StribWatch: The Cart Before the Horse

With the clock counting down to Friday’s deadline for accepting Star Tribune management’s buy-out offer, Strib reporters will get a look at the big, new, glossy, reorganized reassignment chart top editors have been fussing over. Word is it will debut sometime today or tomorrow.

Actually, I don’t know about the “big” or “glossy” parts, but it has struck some as odd that the paper’s supposedly maniacally busy managers have enough disposable time to cook up a reorganization chart, with entirely new assignments for quite a few staffers … BEFORE they have any idea who is actually going to be on their staff after next week.

It doesn’t seem like an exactly efficient use of executive time.

Top editors Nancy Barnes and Scott Gillespie have been e-mailed questions about this, and I’ll dutifully plug them in when and if they respond.

Until then the suspicion further souring the anxious atmosphere of the place is that the pre-buy-out reassignment chart is another not too subtle tool for pushing “targeted” employees off the company dime.

For example, if Employee “A” has never been one of your favorites, but you’re getting the feeling he may linger, you re-assign him to the all-important Bloomington Planning Commission/graveyard of marginalized reporters. Employee “A” — who may be a career-long screw up or just someone you’ve never particularly cared for — sees the big, glossy chart getting pinned to the newsroom wall, trips over a half dozen corpse-like colleagues to search for his name, finds it inked in next to “Bloomington”, says, “Screw this” and signs up for the buy-out.

Mission accomplished, if you’re the diabolical manager.

This attrition technique has not exactly been invented by today’s Strib managers. And it always has the dark beauty of keeping your fingerprints off an old-fashion whacking without cause.

Presumably the official explanation is that today or tomorrow’s list is all for the service of the employees, offering them “guidance” and “clarity” as they make their decision.

Riight.

Whatever it is, another newer, bigger and glossier reassignment list will have to get whipped together after management gets a load of who actually takes the bait/hint and who doesn’t.