It used to be you had to spend your entire career in Milwaukee, where the Journal’s employee-ownership setup made fatcats out of lots of ordinary newsies. Those days are gone now, because the company’s publicly held and the money that used to be poured into the workers’ pockets in the form of fat dividends must be put toward the bottom line to fatten the company’s stock price.
We had the same setup at the Peoria Journal Star before it was sold to Copley Newspapers. The paper had the market to itself and didn’t mind sharing the wealth a bit … lots of people I worked with got six-figure checks when the paper was sold; top editors became millionaires.
But it all came at a price to the paper, which got smaller and less interesting as the years went by as everybody there became obsessed with saving money because it was good for their portfolios. The paper had a 50-year-old letterpress long overdue for the boneyard but nobody would think of ponying up the millions needed to replace it. The news staff and the newshole got smaller and smaller, to the point where people wondered what why there never seemed to be any news in the paper anymore.
And naturally the law of unintended consequences came into play: An ownership setup designed to avoid a takeover by a corporate chain incited a bottomline mentality as odious as anything a chain would’ve imposed on us.