News-Record.com

The former owner who left a dedicated 50 year veteran (age 70)exposed in the buyout is the bad guy in my book...assuming that he was a valuable employee of course. At 2 weeks pay for the first 4 years of service plus another 46 weeks for his remaining service, Paxton may actually be paying him substantially more in severance than he could have hoped to have recieved by simply retiring before the buyout.

As for top management of a wanning paper being quickly shown the door, duh.

The real test of the new management will be how they cover the buyout in their own paper.

They need a blog though. Their website is still showing employment at the paper as 350.

Whoops. Should have read the Herald Sun article first. Max severance package looks to be 26 weeks.

Interenstingly the staff cuts take the daily circulation/employee ratio from 142 to 185 ... the exact ratio for the entire Paxton publishing group.

They do also have a point about making changes quickly in deference to the remaining staff. Leaving people hanging is not productive.

Jim, there are good ways and bad ways to manage change. Take it from the son of a management consultant, someone who also gets paid to manage a little change: This was a horrible way.

Business is never about class. It is about the bottom line.

Business Sense is different than what you and I consider rational. I never understood why a business would risk bad publicity by short-term actions until the phrase "It is not personal, it is business" finally sunk in for me.

If the "family" cared for their employees, they would have given them ownership interests.

In the end, this family-owned business was just a business - acting like all businesses must to survive. It's not fair; it's business.

Don, my point is exactly that: The WAY in which Paxton made its changes was very poor business, one that will have a dramatic negative effect on the bottom line of Paxton's new acquisition.

I don't question the business goals of reducing the size of the staff (whether Paxton's profit goals for the paper are supportable long-term is another question, for another day). I question the WAY in which it was done. If I were acquiring a paper, I'd want to know, among other things, who among the journalists and advertising people has the best and broadest contacts in the community? Who's well thought-of, who's not? I wouldn't do that because I'm a nice guy. (I'm not.) I'd do that because it's essential to preserving as much as possible of the 80% or so of the market value of what you're buying that ISN'T made up of such tangible assets as buildings and presses.

Heh. And here I was debating whether we should start subscribing to the Herald Sun. Don't think so now...

Isn't it amusing that employers still insist on working a notice before you leave them but when given the axe it's almost always, "Hit the road, Jack."

And they wonder why American workers no longer feel loyality to the company.

Billy,

Unfortunately, when you tell someone they are losing their job but ask them to stay on a few weeks you only open up the door for a lawsuit for anyone adversely affected by the terminated employee while they were allowed to continue to be on the premises.

If you could fire all the lawyers first, then you might have some options.

Jim - our company must have good lawyers because we do lay people off and ask them to work out their notice unless we feel there's a reason that their presence is a liability. It's usually a mgmt call.

Lex - I'm with you, I think this was badly handled. And I think it's going to be a problem with them, at least for awhile. But if they continue to provide coverage of Orange County, which the N&O does very little of, I'll have little choice but to continue to at least read them on the Web.