No News is Bad News

Despite worst-case projections that tripled the potential damage, the Inky's new editor will have plans to lay 50 staffers off by month's end.

by Kevin Haney

Media

When former Inquirer reporter Bill Marimow returns to the struggling paper as its new editor later this month, his first order of business will be deciding which of 50 newsroom staffers will lose their jobs.

Even if the Inquirer's new local owners get the concessions they're asking for in contract talks with the staffers' union, publisher Brian Tierney still expects Marimow to trim the staff, company spokesman Jay Devine said Friday.

"Business conditions will determine the actual number," he explained

Philadelphia Media Holdings, the company run by local investors including Tierney, and the Newspaper Guild, which represents about 900 Inquirer and Daily News workers, have been trying to negotiate a new contract for three months.

Slightly more than 400 of its members work in the Inquirer's newsrooms throughout the region. The Guild and 11 other unions, representing the balance of some 2,460 unionized workers, have been working under contract extensions since their pacts expired Aug. 31.

Reaching a new deal with Guild workers has gone slowly because PMH wants to end some of the union's key contract provisions, namely the company's funding of the workers' pension plan, use of seniority to conduct layoffs and reducing sick pay while aiming to merge some of the papers' news-gathering operations.

Henry Holcomb, an Inquirer business reporter who serves as Guild president, said the company's proposed pension freeze would cut retirement benefits for many of its members by $1,000 a month. Tierney has told employees that cuts and changes are needed in all union contracts because of both a sharp drop in ad sales and upcoming payments on $330 million in bank loans that are due by year's end. (Investors took out the loans with a European-based bank to help finance the purchase.) The company seeks concessions that would allow it to invest at least $20 million in upgraded presses and in Internet-based news delivery.

The Guild pension fund is a particularly inviting target for Tierney since it costs the company about $4 million a year, based on the pension formula in the Guild contract.

In a meeting with several hundred of his new employees last Wednesday, Marimow said he wanted to strengthen local-news coverage but admitted there would be "painful" times ahead for the newsroom staff. He replaces Amanda Bennett, who is taking a post at Columbia University, after being brought to Philadelphia by previous owners Knight Ridder in 2003.

After management stints with the Baltimore Sun and National Public Radio, Marimow returns at a time when the Inquirer 's average daily circulation is nearly 331,000, down by more than 7 percent in six months.

When Inquirer staffers peppered Marimow with questions last week about staffing, Tierney urged them to surrender to his negotiators' demands at the bargaining table so Marimow would have the largest staff possible. During the meeting, Tierney acknowledged that there could be up to 150 layoffs, but Devine explained that the paper's senior editors were given that number as the maximum job cut in a "planning exercise."

Tierney's more immediate goal, Devine said, was to limit layoffs to about 50 jobs — cuts that will be made even if he gets the concessions he's seeking in the Guild contract.

Delighted at first to hear of Marimow's return, many staffers were stunned by Tierney comments, and even by some of what Marimow said. "There are a lot of people feeling a bit dazed," explained one longtime Inquirer writer.

Marimow, a Havertown native, is regarded among journalists nationwide as one of the craft's superstars. He won two Pulitzer prizes for his local investigations of police brutality early in his career and eventually became city editor. He served as an assistant in the early 1990s to Bob Hall, then the Inquirer 's publisher, who is now one of Tierney's contract negotiators.

While the current contract requires that people be laid off in a last-hired, first-laid-off fashion, the company will determine the numbers for each job category, such as reporters, photographers or copy editors. Making matters worse is the fact that Marimow could be forced to lay off more people come January if there is no contract settlement.

The Inquirer's ability to cover news throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey has eroded in the last 15 years following a dramatic expansion in the 1980s after the Philadelphia Bulletin closed. Some 75 staffers took buyouts offered a year ago by Knight Ridder. At the Daily News, 25 staffers left, reducing the staff to about 100.

The contract extension for the Guild's 900 members expires Nov. 30, just when the busy Christmas ad season gets underway. Some members believe it would be the best time to strike and force Tierney to scale back his demands; others have said they're worried the contract extension gave the company some leverage as it will be able to tap into that lucrative ad season.

Members authorized their 15-member negotiating committee to call a strike on Oct. 25, by a 500 to 4 vote, but the paper's 11 other unions, representing some 2,500 workers, are still in talks and haven't authorized strikes. Their contract extensions also expire Nov. 30. Joe Lyons, who heads the council representing those unions, said unions representing drivers and mailroom workers, who assemble papers from the presses, were still negotiating over safety and job security. Those unions will negotiate jointly over wage and benefits once the workplace issues are settled.

(k_haney@citypaper.net)