A few days ago I shared why journalists hate life, namely, the sheer ineptitude of management that seems hellbent on driving papers to extinction, kicking employee morale in the face while doing it. This is an industry-wide problem that is killing newsroom after newsroom and making reporters, frankly, not really give a damn about their job anymore.
Well, here’s another story, courtesy of KC Confidential:
The Kansas City Star has told reporters Karen Dillon and Dawn Bormann that one of them has to leave the paper, and they — not management — have to decide who goes.
“Dillon has seniority, so she has the option of taking it or not taking it,” says a KCConfidential.com source. “And if she does, Dawn gets laid off. Dawn’s a great person but I think Karen will vote in favor of herself because she’s got teenage kids at home.”
That’s right, instead of deciding who to lay off, the utter cowards at the Kansas City Star pitted the employees against one another and asked them to decide among themselves.
Think about that for a moment.
Think about working in an environment where that could happen. Where the people you work for don’t have the stones to make a decision, and instead lock you and your colleagues in a cage until one of you walks out alive.
It’s not the first time a paper has done this, either. A friend shared a similar story from his newsroom, once in which a much larger group of people were asked to decide among themselves who stays and who goes. Once I ask permission to share it, I’ll do so.
I’m not sure what is in the water at news agencies, but the people who run them … they’re losing their minds.
