Daily Progress lays off 6 employees
by Lisa Provence
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A week after pulling in 21 awards at the Virginia Press Association annual meeting in Norfolk, Daily Progress publisher Lawrence McConnell announces that six employees will be without jobs, including two reporters and two editors in the paper’s already shrunken newsroom. Full-time employees have been offered severance packages, says McConnell. The Progress is owned by hard-hit Media General, which closed its Washington bureau March 27 and in February ordered mandatory 10-day furloughs for all its 5,600 employees.
3/31/09: The type of jobs of those laid off in the newsroom has been corrected.
The DP stinks, although the employees do not, and one feels sorry for them.
Newspapers everywhere are facing hard times: The San Francisco Chronicle will most likely be online only in a matter of weeks, the Seattle PI just went under, and according to The Atlantic Monthly, the NYT will be bankrupt by May 1.
If you value paper copies of newspapers, now is the time to get a subscription. Or two.
Does anyone know who got laid off ?
How in the hell did the DP win any awards? Only entrant in that category?
I got this huge 2nd-place karate trophy when I was a kid. I was one of two kids in my age group!
The DP is a terrible paper, not worth 25 cents, much less 75, although I of course sympathize with the laid-off. The only daily in town and it can’t keep in business. Pitiful. I grew up reading Fredericksburg’s excellent Free-Lance Star and it’s only now that I realize I was spoiled.
Actually I think the DP has been much improved in recent months. Appears that the Hooks in dept model of covering local stories spurred them on to do more investigative reporting and actually call and interview real people. Only by being a truly local paper and continuing this type of news stories will they survive in Charlottesville. Shuletta, Dixit, McNeill, and Maurer have all been doing an admirable job of reporting and I hope they were not the ones let go. Of course with fewer staff it is unlikely that the ones remaining will have the resources to do any more than issue press releases from the governing bodies and organizations they are covering. That will be yet another loss for the fourth estate as expressed in Governor Baliles’s recent speech to the Virginia Press Association.
http://readthehook.com/blog/index.php/2009/03/20/spiralbound-falling-papers-push-baliles-to-action/
[...] Update: The Hook reports that two editors and two reporters were let go, and a friend tells me that Features Editor Mary Alice Blackwell is among those. With just sixteen [...]
why all the focus on the Progress? LexisNexis is shedding employees at even a faster rate. About 10 more got the unwelcome news today.
And once again experienced employees seemed to be the focus of their cost-cutting efforts
Yes James, the DP is not the only company in trouble
Chicago Sun Times Parent Company files for Bankruptcy
http://www.wina.com/pages/3056508.php?contentId=3755407
Staunton Daily News Leader to lay off 8 full-time and 15 part-time employees. Wonder what’s left of that paper ?
Wonder who besides Mary Alice Blackwell got the axe? Suggestion: Why don’t some of the top executives at MG offer to take pay cuts in their fat salaries to save people’s jobs who really do the work.
Old Karl Marx is being proven absolutely correct.
I am so glad I left the DP when I did. I worked there for 6 years and did the work of 3 people and was paid for 1. It’s been 4 years since I left and I have a wonderful job. My heart goes out to all of the mailroom staff that worked so hard to put out the product and were the lease respected. They were treated like scum by management but always worked so hard. I worked in Circulation and that was the pits sometimes, you did all you could and you were never paid or respected for your hard work. Management always took the credit for what the lower paid,employee did. All the one’s that got paid the big bucks didn’t have a clue about what it took to turn out the finished product. I have come in many times and helped in the mail room to get the paper out on time. My boss took a lot of mess to make Lawrence McConnell look good, and he never was appreciated for it.
I heard Linda Garrison and Mary Alice Blackwell got layoff. Lawrence you must be really stupid to let them go. These two women work very hard than anyone else I know. I’m cancel my paper because of you.
It’s a waste of paper. Save the trees…