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Here's what Nancy Barnes said at a 2005 industry convention about a study the Strib commissioned:

"The study also showed that newspapers need to hire young reporters," said Nancy Barnes, a Star Tribune deputy managing editor who led the initiative. "The only way to diversify your newsroom is to take risks you wouldn't take 15 years ago," she said. "If your newsroom is all full of 50-year-old guys, you miss a huge swath of the community."

(Source: cached web page of the Asian American Journalists Association.)

Hmmmmmmm.

So the Guild is thinking about, maybe, possibly, giving Avista Capital Partners a timeout for their dastardly approach to the buyouts. Way to flex, lunch bucket brigade!

An ownership that would court the Ridder anti-Christ to run its operation, welcome him, his illicit laptop and his secrets-loaded thumb drive, and then spend millions defending him in court in a losing battle (eventually paying for Lean Dean Singleton's torpedoes too) surely is quaking that the union minions are looking at them cross-eyed over the staff gutting.

Meanwhile the rest of us are (all together now) shocked -- SHOCKED -- that such maneuvering would go on.

But oh, right, Nancy Barnes and Scott Gillespie weren't party to any of that intimidating, pre-buyout re-organizing -- just the inevitable post-buyout re-re-organizing. They whimpered into their hankies over it while thinking lofty journalism thoughts. Lightweights.

The big problem with this post is the underlying assumption your employer owes you a job, benefits and so forth regardless of business conditions.

The newspaper business is no longer a "cash cow" for owners but rather bologna beef for speculators. This is a natural devolution of the business as it enters Schumpter's "creative destruction" phase of its life. There is little anyone can do to protect workers when consumers have abandoned the previous business model.

Pile union upon union, grievance upon grievance and it still makes no difference if there is no "there" there to redistribute. I feel sympathy for those who lost their jobs and for those who will lose their jobs; however, it is useless to look for blame in these matters. Looking for "blame" does not solve the afflicted's problems; it leaves things the same.

Sooner or later someone will develop a business plan that works. Until then employees would be best to look for solutions to make the business work rather than indulge their paranoia.

NOW we're getting somewhere.

Bleuler scores and Levine starts to see the light...

Ah, so let's see, the bidness ethics being espoused by the right-wing gonzamachers is that if you're profit margin dips below 20% you can treat people as shabbily as your denatured sensibility allows, that about it? This as you pound millions donw the alimentary canal that is Par Ridder.

And, meanwhile, the poor dim bertram jr, well out of his usual element as passively pliant right rant radio nodder, utterly misapprehends levine's point.

The lightly medicated yet virulently world hating jimmy faints at such prospects as Levine mentions:

"wiith people like Doug Tice, James Lileks and Katherine Kersten in prominent roles".

Methinks the above would be a salve on what ails the poor, listing Strib.

People who know what's right, know what is the truth, and know what is good. And aren't afraid of those limp-witted, fools who oppose them, whose only recourse is the ad hominem attack.

People like Kersten, Lileks and Tice, who are anethema to 'jimmy'.

Now, back to Ms. Ingraham's show, where she joyfully excoriates the jimmy's of this world, all the while a ratings success and a best selling author.

Whither jimmy?

Of course it's a better day - Laura Ingraham's book is still TOP 5 nationally.

And still not a mention of it in the Strib's pages....

How odd.