Entries associated with the tag "Pioneer Press":

The bad news: On Thursday the Sun-Times Media Group announced an operating loss of $24 million for the second quarter of 2008, ended June 30. The good news: Last year's loss for the same quarter was $80 million.

The bad news: "It's no secret that the newspaper industry is in rough shape," the Media Group told shareholders. "Our industry's advertising revenues are being depressed by the significant declines in the industries that are most important to us -- housing, real estate, employment, autos and, increasingly, retail. Some of the issues affecting our advertising revenue are economic, while others are secular. The entire newspaper industry is in a deep recession, possibly the deepest in 70 years. And it may well worsen."

The good news: "As you will recall, on December 14, 2007, we announced our goal of reducing operating costs by $50 million a year. We expect to meet that goal in 2008."

The bad news: "However, double-digit declines in advertising revenue -- 13 percent in the first quarter and 14 percent in the second quarter -- coupled with rising newsprint and energy costs, wiped away the benefits of those cost reductions. With no end in sight to the industry malaise, newspaper companies including yours find themselves looking for additional ways to manage costs and ultimately survive."

So there will be more cuts. (The managerial ranks of the Media Group's Pioneer Press were cut back just this week.) But if there is no good news for shareholders, they expect feisty news, and the Media Group did not disappoint: "We are transforming ourselves from a print company with an online presence to a fully integrated, 24/7 news operation that gives our readers and advertisers the products and service levels they demand. Despite the falling market, we believe we continue to have important new business opportunities."

To find out more about what they are, read the full report to shareholders from CEO Cyrus Freidheim Jr. (One idea's to take the company private, which would mean no more shareholders to report to)." In short," said Freidheim, "the Sun-Times News Group will do everything in its power to emerge as a market leader in this tumultuous but extraordinary industry."

Some good news for a change at the battered Sun-Times Media Group. In its previous incarnation as Hollinger International, the Media Group had purchased Chicago's storied Lerner chain of neighborhood weeklies in 2000 and folded it into the Pioneer Press chain in 2004.  Now the Media Group's undergoing a massive retrenchment, trying to save $50 million, and Pioneer is pulling out of Chicago. Three northwest-side titles were shut down earlier this month, and the three other city papers, all on the north side, kept going only because Wednesday Journal Inc. was negotiating to buy them.

This week the deal was off and then it was on again, and Wednesday evening, appropriately, Wednesday Journal announced it was buying Skyline, the Booster, and the News-Star. The new owners have a reputation for quality -- the Wednesday Journal in Oak Park-River Forest,  Chicago Parent -- as well as for staying within tight budgets by working talented young writers until they're ready to collapse (I'm thinking of the Chicago Journal). Publisher Dan Haley's a good guy and I wish him well.

The Sun-Times wants to eliminate more than 30 Chicago Newspaper Guild jobs, and when guild leaders and union officials met Monday to begin discussions of how this should be done or might even be avoided, emotions ran high. They peaked on the subject of two employees whose jobs are safe. That's because James Smith, a page designer, and Garry Steckles, an editor -- both recent hires -- were just promoted to exempt positions by editor in chief Michael Cooke, thus getting them out from under language in the guild contract that protects members according to seniority. Cooke "was at the meeting. His basic position was 'I can promote whoever I want,'  and he was pretty arrogant about it," says Gerald Minkkinen, executive director of the CNG. "The subject of exempting his buddies and making others vulnerable was a matter of considerable discussion. We were pretty angry about it."

Minkkinen concedes that Smith is, by reputation, a superior designer who distinguished himself at the Sun-Times Media Group's daily in Joliet before coming to the Sun-Times. But Steckles was a mystery to him. Not to me, however. A couple years ago I had a couple of long phone conversations with Steckles, who described himself to me as a restaurant owner in Saint Kitts who served Cooke as the Ed McMahon to his Johnny Carson. "I help out wherever he needs me," said Steckles, and whenever Cooke doesn't, Steckles lays low. "I don't miss it when I'm lying on a beach in the Caribbean," he said about the newspaper biz, "But I always enjoy doing it when I get the chance."

To Cooke, Steckles is a friend so old he's comfort food. "Michael's from Lancashire -- " Steckles told me, "[from] a little village outside Lancaster. He grew up on back lanes with outside toilets. I did as well. It was cold and rough. Michael started work at 16." They both entered journalism, went to Canada, and worked on papers together in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. When the New York Daily News hired Cooke  away from the Sun-Times three years ago to be its editor, Steckles thought he would become the Daily News's Sunday editor. But Cooke didn't stay in New York long enough for that to happen. By the end of 2005 he was back in Chicago as the Sun-Times group's vice president of editorial operations. When Cooke decided to turn Waukegan's News-Sun into a prototypical tabloid, he summoned Steckles from Saint Kitts and James Smith from Joliet to help him do it.

"Michael realized James is a major talent," Steckles told me back in 2006. "He has all the flair of a terrific graphics designer but also a great sensitivity for newspapers." In another conversation, Steckles called Smith "absolutely brilliant," and said that by the time he got to Waukegan Smith had pretty much wrapped up the design work, leaving it to Steckles "to pull together editorial." Pretty clearly, Steckles thought of himself and Cooke and Smith as a wonderful team, and apparently Cooke thinks the same. Gerald Minkkinen says Cooke kept Steckles "under the radar" as a Sun-Times "consultant," and when the guild pointed out that the guild contract didn't provide for consultants, he put Steckles on staff last fall in a guild job. I caught up with Steckles briefly Tuesday and he allowed that "I haven't really had a title" other than consultant. But for the time being I could call him a "copy editor for the Showcase" if I wished, though that will change "under the new scheme of things" to something he can't yet disclose.

The guild is entitled to two weeks of talks before the Sun-Times can lop heads. On Monday night the Sun-Times's guild members met to "brainstorm" -- Minkkinen's word -- possible alternatives to the layoffs. Buyouts -- which the paper hadn't mentioned -- were one, and Minkkinen said he'd like to keep the others under his hat. By the time I got to work Tuesday morning an anonymous guild member had left me a steaming voice mail message. He told me about the two employees Cooke was protecting and he said the staff was “incensed and flabbergasted at such a shameless injustice."

The goal of the Sun-Times Media Group is to cut costs by $50 million and thereby turn a profit and stay in business. At another of its properties, Pioneer Press, publisher Larry Green wrote a staff memo Monday that began: "Today we notified the Chicago Newspaper Guild that we would be eliminating 4 positions in the Pioneer Press editorial department before the end of January." In addition to these four guild positions are two that were held by guild members who recently quit and won't be replaced and four non-guild positions held by editors who'll be let go. "An additional five positions will be eliminated at the Lake County News-Sun [the paper Steckles and Smith overhauled in 2006]. An additional 16 full and part-time positions are being eliminated in the circulation department."

Green said Pioneer Press was closing three northwest-side city papers "where subscriptions and advertising have been weak." But the "suburban titles remain strong," he told his staff, and vowed that he's "committed to maintaining our unique strength as suburban Chicago's premiere sources of local news."

"More with less" I suppose.

If you can't get enough of Conrad Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, aka the former Hollinger International  press baron in the crosshairs in United States v. Black, there's a new blog up and running that promises all Black all the time. Blacksjustice.com was launched by freelance reporter Susan Berger, who was a Pioneer Press staffer when that suburban chain was one of the more profitable elements in Black's media empire. Berger plans to attend Black's fraud and racketeering trial, which just got under way in federal court, and she promises ongoing commentary plus links to media coverage beyond Chicago. The volume of Canadian coverage in particular is staggering, and here's a taste of it, an ingenious attempt by the Globe and Mail, Canada's foremost national newspaper, to concoct a think piece out of pretty much nothing. If you thought his lordship had nothing in common with the blue-collar rabble that will be judging him -- a notion the Canadian media  can't express often enough -- well, it seems he has nothing in common with Mies van der Rohe either! 

And also from the Globe and Mail, here's a stylish rant by a former Hollinger editor in Canada that asks, Was it really necessary to destroy the company in order to save it? Joan Crockatt begins: "Conrad Black's trial is a classic case of pride and prejudice. Even Jane Austen couldn't have written a better commentary on the excesses of U.S. society in the post-Enron, post-WorldCom, Iraq-war era. In a nutshell, Lord Black exudes a kind of British aristocratic pride that offends modern-day America. America rails at it. Prejudice grows. Charges are hurled. Blood spills."

The trial's expected to last about four months. 

UPDATE: Want to be a juror in a famous federal trial? Jurors in the pool for United States v. Black had a 45-page questionnaire to fill out before they could even be considered. Go through it yourself. See how it's skewed toward teasing out how strongly you feel that those big shots making millions in complicated corporate maneuvers are all a bunch of crooks.