.....

Here's some more coverage:
Washington Post: At the Inquirer, Shrink Globally, Slash Locally?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 27, 2006; Page C01

Brian Tierney, a onetime critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer who wound up buying the paper, is determined to take his new property in a different direction.

"We don't need a Jerusalem bureau," he says. "What we need are more people in the South Jersey bureau."

But six months after this advertising and public relations executive gained control of a once-proud newspaper that routinely ranked among the country's top 10, he is considering layoffs of as much as 30 percent of an already reduced newsroom staff. That would mean even fewer journalists covering those New Jersey suburbs and just about everywhere else, deepening the sense of gloom at a paper that racked up 18 Pulitzer Prizes between 1975 and 1997.

"The Inquirer, unfortunately, has retreated in all but a couple of symbolic ways from the ambition it had at one time to play in the majors," says veteran reporter Rick Nichols. Tierney's threatened layoffs, he says, "would be carved right out of the heart of local coverage."

The Nation: posted November 15, 2006 (web only)
The Death of News
Nicholas von Hoffman

Hope for haters of "the media" of whatever stripe or flavor! Judging from recent events, they may not have much media to kick around any more. Things are definitely on the droop in news-media land.

One reason morale is down is reportorial work is getting exceedingly dangerous.

....While foreign journalists are losing their lives, journalists in America are losing their jobs. The Christian Science Monitor reports that "daily newspapers in New York, Boston, Houston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and elsewhere are laying off or buying out hundreds of newsroom employees, as well as other workers." And talk about covering your own funeral: The Monitor added that "last summer, The Christian Science Monitor cut newsroom jobs, too." Those cities do not begin to exhaust the list of places where reporters and editors are being let go.

The cause of mass reporter firings are varied.... If the readers continue to disappear at this rate into the Internet or die off or opt out of word communication for pictures and music, the advertisers are going to do the same....As readers evaporate, so do advertisers and, although American newspapers continue to be more profitable than most businesses, there is panic...American corporate managers are schooled to do one thing and one thing only under stress--lay people off....there comes a point when laying off staff hurts the quality of the product.

So what would happen if the public, the readership, started cancelling subscriptions and boycotting the paper if the strike occurs? After all, are we willing to read what scabs create? We understand that people are desperate and have got to work, but shouldn't we show loyalty to those who have survivied lay off after lay off, editor after editor, publisher after publisher, owner after owner??? And we will leave you with this parting shot: if Sam McKeel was still chairman and publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News, we wouldn't be having this discussion and we wouldn't be worried about a strike - McKeel is a man who understands newspapers and the newspaper business. Also to be considered: could our local weeklies make a go of it as a local daily?