Getting The News
When a large corporation has a bad quarter and loses a lot of money, employees can pretty much count on one thing: cost cutting measures that involve lay-offs and outright terminations. And those lay-offs and terminations will not involve people at the upper management level, but rather those employees who do the actual work to provide the product or service the corporation is selling.
The country's news organizations, which are, after all, large corporations, operate the same way, according to this article in the NY Times.
News operations at CBS stations in several cities started a series of job cuts this week even as the CBS News network moved ahead with plans to lay off about 1 percent of its nearly 1,200 employees. ...
Over the last several days, layoffs were ordered at local stations that CBS owns, including ones in New York, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco. ...
CBS revenues declined 14.6 percent in the fourth quarter. Like most media stocks, the share price has also been in decline, down almost 20 percent for the year. ...
If the numbers remain as announced, job cuts at CBS News will be less than those at its news counterparts at ABC and NBC. Sandy Genelius, the spokeswoman for CBS News, said some jobs were being redefined and others would be open to be filled by others.
ABC News announced last week that it was eliminating about 20 jobs (though an ABC spokesman said other positions will be added, keeping the overall job loss to less than 10 positions). The division president, David Westin, has said he intends to cut about 30 jobs by next year.
NBC News ordered a series of job cutbacks two years ago as part of a companywide initiative called NBC 2.0, which set a goal of cutting 700 positions by the end of this year. About 30 of those cuts have come from inside NBC’s news operation, which is much larger than CBS’s because it includes a separate cable news channel, MSNBC.
Please note that with some notable exceptions at the local station level the job cuts don't involve the on-air news readers. It's the people who do the actual news gathering and the technical people for the broadcasts who are getting the ax, at least for this round.
While it's tempting to write this off as relatively unimportant because most television news is nothing more than entertainment which serves as a platform for the advertisers, the television news show is where a huge segment of the US population gets its news.
Not only that, the same "cost-cutting" efforts have been going on for serveral years in the print media as well. Reporters with years of experience have been layed off at the Los Angeles Times over the past several years, and several editors of the paper have been forced out of their jobs for refusing to make the cuts mandated by the corporate owner.
I haven't done a thorough survey, but I have a hunch someone has, and that survey would show that the news media in this country is owned by just a few corporations, some of which are foreign (see Ruth's post on what this means). And those corporations are more interested in the bottom line and the advertisers who help them reach that bottom line than in actually delivering the news.
Is it any wonder that Americans can tell you how many times Britney Spears has been arrested but can't tell you where Tibet is?
I am not optimistic.
The country's news organizations, which are, after all, large corporations, operate the same way, according to this article in the NY Times.
News operations at CBS stations in several cities started a series of job cuts this week even as the CBS News network moved ahead with plans to lay off about 1 percent of its nearly 1,200 employees. ...
Over the last several days, layoffs were ordered at local stations that CBS owns, including ones in New York, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco. ...
CBS revenues declined 14.6 percent in the fourth quarter. Like most media stocks, the share price has also been in decline, down almost 20 percent for the year. ...
If the numbers remain as announced, job cuts at CBS News will be less than those at its news counterparts at ABC and NBC. Sandy Genelius, the spokeswoman for CBS News, said some jobs were being redefined and others would be open to be filled by others.
ABC News announced last week that it was eliminating about 20 jobs (though an ABC spokesman said other positions will be added, keeping the overall job loss to less than 10 positions). The division president, David Westin, has said he intends to cut about 30 jobs by next year.
NBC News ordered a series of job cutbacks two years ago as part of a companywide initiative called NBC 2.0, which set a goal of cutting 700 positions by the end of this year. About 30 of those cuts have come from inside NBC’s news operation, which is much larger than CBS’s because it includes a separate cable news channel, MSNBC.
Please note that with some notable exceptions at the local station level the job cuts don't involve the on-air news readers. It's the people who do the actual news gathering and the technical people for the broadcasts who are getting the ax, at least for this round.
While it's tempting to write this off as relatively unimportant because most television news is nothing more than entertainment which serves as a platform for the advertisers, the television news show is where a huge segment of the US population gets its news.
Not only that, the same "cost-cutting" efforts have been going on for serveral years in the print media as well. Reporters with years of experience have been layed off at the Los Angeles Times over the past several years, and several editors of the paper have been forced out of their jobs for refusing to make the cuts mandated by the corporate owner.
I haven't done a thorough survey, but I have a hunch someone has, and that survey would show that the news media in this country is owned by just a few corporations, some of which are foreign (see Ruth's post on what this means). And those corporations are more interested in the bottom line and the advertisers who help them reach that bottom line than in actually delivering the news.
Is it any wonder that Americans can tell you how many times Britney Spears has been arrested but can't tell you where Tibet is?
I am not optimistic.
Labels: Free Press
posted by Diane at 3:55 AM
3 Comments:
let me add, here, that this isn't really new and it's not really restricted to the news divisions. I work as an Avid editor in TV animation in Hollywood, and have watched all of "the majors" (WB, Disney, Sony, etc.) shrink their workforces since even before 2000. I vividly remember taking a job at WB in 2001, and being amazed that everyone there had already been scared into submission by the new reality--the most frequently heard phrase was "oh, well, at least we've still got jobs."
to be fair, much downsizing in my particular part of the industry (post-production) was made easier via the advancement of technology--moving to a digital world allowed management to heap MANY jobs formerly done by many supporting workers onto the editors' plate. suddenly, editors, formerly responsible only for cutting the footage, were doing audio editing/mixing, graphics fixes to picture, color correction, layback of the audio mix to picture, and output of the final network master. what had previously given many other support people good careers was folded into the editor's responsiblities, saving management many thousands of dollars per episode.
the Editors' Guild, our local IATSE union, should have been there to draw the line. unfortunately, they've been tight with management for years and are only effective in ensuring that union members receive decent benefits. (as someone who recently spent a few weeks in the hospital, I'm not ungrateful for that.)
***
the bottom line, for all corporations, has long been of utmost importance, and probably a major factor on whether somebody at the upper levels gets one of those fat bonuses we love to hear so much about. I suspect that cutting the permanent numbers of the workforce is merely a pleasant upside that helps to realign the overall picture of labor in the US into something that makes boardrooms smile.
"Gutting" the news.
Leave Tibetney alone!
If we could name countries after pop stars, we could finally answer the question....
...is our children learning?
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