I’m A Big Boy! A Very Big Boy!
I woke up this morning and saw in my email that one or two of my employees didn’t show up for work today. Or maybe it was a hundred? A thousand? I kind of skim those things. I can barely get through the hour it takes me to do the Workle sometimes. Mornings, let me tell you!
Anyway, here at my enterprise, we have great employee relations. Everyone I know tells me so!
Step One – Deny You Have A Problem
But let’s just say that one day we had some grumpy gusses wanting to stir up trouble. Here’s how I’d fix things.
Now, Donald Trump was a touch distasteful, but let’s be honest, he had some good ideas. For instance, he hated America’s veterans and called them losers and suckers. So when he started planning a military parade he made sure no disabled veterans were allowed. Great idea!
So in the past year my paper didn’t have anything in the front section remembering September 11. Or anything on Veterans Day. Or bothering to mention Trump perpetuated the old libel about Jews running my operation. Those things just make me feel icky. Better to just pretend they don’t exist. And I’ve trained my editors to keep them away from me!
Now, Maggie Haberman, she’s an old PR pro. She knows how to hide things. When Covid was looming in late 2019 and early 2020, she knew that covering what Trump was – or wasn’t – doing to deal with it would just be a headache. So she didn’t even bother!
Why would she? It’s not like she could single handedly invent a vaccine and travel around the world and inject all eight billion people in a single night like Santy Claus, so really, what difference could she make?
Step Two – Crush Dissent (For Some People)
Now, we all know some people have a permanent case of the Mondays. Ooh, ooh, my latte isn’t hot enough. Ooh, ooh, I spilled my latte on my designer handbag. Ooh, ooh, my wages aren’t keeping up with inflation in one of the world’s most expensive cities and management won’t bargain in good faith. Such whiners. Sometimes they even communicate with each other.
What you need is someone who acts out on petty grievances and will sing any tune. Like Caroling Ryan. Back in 2011 I had my eye on her when she was an editor at my paper decided that there was nothing to cover about Andrew Cuomo because he was a “homebody” and the best story out there was a baby hawk.
Now, we all know in hindsight that Cuomo was a serial, uh, inappropriate guy and he was doing this, uh, stuff for years when Caroling Ryan said he was just a “homebody.” Oopsies! I’m sure she wasn’t covering anything up. There was a baby hawk to cover. A BABY HAWK!
Anyway, fast forward and now Caroling Ryan is in charge of crushing dissent on my behalf. At least for some people. Blecch Stevens is allowed to bash other employees, of course, but Caroling Ryan is letting all those progressive whiners know to shut their mouths. Meanwhile Maggie Haberman is allowed to circle the wagons about WeddingGate, of course, but then Haberman flatters Caroling Ryan with lines like “She had seen something in me that I had never seen in myself, which was an ability to succeed at the best news-gathering organization in the world.” That kind of public politicking is the hallmark of a successful organization!
Step 3 – Kick Unions In The Teeth Even Though It Doesn’t Work
OK, sometimes a true leader has to admit denial doesn’t change reality, and crushing dissent doesn’t make your employees feel better about you. I’m not sure why, but maybe editors like Caroling Ryan don’t have a good grip on reality and the things she tells you are wrong? Sure she was wrong about Cuomo, and wrong about Trump being progressive on foreign policy, and wrong about Trump being good on LGBTQ issues, and wrong about Glenn Greenwald somehow being the guy to back up her Trump coverage in 2016.
Well, sometimes you have to go to someone else to tell you that you’re doing the right thing. And that’s why I have my CEO, Meredith Kaput Leadening, helping me kick unions in the teeth. Even when it doesn’t work! Over and over!
When that Wiresputter outlet we run got sick of bringing us millions of clicks and the workers wanted a union, we tried fighting them for two years. I’m sure it was a great idea! Until they all went on strike during the busiest season of the year that drew in tons of referral fees and ad dollars for us. And then we caved a few days later. Oopsies!
It seems like they also had a problem with NDAs we were forcing them to sign to keep them quiet about harassment. Gosh, how did those get in contracts in the first place?
Then, when my big digital expansion effort started leaving a lot of babies feel like they weren’t getting paid fairly even though they were bringing in tons of money, all of those tech workers started a union movement. What were they talking about? Their division was called XFun, so it had to be fun working there! So I had no choice but tell CEO Leadening to try to sandbag the union.
Wow that was great PR for us! And wow, did it work great. Except for the part where the National Labor Relations Bureau stopped us from blocking the election, and then tech workers voted over 4-1 in favor of the union. But still, it was a brilliant move on my part. Everyone tells me so!
Anyway, now I’m trying the same tactic, walking away from the bargaining table and sparking another walkout. And never mind the endless articles we’ve run about how important it is for people to go back to the office. We’ve insisted on negotiating over Zoom! But Meredith Kaput Leadening says “It’s disappointing that they’re taking such drastic action, given the clear commitment we’ve shown to negotiate our way to a contract” and that’s just what I feel too. We’re committed to negotiating. That’s why we walked out!
Ouch, that Observer interview with Carolyn Ryan. The interviewer, Azi Paybarah, now writes for, you guessed it, The New York Times. I guess she admired his hard-hitting journalistic instincts (“so you’re in a book club…”)
Ryan is just really bad at her job. She hires a lot of unoriginal people with very stunted interest in the world, her own ideas of the world are exceedingly superficial, and as the Cuomo bit shows in retrospect, her shallowness actively impedes her ability to see huge stories that are right in front of her.
She’s like a chef at an old school NYC French restaurant who refuses to go beyond the list of dishes she learned in culinary academy 30 years ago on the grounds that anything else isn’t French. And even when people bring up 1,000 different sources — Escoffier’s original recipes, modern restaurants in Paris, traditional non-academy regional French food — all she can do is yell about the five sauces and refuse to do anything else.
The bigger thing is just just this morning I was reading somewhere, and now of course I can’t find it, an article that talked about how the Times, to use an outdated expression, publishes yards of pro-union copy pretty regularly, supporting the Amazon warehouse workers and Starbucks baristas. A “Times insider” explained, “Pretty much everyone in editorial is pro-union, of course they are, but the Sulzbergers have been anti-union for over a century. And editorial doesn’t run things.”
In the 1940s they got hauled before the NRLB because someone dropped a dime about management having “spies” in the newsrooms looking for union-related activities and accusing proto-union organizers of being Communists, leading the writer of this vanished article to point out, “The Sulzbergers whipped up a Red Scare in their own newsroom a decade before Senator McCarthy got to work.”
Which is ironic of course because a decade before that they had Soviet mole Walter Duranty on the payroll filing Stalin-era propaganda about how well things were going in (the) Ukraine.
Another obvious contradiction is Sulzberger’s rhetoric is full of talk about the need for tech to be nimble and fast, but the operation he runs is extremely disorganized and stodgy.
It’s a classic case of upper management thinking they’re full of brilliant new ideas, but they never bother to think any of them through or get any kind of systematic input outside of a few usual suspects.
So he dropped half a billion dollars on buying The Athletic, and apparently did no hard work thinking about how it would be integrated into the larger business or how that purchase would affect his looming labor problems.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/07/new-york-times-athletic-subscribers/
Now it’s all being left to people below him, and you can pretty much bet as revenue targets get harder and harder to hit, and overlap with the Sports writers at the Times become more obvious, you’re going to see a big retrenchment at The Athletic and yet another big unionization battle.
Still not yet as colossal a failure as when they bought the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion in 1993 ($2,27 billion in 2022 dollars) and then a decade later sold it for a tenth of that, basically for the value of the land, AND they were forced to retain all the Globies’s substantial pension liabilities which they incurred because, yes, the Globe is (or was) a union shop. More irony, The Boston Globe through the Winship family owned a nice, healthy, lucrative stake in the Boston Red Sox, which the Sulzbergers immediately sold off because who in New England cares about the Red Sox, right? The Boston Globe was bought from the Sulzbergers at that fire-sale price by John Henry, who owns the Boston Red Sox.
On the one hand the Sulzbergers are lucky in that they structured the company so that they’re actually minority shareholders yet control the voting stock. On the other hand, can you imagine being a talented Sulzberger but not one of the anointed ones and looking at all this financial carnage and seemingly monthly bad decision-making and not wanting to kill a few second cousins once-removed?
That Globe purchase was probably inspired by so much of the family reading it while they were at some Ivy or other, or on vacation, and not realizing how thin it really was relative to the population and wealth of the region it covered, roughly 4 1/2 million people.
Even back in the 90s its print output was pretty meager, barely able to outproduce much smaller circulation papers in Hartford and Providence.
And they definitely had no idea how the nuts and bolts of the business worked. If you want to expand your sports coverage, why dump the Red Sox? If you don’t want to be team owner, why buy The Globe?