Month: March 2009

Life is more stressful than usual for many employees at The Commercial Appeal these days. Last week the newspaper’s management announced that it would lay off 23 Newspaper Guild-covered employees and three employees covered by the pressman’s union effective March 12. The employees being laid off were originally supposed to be notified on Monday, March 2. But recent, not entirely clear events, have resulted in the notification date being been pushed back to March 27.

It was originally announced that 18 of the employees being laid off would come from the newspaper’s editorial department. That has changed with the voluntary retirement of business reporter David Flaum, and the resignations of business reporter Cassandra Kimberly and Alex Doniach, who covers Shelby County government.

According to Mediaverse-Memphis, a blog that covers Mid-South media, the delay was caused by a protracted debate over who on the editorial staff will be laid off. Additional sources suggest that the management is waiting to see if there will be more voluntary resignations. Rumors have also been floated about everything from troubles with accounting software to fears that laid off employees might cause trouble in the workplace between the time of the the announcements and the time that the layoffs actually take effect. The truth is most likely some combination of all these things.

Several sources inside the building have said that, although nobody wants to lose their job, there are reasons to be envious of those who have decided to resign. They no longer have the threat of termination hanging over their head at a time when everybody seems to be concerned about the future of the newspaper industry.

To cut costs, CA management reduced the size of the newspaper, laid off 9 percent of its workforce, and ceased home delivery to thousands of households in surrounding cities in 2008. 2009 began with management taking paycuts of up to 15 percent.

The CA isn’t unique. Shrinking of the physical product and staff downsizing is happening at daily newspapers all across America. That and a seemingly endless stream of articles announcing the death of print journalism might lead consumers to believe that daily newspapers are rapidly going the way of the dinosaur. Yet, amid all the doom and gloom, most newspaper companies continue to post what in virtually any other industry would be regarded as robust operating profits.

So why is a profitable business model failing? In spite of what you’ll read in the papers, it’s got very little to do with the internet or theories that people don’t read anymore. In almost every case, the papers that are suffering the most are those with massive corporate debt. They have “borrowed” themselves into a hole to expand their media empires.

According to Advertising Age magazine, the McClatchy newspaper group posted a 21 percent operating profit in 2008. But the media giant still had to lay off employees and freeze pensions in order to maintain profit margins, while paying back its nearly $2 billion in debt from the purchase of the Knight-Ridder news service.

Scripps, The Commercial Appeal‘s parent company, used its publishing success to launch a battery of cable television channels, and to develop original content for those channels. In 2008, the newspaper division and the cable division became two separate corporate entities, both of which have since lost stock value. That’s bad news for stockholders, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect negatively on the future viability of daily newspapers.

–Chris Davis

I realize that this may seem callous at a time like this, and believe me, I am feeling the effects of it too, but I would like nothing more than to go for just a few days without reading about, seeing news stories about, talking about, or even mentioning “the economy.”

First of all, I’ve never been driven by money, so I’ve never really had any and I don’t understand how it all works. I don’t understand why AIG is getting another big batch of bailout billions when they seem to have spent a decent-sized portion of their last wad of cash on lavish corporate getaways with fine wine, massages, and hotel rooms that cost more by the night than my monthly mortgage note. I’m sure I could read enough about it to figure it out, or at least to get fairly pissed off, but I don’t even want to know at this point. I don’t understand how Bill Clinton could have left office with a healthy surplus in the reserves and now, after eight years of the Bush regime, there’s not only nothing left but there’s also this massive debt and many in the Republican Party are blaming it on the Democrats.

Who cares whose fault it is? It’s done. We’re toast for now. Or at least that’s what many of us will be considering a major food group until things get better. What makes me a little bit nuts is to have seen those holiday stampedes at Wal-Mart and Circuit City and Best Buy and stores like them, with throngs of people knocking each other down to get to the latest video game or Play-Station or iPod or iPhone or whatever, and then bitch about being broke. Why weren’t they stampeding the “everything’s-a-dollar” section at Piggly Wiggly and feeding their families?

I say, this is all Ann Coulter’s fault. I think Coulter is the antichrist and that she has come from another planet to drain our collective intelligence and turn us into strange robots, like herself. I thought maybe she had decided to leave Earth and stay on her own planet while the presidential election was going on, because she was nowhere in sight, but then she came back through the Star Gate somewhere and reemerged. I first saw her on a talk show on which she refused to refer to President Obama as anything other than “Barack Hussein Obama,” trying to connect him in some pathetic way to Saddam Hussein. Of course, she was just hawking her latest piece-of-crap book that people will go buy instead of buying food and then bitch about being broke.

But at least she hasn’t lost her keen sense of humor! While Rush Limbaugh may have been the headliner at last week’s big Conservative Political Action Conference (go to that group’s website and try to find a minority face!), it seems that Longneck Ann gave a little speech of her own and had the crowd just a-chuckling. And I have found THE greatest review of it imaginable. It’s from a lawyer named Tommy De Seno, who also has a newspaper column named JUSTIFIED RIGHT (yeah, he uses all caps) but, according to his bio, he “still finds time to walk about the City by the Sea debating, and proving wrong, all sorts of IQ-challenged political pee-wees such as Dummycrats, Green Party Pansies, and the dimmest left-wingers on God’s earth — Secular Humanists.” This guy is fabulous. He fancies himself as “the last scion of conservative thinking in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and the only person there brave enough to challenge Asbury’s favorite son, Bruce Springsteen, on his ‘Born to Cut and Run’ political views.”

I don’t want to shame the guy for what he believes in, even if he thinks people who care about the environment are IQ-challenged. He has a right to his opinions. But his newspaper column? Oh, dear. Here is just a sample of one that he wrote about Coulter’s performance at the White Convention:

“Ann Coulter is the funniest woman on the planet. I don’t know why the media always paint her as the toughest man on the planet. No one is better at putting funnies into serious stories.” Yes, the man used the word “funnies.” And it gets even better: “She started right in against the liberal media, telling the crowd that every host at MSNBC went to the ‘alternative prom’ in high school. The crowd cracked up, and the jokes and laughter grew from there.”

Good Lord, how I wish I would have been there to laugh at that hilarious “funny.” I’m almost wetting my pants right now laughing at how clever she is. And at what a good and insightful writer Mr. De Seno is. Ha. Ha. Hahahahahahaha. “Alternative Prom.” That is a real knee-slapper. Very original. There’s some more funnies about bed-wetting and such (“only Coulter can get away with that!”) and De Seno observes all of her zingers with great zest. Oh, and he is now offering himself up for “appearances” on his web site, justifiedright.typepad.com.

I do wish someone would book him to come to Memphis and maybe bring Coulter along with him so they could play off each other. And if the economy, which we won’t mention any more, is any worse by then, maybe they can eat each other. n

Our state’s budget crisis demands that state leaders devise new ways to protect taxpayers’ precious dollars — a significant part of which is lost annually through fraud, waste, and outright theft by state employees.

There’s one good way to encourage conscientious state workers to report those who misdirect taxpayer dollars. How? By funding legal protection for whistleblowers.

Statistically, most government fraud is observed and reported by employees (26 percent), while only 11.5 percent is discovered by external auditors and 1.7 o\percent by law enforcement. Frontline whistleblowers are less expensive than fraud investigators, and they enrich our budget by rescuing and recouping taxpayers’ losses.

But, as the Tennessee State Employees Association and the state comptrollers’ office can report, whistleblowers suffer retaliation from managers, perpetrators’ friends, department officials, and investigative offices, as well as from coworkers. Abuse can be brutal and relentless, taking a physical and mental toll.

An employee of one health-related state agency reported her supervisor’s ordering her to alter time-sheets to allow the supervisor’s friends to go frequently AWOL. Internal “investigators” attempted to refute the whistleblower’s claim and harassed her. Subesquently, she fell ill and died from what could have been stress-induced causes.

In 33 years of working in Tennessee state fiscal offices and with TSEA, I often observed that managers discouraged workers from reporting violations that could embarrass their departments. They sometimes turned the investigation against the whistleblower with cruel and intimidating behavior.

There was the case of a supervisor who reported to her human resources office an employee who was absent most days, getting paid for massive amounts of hours and days not worked. Result? The supervisor was compelled to leave her own job when the HRO turned the investigation against her.

Another employee who reported the same perpetrator had her computer confiscated, then suffered various forms of intense retaliation from managers and from the perpetrator’s friends, and finally had her job terminated. Both the whistleblowers in this case are currently unemployed. Yet, though internal investigators produced documentation suggesting that the accused employee was guilty of misappropriating thousands of dollars in state funds, she was promoted and given a raise.

Why does this happen? Possibly because government differs from businesses, in that job security and promotion do not necessarily depend on quality performance or protecting assets. The primary motivator is often friendship or connections. Survival in some state offices depends on skillfully performing the reality-show dynamics of alliance-building, coworker manipulation, and currying favor with managers. An ethical, hard-working employee can suffer by not investing in these dynamics.

In some cases in which ethical employees report waste or fraud, their departments either do not want to be embarrassed or hesitate to take action against a popular employee or manager. Co-workers circle the wagons around the perpetrator and attack the whistleblower for rocking the boat. The aforementioned promoted employee charged with theft had protective friends on all levels. This culture foments fraud and taxpayer losses.

There are efforts at official remedial action from time to time. I helped state representative Mike Kernell of Memphis craft one such: the Advocacy for Honest and Appropriate Government Spending Act. And there have been others: The Financial Integrity Act, Risk Management and Internal Control Requirements, The Whistleblower Protection Statute,and so on.

What tends to make these remedies ineffective is the fact that whistleblowers must pay lawyers to protect themselves from inevitable retaliation and job loss. Unlike Marie Ragghianti, most state workers cannot afford Fred Thompson’s — or any lawyer’s fees.

Lawmakers need to put fangs into these regulatory words-on-paper by funding the legal fees that whistleblowers inevitably incur. They also need to establish an entity that, with objectivity and uniformity, can mete out real consequences for fraud, thereby bypassing the biased “friendship-based” department officials.

There are abundant examples these days of heroic whistleblowers in the financial industry, people whose consciences and altruistic concern for the public’s welfare prompt them to shine a light on investment fraud.

Whistleblowers in government perform a similar service. After all, Tennessee taxpayers sacrificially “invest” their money in state officials and employees, trusting it will be returned to them through services and quality of life. An effective way to keep their money from being misdirected into the pockets of a few delinquent employees is to further invest a modest portion of it in paid legal protection for courageous, ethical whistleblowers.

Protecting them will protect Tennesseans’ assets.

Becky Clark Carter is a former state employee who continues to be active with the Tennessee State Employees Association.