Rants & Raves - EDITOONERY CASUALTIES

[Nathan E. Bekke Vice President-Consumer Sales & Marketing]

At the end of July last summer, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
laid off 23 staffers from the newsroom, advertising and
production—including R.J. Matson, the paper’s staff editorial
cartoonist. The Post-Dispatch is the largest in the Lee
Enterprises chain, which owns 53 daily newspapers and 300
weeklies, shoppers and specialty publications mostly, plus
online sites, in 23 cities. Founded by A.W. Lee in the 1890s,
Lee Enterprises acquired Pultizer, Inc., owner of the Post-
Dispatch, in 2005, in a deal now seen by many as the purchase
that saddled the property-gobbling company with debt that forced
it into bankruptcy last year. The reductions in staff continue a
chain-wide budget-balancing purge.

While cutting costs by dropping staff, Lee gave CEO Mary Junck a
stock bonus worth some $655,000 last winter. Junck’s previous
employment includes being publisher and president of the
Baltimore Sun (which laid off its legendary staff editoonist,
KAL, a couple years ago) and the St. Paul Pioneer Press (which
laid off the esteemed Kirk Anderson several years back). When
Lee merged the Lincoln Journal with the Lincoln Star in 1995 to
create what was then the chain’s second-largest daily, the
paper’s staff political cartoonist, Paul Fell, was laid off. (He
now self-syndicates his work, which, with additional editorial
comment by the perspicacious Shawn Peirce, is available by free
subscription at PaulFellCartoons.com.) It’s a track record that
makes me fear for the continued livelihood of the Lee-owned
Arizona Star’s superlative editoonist, David Fitzsimmons, whose
cartoons we’ve featured in the Usual Place (Rants & Raves at
RCHarvey.com) almost every time we discuss the current crop of
visual comedic mayhem.

Junck’s bonus is a reward, perhaps, for her negotiating a deal
last year with Lee’s lenders to refinance $759.5 million of its
distressed loans and forestall collapse.

Lee employees are understandably outraged by the news of layoffs
at the papers Junck is responsible for. In Montana last winter,
missoulanews.bigskypress.com reported that one former staffer
described Junck as “no strategist,” saying, “You could have
thrown water balloons in the newsroom and hit ten better
candidates for CEO.” ... Another said Junck and other managers
“crossed the line from managing to looting a long time ago.”

United Media Guild, which represents St. Louis area workers,
pulled no punches in its assessment of Junck’s work: “Junck and
[CFO Carl Schmidt, who got a $250,000 bonus] are the fiscal
geniuses ... [responsible] for eliminating promised health
insurance to its retirees, forcing current employees to take
unpaid furloughs, freezing pensions, and cutting pay” while
laying off hundreds of employees across the country.

Paul Friswold at Dailyrft.com put it this way: “If I may be so
bold as to ask, what the hell kind of business strategy do you
call giving the boss a big bonus and then giving staff their
pink slips? Is this trickle-down economics at work, or merely
simple plundering?”

No one has heard any post-employment comment from Matson, who
continues to cartoon for Roll Call; he gave no interviews that
I’m aware of (although his September 20 cartoon depicting the
“47 Percenter” might have an alternative message).

Matson has cartooned for Roll Call since 1986, the year after he
graduated from Columbia University. At the same time, he was art
director for the Washington Monthly (until 1988) and then
cartooned for the New York Observer (1989-2010) and the Post-
Dispatch, which he joined in July 2005.

https://gocomics.typepad.com/rcharvey/2012/12/