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Jobs Of The Day: Variety, NPR, Kimpton
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Guild: Negotiations Have Turned 'Acrimonious'The Post-Dispatch and its Newspaper Guild have been working on a new contract, which expired in June 2009, but negotiations are close to breaking down, the Guild reports. The company is asking for, the Guild says, a 15 percent pay cut in the first year of the contract, followed by a 5 percent cut the next two years. "We are now meeting twice a week with the company and a federal mediator is sitting in on negotiations. Things have gotten more serious." The Guild says it expects the company to declare an impasse soon, and extend a "last, best, and final offer." The Guild believes that offer will include many of the "poisonous provisions" already discussed as well as an elimination of 401(k) matching and a pension freeze. Lee Enterprises, the paper's parent company, posted a profit last quarter of 62 cents per share, or $27.9 million. Reuters Vs. Newspaper Guild: Fight!
Reuters apparently informed employees on Jan. 19 that contract negotiations had stalled and so the company was imposing new terms, including an increase in the cost of healthcare and the number of hours needed to qualify for overtime, which would be, the guild says, equivalent to a 10 percent pay cut. The guild claims that there was no such stalling, therefore, it's illegal for Reuters to impose terms. "They announced it in a memo to the staff without even telling us, when we weren't even negotiating," Bill O'Meara, president of the Newspaper Guild of New York, told Richard Pérez-Peña of the NYT. Job Loss = Grief. How To Deal.Losing your job can be as emotionally devastating as anything. "Why wasn't I good enough?" you wonder. "Why me?" Even if hundreds of your colleagues also got pink-slipped. Even if your whole division closed. You still can't shake that voice, sometimes, whispering "I'm a failure." If you're feeling down, don't try to go it alone. The Job Goddess, a partner of the 405 Club (so called because that's what your weekly unemployment bennies max out at), has posted some resources for you if you're depressed but think you can't afford mental health treatment. Among the suggestions: Cullen Resigns From Reuters Less Than One Month After JoiningTeri Cullen, who joined Reuters Jan. 11 from the Wall Street Journal Online, has resigned after the wire pulled one of her stories, about a White House tax plan, that was found to contain numerous errors, Talking Biz News reports. The story, which claimed the White House's deficit reduction plan relied on raising taxes on the middle class, ran Monday and was pulled that night. On Wednesday, according to Talking Biz News, a Reuters editor sent out a memo stating: Cullen had 13 years of experience at the WSJ online covering personal finance and financial markets, so our guess is that these mistakes were not symptomatic. And, we're guessing, the copyeditor who would have caught these mistakes was laid off six months ago. Blog Called On Account Of Snowpocalypse
So while us bloggers aren't supposed to be able to blame weather for not making it into work, today we have a commute, and it ain't happening for a while. We're typing this on a borrowed computer, which we hope to borrow for a little bit longer, but please bear with us, is all we're sayin'--this is the fourth worst storm in the history of measuring snowstorms. In the meantime, here's a video of a Baltimore weatherman losing his cool:
The Week In Review: Our Most Popular Posts And Our Comment Of The WeekOur most popular posts this week:
We'd like to again open the floor: what is it we can do for you? What do you want to see more of? Tell us via e-mail or in the comments. Speaking of comments, our comment of the week goes to "chereestrin," the editor of a new digital magazine for woman litigators, talking about the joys of a virtual office: We publish SUE Magazine for Women Litigators, a bimonthly flipping magazine. We have 102,000 subscribers. There's three of us all working virtually. The need for an editor, designer, photo editor and writer to gather around a table to look at a page proof is gone. There are too many software programs available, free teleconferences and more that makes that luxury no longer necessary. Would we like to have the company around us? Sure! However, we have no expensive real estate, rent, parking spaces, lunches, office supplies, food, excess labor, office equipment, furniture, and office politics to contend with. We concentrate on producing a quality product. What a way to live! Now go enjoy your weekend. Giant Anacondas And Time Travel Is Your Job Of The Day'Cuz NBC Universal's Syfy and USA channels are hiring for an associate director of digital research. Which means maybe you get to decide whether to sign that fifth anaconda movie. More jobs: Local Sports Site May Not Be Paying The Mortgage, But $5500 Ain't BadCNATI.com is a local sports news site covering the sports teams of Cincinnati, Ohio. It's (by its own admission) "light-weight." So when you want to cover your baseball team's spring training, which costs thousands of dollars, what do you do? Try to sell more ads? Get a corporate sponsor? Instead, CNATI put up a donation box. They were hoping to get $4,000, which is about half of what the average media outlet spends when sending a reporter to cover six weeks of spring training. "Part of our reasoning is a proof-of-concept (proving that we can do more than the big guys with less) and part of it is downright necessity," wrote Lee Heidel, CNATI.com's publisher. Incredibly, by the 18th of last month, the site had already raised $5,100. Now, with a week to go before donations close, 169 contributors have raised a total of $5,500.33.
Um, how awesome is that? TechCrunchGate Distracts Us All From Snowpocalypse
Yow. Michael Arrington's apology to readers has already received hundreds of comments and has been retweeted more than 1,000 times. "We are all shaken here at TechCrunch," he wrote. "This is someone who was our friend and who we trusted to be honest with our readers. Our hope is that the intern learns something from this experience and grows into the kind of person that will be more welcome in this community." The intern in question, Daniel Brusilovsky, wrote about the experience on his own blog, sort of. I guess they don't teach ethics in high school journalism classes anymore. How Do You Survive Without A Job?![]() Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division We thought this post at Ask A Manager was thought-provoking. A reader asked: I have a question that I do not mean with any snotty tone, whatsoever. I am truly curious because it's something I've always wondered: Readers chimed in. One, who was attending grad school and working part-time, took out extra student loans (which now have to be repaid at "exorbitant" interest). Others relied on emergency funds (which many have said are now drained dry). Others just cut back expenses to the bonenothing but mortgage/rent, food, and utilities. Many are saying they've moved back in with their parents. One woman says that she's survived 18 months of unemployment...because she religiously saved 1/3 of her income in an emergency fund. That's huge, and probably not feasible for most. What are your coping strategies? 'Demand Media Can Go To Hell'Them's harsh words, pardner. [Matt] Pressman [, who yesterday wrote a VanityFair.com piece about Demand Media] quotes Steven Kydd, Demand Media's executive vice president in charge of content, as saying that writers have the benefit of steady reliable work and a quick turnaround on payments. Then he gets even tougher: I hope no magazine ever partners with Demand Media. In fact, I hope Demand Media and any site like it goes out of business. They demean and abuse professional content creators, leveraging them to generate revenue from Google ads. The comments are filled with support from Demand contributors, saying things like "I take in $1,500 a month without breaking a sweat, and I am happy with the arrangements" and "Because I can work as much as I want, I am making more money than my fulltime job. Obviously, I have no benefits and pay more for Social Security. But this job is the difference between living on unemployment and likely having my house in foreclosure." And this particularly impassioned/harsh (depending on your 'tude) comment: Did Demand Media put 7000 out of work writers and editors back to work? HELL YES. If you can't back up your indignation with some good basic fact-checking, maybe you should pick another profession. I hear Rupert Murdoch is looking for a good shoe-shine boy. Yikes. We predict this debate will really come to a head in 2010. |
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