Dec. 11 Day of Action
Hey Guys,
As a follow-on for last week's support of our coworkers at the San Jose Mercury News, The Newspaper Guild has organized a national day of action today to remind people of the drastic job cuts seen in the last few years. Whether it's the layoffs and job freezes we've seen right here at the Daily News, the cuts down at the Press-Telegram, the ones threatened across town at the Times, we've seen far too much of this locally and nationwide.
Whenever news of the cuts comes out and makes the rounds on the journalism Web sites, it's easy to shrug your shoulders and figure that as long as it wasn't your job that it's no big deal. It's a very big deal, whether it's at our own paper, our company or even our competitors. Each job lost makes the business smaller and a harder place to compete. For those of us who'd like to make this a career, it's becoming an increasingly tight and bleak landscape.
And that's a shame, something that I think that people outside of the business can't really appreciate. It's not just that these thousands of cuts take food off the tables of families. Every time we get stretched more thinly, that's less news we can cover and less service we can offer to the public. Newspapers have played a crucial role in our democracy since this country was just a bunch of maligned colonies, so the worse they're pared down to maximize profits, the worse off the country becomes.
So with that in mind, if you've got some time today, drop by my desk. I'll have stickers we can wear that the Guild has put out and, if you're available at 2:30 p.m., come on over and whomever's interested in learning more, I'll buy you all coffee across the street. It's a very small thing compared with some of the actions planned nationwide (http://www.savejournalism.org/), but let's use a few minutes out of our day to talk about ways we can remind our company, our industry, and most importantly, our readers about why our jobs are indispensible and why these cuts cannot continue.
Thanks for your support and I'll see you later on today.
-Brent
As a follow-on for last week's support of our coworkers at the San Jose Mercury News, The Newspaper Guild has organized a national day of action today to remind people of the drastic job cuts seen in the last few years. Whether it's the layoffs and job freezes we've seen right here at the Daily News, the cuts down at the Press-Telegram, the ones threatened across town at the Times, we've seen far too much of this locally and nationwide.
Whenever news of the cuts comes out and makes the rounds on the journalism Web sites, it's easy to shrug your shoulders and figure that as long as it wasn't your job that it's no big deal. It's a very big deal, whether it's at our own paper, our company or even our competitors. Each job lost makes the business smaller and a harder place to compete. For those of us who'd like to make this a career, it's becoming an increasingly tight and bleak landscape.
And that's a shame, something that I think that people outside of the business can't really appreciate. It's not just that these thousands of cuts take food off the tables of families. Every time we get stretched more thinly, that's less news we can cover and less service we can offer to the public. Newspapers have played a crucial role in our democracy since this country was just a bunch of maligned colonies, so the worse they're pared down to maximize profits, the worse off the country becomes.
So with that in mind, if you've got some time today, drop by my desk. I'll have stickers we can wear that the Guild has put out and, if you're available at 2:30 p.m., come on over and whomever's interested in learning more, I'll buy you all coffee across the street. It's a very small thing compared with some of the actions planned nationwide (http://www.savejournalism.org/), but let's use a few minutes out of our day to talk about ways we can remind our company, our industry, and most importantly, our readers about why our jobs are indispensible and why these cuts cannot continue.
Thanks for your support and I'll see you later on today.
-Brent
posted by Oxnard St. at 7:33 AM
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