Will A Hedge Fund Cannibalize What’s Left of The Virginian-Pilot?

Oh no, I thought. Not again.

A story published last week in The Virginian-Pilot reported that all employees who’d been at the paper more than eight years were being offered a chance to leave, through buyouts.

EIGHT YEARS.

Shoot, that’s hardly long enough to figure out the feeder road system in Virginia Beach. 

In 2017, when I accepted a severance package, the offer was extended to employees with 25 years at the paper. 

For the uninitiated, a buyout is a bribe. It’s an enticement to get highly paid workers off the payroll, so they can be replaced with cheaper employees, even if the product will suffer.

News flash: It always suffers.

One buyout may get rid of deadwood at the top of the food chain. Serial buyouts? Your local newspaper is in serious trouble.

I emailed the story about the offers to an old friend. We once sat beside each other in The Pilot newsroom, back when there were so many reporters and editors - 282 of us in the mid-1990s - that personnel was stashed all over the bustling building at 150 W. Brambleton Avenue in Norfolk. I had a desk in a converted supply closet for a while.

Parking? Hah! Come early or spend part of your morning cruising the Pilot lot, hoping to grab a spot vacated by a reporter or photographer heading out to cover a story.

Layoffs and buyouts began around 2008. They were followed by furlough days, some pay cuts and more layoffs and more buyouts. In 2014, the most recent newsroom headcount I can find, there were 105 newsroom employees.

That number is considerably smaller now.

By the time I left, after 33 years at the newspaper, the newsroom was eerily quiet. Empty desks and abandoned cubicles littered the once teeming scene. On the plus side, parking was no longer a problem. 

It wasn’t that those of us who took the money and ran were old and useless. Quite the contrary. Some of us thought we were just hitting our stride. The problem was, senior writers and editors had senior salaries.

We could be replaced by some young journalists at half the price. Or not replaced at all. It was a decision made by bean counters who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

“Who’s left to buy out?” my friend asked via email.

We both thought for a minute and came up with three names.

I’ve thought of more over the past few days. I’m up to about a dozen. 

Once they’re pushed out, lots of talent will be left at the newspaper. But no experience. No crusty editors to teach cub reporters how to sniff out stories, be skeptical and fair. Historical memory of Tidewater? Gone.

Yet local newspapers, with skeleton staffs, still do solid investigative work. The Pilot does at least. Look at the stories the paper is publishing now on strip searches of visitors to Virginia prisons.

In the past month, a New York hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, has taken a 32 percent stake in the Tribune company that owns The Pilot and 73 other newspapers. It now has the largest stake in the company.

Not good.

In a story last year, The Washington Post described Alden’s business model this way: Alden has made a business out of gobbling newspapers, ruthlessly cutting costs and gutting the staff and then, cutting even more when the product is invariably damaged, 

The hedge fund reportedly likes to liquidate newspapers, like a chop shop. Selling them off for parts.

An opinion piece, penned by two of The Chicago Tribune’s investigative reporters and published Sunday in The New York Times, was headlined: "Will the Chicago Tribune Be the Next Newspaper Picked to the Bone?"

In a signal of what may happen in Chicago, on Jan. 13, we and other newsroom staff members were offered buyouts. Now, we are bracing for the sight of colleagues with decades of experience walking out with cardboard boxes in their arms and tears streaming down their faces.

On Sunday, Scott Maxwell, a writer for another Tribune paper, The Orlando Sentinel, wrote that his job is a vocation. He says he’s not boxing up his desk. Not yet, anyway, even though folks have compared local newspapers to the Titanic. 

Assuming he does stay, I have some advice for Mr. Maxwell: 

Put on a life vest.

You’re about to hit an iceberg.