Debt increase by presidents: Reagan 186%, Bush 54% Clinton 41% Bush II 72% Obama 23%. Source CBO. -@paulfreid
Unemployment is 8.2% in TX, 5.5% in Socialist Republic of VT. -@dankennedy_nu
Friday, August 19, 2011
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Post-Star: Help Wanted (guest essay)
9th in a series on the troubles at The Post-Star and its parent Lee Enterprises
by Mark Wilson
Astronomy informs us that at the end of a star’s useful life, when it has burned through all its fuel, it expands into a loose assemblage of cosmic dust centered on a collapsing carbon and oxygen core. The outer shell eventually dissipates, leaving the ultra dense, sparkless core to mark a once-bright spot in the heavens. This post-star phase of stellar evolution is known as a “white dwarf” or “degenerate dwarf.”
In Glens Falls, the Post-Star is in transition. Dire financial crises at Lee Enterprise Inc—the Iowa corporation that owns the newspaper, along with about fifty other dailies across the country—have forced another round of staff cutbacks in all departments. Since Memorial Day, the Post-Star has lost nine of the 68 staffers (13.2%) listed on the “Contact Info” page at poststar.com. The loss of editorial staff includes Drew Kerr from the Saratoga Bureau, feature writer Jordan Reardon, veteran photographer and photo-illustrator TJ Hooker, and sportswriter Alex Matthews. In the past week the paper has also lost its online editor Jonathan Davenport (particularly painful as the news organization attempts the difficult transition to an internet-based model) and Washington County correspondent Lydia Wheeler, whose name has yet to be removed from the web page.
Characteristically, Post-Star Editor Ken Tingley wrote a vague blog post attempting to spin this bad news into something positive: a portent of a strengthening business climate in the newspaper publishing industry. His implication that the missing writers left for better jobs in the industry seems not to be true in all cases. When asked, Tingley declined to identify the recently-departed editorial staff; the transparency-crusading editor who publishes the names (and salaries) of public-sector employees as a service to the taxpayers who underwrite them proves himself unwilling to even confirm the employment status of his own byline journalists as a service to the subscribers, readers and advertisers who support them.
This summer’s staff cutbacks at the Post-Star mark the second major round of shrinkage for the newspaper (and the parent corporation) since the recession took hold in 2008. In December of that year an article in the Post-Star announced the firing of four of its full-time employees. The story stated that the cuts amounted to two per cent of the paper’s workforce, reducing the staff from 161 full- and part-time employees to 157. The following March, an article announcing the layoffs of eleven more employees cited a decrease in the paper’s payroll from 147 to 136 full- and part-time staff. Using their own numbers, in the three and a half months between those two news items ten more staffers disappeared, unreported. In total, the attrition in Post-Star staff between December 2008 and March 2009 amounted to 25 employees, or 15.5% of the original 161. By comparison, the Post-Star’s parent company reported a 12.2% decrease in total employees in the fiscal year ending September 2009.
Perhaps a better measure of the net loss of Post-Star talent (that accounts for staff increases as well as decreases) is a comparison of the staff “Contact Info” pages from poststar.com at various dates. The page from September 14, 2008 lists 84 employees. (Notably vacant on this list is the position of Publisher, which would not be filled by Rick Emanuel until October 20, about a month prior to the layoffs.) The same web page today lists 60 employees. Accounting for the previously mentioned departure of Lydia Wheeler, in less than three years the newspaper has suffered a net loss of nearly 30% of the staff it distinguishes with a listing on its own website.
While Editor Tingley, may try to put some positive spin on this grim statistic, the fact remains that the Post-Star continues to shine ever and evermore dimly.
by Mark Wilson
Astronomy informs us that at the end of a star’s useful life, when it has burned through all its fuel, it expands into a loose assemblage of cosmic dust centered on a collapsing carbon and oxygen core. The outer shell eventually dissipates, leaving the ultra dense, sparkless core to mark a once-bright spot in the heavens. This post-star phase of stellar evolution is known as a “white dwarf” or “degenerate dwarf.”
In Glens Falls, the Post-Star is in transition. Dire financial crises at Lee Enterprise Inc—the Iowa corporation that owns the newspaper, along with about fifty other dailies across the country—have forced another round of staff cutbacks in all departments. Since Memorial Day, the Post-Star has lost nine of the 68 staffers (13.2%) listed on the “Contact Info” page at poststar.com. The loss of editorial staff includes Drew Kerr from the Saratoga Bureau, feature writer Jordan Reardon, veteran photographer and photo-illustrator TJ Hooker, and sportswriter Alex Matthews. In the past week the paper has also lost its online editor Jonathan Davenport (particularly painful as the news organization attempts the difficult transition to an internet-based model) and Washington County correspondent Lydia Wheeler, whose name has yet to be removed from the web page.
Characteristically, Post-Star Editor Ken Tingley wrote a vague blog post attempting to spin this bad news into something positive: a portent of a strengthening business climate in the newspaper publishing industry. His implication that the missing writers left for better jobs in the industry seems not to be true in all cases. When asked, Tingley declined to identify the recently-departed editorial staff; the transparency-crusading editor who publishes the names (and salaries) of public-sector employees as a service to the taxpayers who underwrite them proves himself unwilling to even confirm the employment status of his own byline journalists as a service to the subscribers, readers and advertisers who support them.
This summer’s staff cutbacks at the Post-Star mark the second major round of shrinkage for the newspaper (and the parent corporation) since the recession took hold in 2008. In December of that year an article in the Post-Star announced the firing of four of its full-time employees. The story stated that the cuts amounted to two per cent of the paper’s workforce, reducing the staff from 161 full- and part-time employees to 157. The following March, an article announcing the layoffs of eleven more employees cited a decrease in the paper’s payroll from 147 to 136 full- and part-time staff. Using their own numbers, in the three and a half months between those two news items ten more staffers disappeared, unreported. In total, the attrition in Post-Star staff between December 2008 and March 2009 amounted to 25 employees, or 15.5% of the original 161. By comparison, the Post-Star’s parent company reported a 12.2% decrease in total employees in the fiscal year ending September 2009.
Perhaps a better measure of the net loss of Post-Star talent (that accounts for staff increases as well as decreases) is a comparison of the staff “Contact Info” pages from poststar.com at various dates. The page from September 14, 2008 lists 84 employees. (Notably vacant on this list is the position of Publisher, which would not be filled by Rick Emanuel until October 20, about a month prior to the layoffs.) The same web page today lists 60 employees. Accounting for the previously mentioned departure of Lydia Wheeler, in less than three years the newspaper has suffered a net loss of nearly 30% of the staff it distinguishes with a listing on its own website.
While Editor Tingley, may try to put some positive spin on this grim statistic, the fact remains that the Post-Star continues to shine ever and evermore dimly.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
A Peace Corps history
A few weeks ago, I finished reading When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and its First Fifty Years by journalist Stanley Meisler, an excellent history of the widely respected agency. Meisler's book is very well-written and easy to follow. It provides a lot of inside details, particularly in the early days, but it is no hagiography. It does not shy away from some of the more controversial incidents and aspects of the Peace Corps first half century.
Monday, August 08, 2011
Dear Verizon
Dear Verizon,
When you are making record profits with your existing labor contract and you do nothing but raise rates on consumers, it doesn't exactly make me sympathetic when you claim to "need" to wring more concessions out of the workers who made you those record profits.
Regretfully yours,
The (Fairly) Young Contrarian
When you are making record profits with your existing labor contract and you do nothing but raise rates on consumers, it doesn't exactly make me sympathetic when you claim to "need" to wring more concessions out of the workers who made you those record profits.
Regretfully yours,
The (Fairly) Young Contrarian
Sunday, August 07, 2011
Lee Enterprises, Inc’s 3rd Quarter Report: Black & White & Red All Over (guest essay)
8th in a series on troubles at The Post-Star and its parent Lee Enterprises
by Mark Wilson
The Iowa corporation that owns the Glens Falls Post-Star, Lee Enterprises, Inc., released its third quarter financial statement late Friday afternoon. As any reporter will tell you, the vacant lot between the close of stock markets Friday and Monday’s opening bell is where you go to bury bad news.
While many of the headlines from Lee’s SEC filing were made public soon after the fiscal quarter ended on June 26th, the aggregate bad news and the details of the measures the company is undertaking to stay afloat make for compelling and distressing reading.
The Big Picture
Lee Enterprises lost $155.5 million over the last three months. That compares to last year when they gained $10 million for the same quarter, and 2009—at the bottom of the recession—when they lost only $24.5 million. Even if Lee repeats last year’s fourth quarter gains (unlikely in what looks like a secondary recession) it will outpace its 2008-09 recession year losses by nearly $10 million or 7.85%.
Revenue Loss
While representatives for Lee Enterprise (including management at the Post-Star) continue to accentuate the increase in online ad revenue (up 22% over last year), those sales amount to only 12% of total advertising income. Combined print and digital advertising lost 5.6% over last year with real estate ads leading the decline (down 20%). Revenue from circulation was off .4%, a figure that reflects the unfortunate tug-of-war between the increased newsstand and subscription prices at some of Lee’s papers and the drop-off in readership.
Layoffs and Benefit Cuts
With revenues plunging and material costs on the rise, Lee has resorted to the one revenue stream under its control: laying off staff and cutting back on employee and retiree benefits. Lee saved $4 million over the last three months through layoff, buyout or “coerced attrition.” Full time equivalent employment at Lee (a term that balances out full and part time labor) decreased 4.8% from last year. (these savings were offset by increased $1.6 million “workforce adjustment costs” (outsourcing, contract labor, etc.).
Lee also saved $4 million by eliminating post-retirement medical coverage for its employees and freezing some pension benefits. Ominously, the report looks ahead to decreasing these operating costs another 4-5% in the coming quarter.
Corporate Debt
Lee Enterprises continues to struggle beneath a $1 billion debt burden which comes due in eight months. This picture may soon brighten,however, if only for the short term.
Reporters Mike Spector and Matt Wirz for the Wall Street Journal broke the story last Wednesdaybthat Lee has approached its principal lenders with a new plan for reorganizing its debt. The new plan divides the current debt obligation into three parts: $675 million in first lien senior debt; $175 million in second lien debt; and $175 new bond debt. The senior debt holds an interest rate of 7.5% over a term of four years (compared to the 4.25% they are paying now). The second lien debt holds an interest rate of 15% over five years (compared to 10% now paid on the debt remaining from the purchase of Pulitzer newspapers) and offers lenders a 13% stake in the company. Lee’s lenders Goldman Sachs and Monarch Alternative Capital have tentatively agreed to hold the publisher’s second tier debt in exchange for the over 1/8th ownership stake.
If the new arrangement holds to the previous terms (apart from interest rate and maturity dates) a very rough calculation of Lee’s new debt looks something like this:
•$675,000,000 over 4 years at 7.5% interest (in quarterly installments) comes to $197 million/year
•$175,000,000 over 5 years at 15% interest (in quarterly installments) comes to $50 million/year
When combined, Lee will have to come up with about $147 million/year to satisfy its creditors (before even considering the new bond debt service). This payout would be 2.25 times larger than the $109 million debt service it managed to come up with this past year. For an advertiser/subscriber/investor–dependent company going into the second wave of a national recession, this will be a very tall order to fill.
In the increasingly likely event that Lee ultimately fails to meet the new debt obligations and declares bankruptcy, the new arrangement with its banks sets up a dynamic similar to the Journal Register Company, which emerged from its 2009 bankruptcy last month as the privately-held property of the hedge fund Alden Global, the newspaper’s principal lender.
Anyone who was disappointed three years ago in their newspaper’s failure to hold financial institutions accountable for the nation’s real estate and stock market collapses will not see this infiltration into the publishing sector by many of the same banks as a move in the right direction.
Late in the week, following news of the debt refinancing plan and in anticipation of the quarterly report, Lee’s stock dropped to a 2-year low of 68¢ per share.
by Mark Wilson
The Iowa corporation that owns the Glens Falls Post-Star, Lee Enterprises, Inc., released its third quarter financial statement late Friday afternoon. As any reporter will tell you, the vacant lot between the close of stock markets Friday and Monday’s opening bell is where you go to bury bad news.
While many of the headlines from Lee’s SEC filing were made public soon after the fiscal quarter ended on June 26th, the aggregate bad news and the details of the measures the company is undertaking to stay afloat make for compelling and distressing reading.
The Big Picture
Lee Enterprises lost $155.5 million over the last three months. That compares to last year when they gained $10 million for the same quarter, and 2009—at the bottom of the recession—when they lost only $24.5 million. Even if Lee repeats last year’s fourth quarter gains (unlikely in what looks like a secondary recession) it will outpace its 2008-09 recession year losses by nearly $10 million or 7.85%.
Revenue Loss
While representatives for Lee Enterprise (including management at the Post-Star) continue to accentuate the increase in online ad revenue (up 22% over last year), those sales amount to only 12% of total advertising income. Combined print and digital advertising lost 5.6% over last year with real estate ads leading the decline (down 20%). Revenue from circulation was off .4%, a figure that reflects the unfortunate tug-of-war between the increased newsstand and subscription prices at some of Lee’s papers and the drop-off in readership.
Layoffs and Benefit Cuts
With revenues plunging and material costs on the rise, Lee has resorted to the one revenue stream under its control: laying off staff and cutting back on employee and retiree benefits. Lee saved $4 million over the last three months through layoff, buyout or “coerced attrition.” Full time equivalent employment at Lee (a term that balances out full and part time labor) decreased 4.8% from last year. (these savings were offset by increased $1.6 million “workforce adjustment costs” (outsourcing, contract labor, etc.).
Lee also saved $4 million by eliminating post-retirement medical coverage for its employees and freezing some pension benefits. Ominously, the report looks ahead to decreasing these operating costs another 4-5% in the coming quarter.
Corporate Debt
Lee Enterprises continues to struggle beneath a $1 billion debt burden which comes due in eight months. This picture may soon brighten,however, if only for the short term.
Reporters Mike Spector and Matt Wirz for the Wall Street Journal broke the story last Wednesdaybthat Lee has approached its principal lenders with a new plan for reorganizing its debt. The new plan divides the current debt obligation into three parts: $675 million in first lien senior debt; $175 million in second lien debt; and $175 new bond debt. The senior debt holds an interest rate of 7.5% over a term of four years (compared to the 4.25% they are paying now). The second lien debt holds an interest rate of 15% over five years (compared to 10% now paid on the debt remaining from the purchase of Pulitzer newspapers) and offers lenders a 13% stake in the company. Lee’s lenders Goldman Sachs and Monarch Alternative Capital have tentatively agreed to hold the publisher’s second tier debt in exchange for the over 1/8th ownership stake.
If the new arrangement holds to the previous terms (apart from interest rate and maturity dates) a very rough calculation of Lee’s new debt looks something like this:
•$675,000,000 over 4 years at 7.5% interest (in quarterly installments) comes to $197 million/year
•$175,000,000 over 5 years at 15% interest (in quarterly installments) comes to $50 million/year
When combined, Lee will have to come up with about $147 million/year to satisfy its creditors (before even considering the new bond debt service). This payout would be 2.25 times larger than the $109 million debt service it managed to come up with this past year. For an advertiser/subscriber/investor–dependent company going into the second wave of a national recession, this will be a very tall order to fill.
In the increasingly likely event that Lee ultimately fails to meet the new debt obligations and declares bankruptcy, the new arrangement with its banks sets up a dynamic similar to the Journal Register Company, which emerged from its 2009 bankruptcy last month as the privately-held property of the hedge fund Alden Global, the newspaper’s principal lender.
Anyone who was disappointed three years ago in their newspaper’s failure to hold financial institutions accountable for the nation’s real estate and stock market collapses will not see this infiltration into the publishing sector by many of the same banks as a move in the right direction.
Late in the week, following news of the debt refinancing plan and in anticipation of the quarterly report, Lee’s stock dropped to a 2-year low of 68¢ per share.
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
'Violent counter-jihadism' and its threat to western democracies
Foreign Affairs has a good article on "counter-jihadism," a violent ideology in itself, as exemplified by the Christian terrorist who committed mass murder in Norway last week.
Monday, August 01, 2011
Lee Enterprise newspapers moving (fast) to subscription-based web content (guest essay)
7th in a series on troubles at The Post-Star and its parent Lee Enterprises
by Mark Wilson
The on-again-off-again romance between the Post-Star and the internet subscription paywall looks like it might soon heat up again.
Lee Enterprises, the Davenport, Iowa-based parent company of the Post-Star announced suddenly yesterday that it will begin requiring visitors to the websites of its Montana and Wyoming newspapers pay a subscription if they wish to read more than a few stories per month. Access to the papers’ home pages, classified sections, and a few other features will remain free, regardless of the number of visits. According to the editor of the Montana Standard, the subscription plan begins today for the Billings Gazette, the Helena Independent Record, The Missoulian, and Ravalli Republic in Montana, and the Casper Star Tribune in Wyoming.
The head office’s new policy seems to have blind-sided some of the publications. The Billings Gazette and the Ravalli Republic in notices to their readers claim the new “reader meter” allows visitors twenty free stories in any given thirty day period, while the Montana Standard and Helena IR claim the system will allow fifteen free pages for any of the affected websites. Neither The Missoulian nor the Casper Star Tribune websites made any announcement of the new policy on Sunday.
No telling if this policy in the northern rockies will spread to any of Lee’s 43 other newspaper properties (including the Post-Star). The company is in financial disarray, and is looking for any way to generate new income and attract investors to boost its dangerously deflated stock. This might be the company’s next hail Mary pass.
The Post-Star flirted with subscription-based web content a decade ago—a move which led to the online division between PostStar.net (for paying customers) and PostStar.com (for everyone else). Visitors preferred the free site in numbers large enough to convince the publisher to drop the firewall altogether and offer all content for free. In February last year, after deciding to pull Letters to the Editor and other items from the website, Editorial Page Editor Mark Mahoney sent out an e-mail plea to editors around the country for information on how to make the paper’s website profitable. The plea made its way online, where it was unfortunately ridiculed for its loose grammar and desperate tone.
Perhaps enough time has passed since the Post-Star’s last traumatic break-up with subscriber-only content. After all, the paper and its readers are older, more mature. Maybe the paper is ready for a fuller commitment to the relationship this time. After all, the Schenectady Gazette is making a go of it with its readers. So is The New York Times. Maybe, by golly, its time to take the big plunge. No regrets. ‘Til death do us part.
Then again, maybe the Post-Star won’t have a choice in the matter. A shotgun marriage is being arranged at this very moment in Iowa. Expect an invitation from the Lee family at any moment.
by Mark Wilson
The on-again-off-again romance between the Post-Star and the internet subscription paywall looks like it might soon heat up again.
Lee Enterprises, the Davenport, Iowa-based parent company of the Post-Star announced suddenly yesterday that it will begin requiring visitors to the websites of its Montana and Wyoming newspapers pay a subscription if they wish to read more than a few stories per month. Access to the papers’ home pages, classified sections, and a few other features will remain free, regardless of the number of visits. According to the editor of the Montana Standard, the subscription plan begins today for the Billings Gazette, the Helena Independent Record, The Missoulian, and Ravalli Republic in Montana, and the Casper Star Tribune in Wyoming.
The head office’s new policy seems to have blind-sided some of the publications. The Billings Gazette and the Ravalli Republic in notices to their readers claim the new “reader meter” allows visitors twenty free stories in any given thirty day period, while the Montana Standard and Helena IR claim the system will allow fifteen free pages for any of the affected websites. Neither The Missoulian nor the Casper Star Tribune websites made any announcement of the new policy on Sunday.
No telling if this policy in the northern rockies will spread to any of Lee’s 43 other newspaper properties (including the Post-Star). The company is in financial disarray, and is looking for any way to generate new income and attract investors to boost its dangerously deflated stock. This might be the company’s next hail Mary pass.
The Post-Star flirted with subscription-based web content a decade ago—a move which led to the online division between PostStar.net (for paying customers) and PostStar.com (for everyone else). Visitors preferred the free site in numbers large enough to convince the publisher to drop the firewall altogether and offer all content for free. In February last year, after deciding to pull Letters to the Editor and other items from the website, Editorial Page Editor Mark Mahoney sent out an e-mail plea to editors around the country for information on how to make the paper’s website profitable. The plea made its way online, where it was unfortunately ridiculed for its loose grammar and desperate tone.
Perhaps enough time has passed since the Post-Star’s last traumatic break-up with subscriber-only content. After all, the paper and its readers are older, more mature. Maybe the paper is ready for a fuller commitment to the relationship this time. After all, the Schenectady Gazette is making a go of it with its readers. So is The New York Times. Maybe, by golly, its time to take the big plunge. No regrets. ‘Til death do us part.
Then again, maybe the Post-Star won’t have a choice in the matter. A shotgun marriage is being arranged at this very moment in Iowa. Expect an invitation from the Lee family at any moment.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Republicans are holding the economy hostage and thumbing their nose at the Constitution
I'm not a Democrat or a supporter of President Obama, but the Republicans' actions with regard to raising the debt ceiling is completely disgraceful, although that's probably an understatement.
To recap...
-Congressional Republicans are refusing to raise the debt ceiling to pay for expenditures Congress has already authorized as part of the regular budget. Given that 'Tea Partiers' yammer on incessantly about strict fidelity to the Constitution, perhaps they can explain how their demand that spending be approved by Congress twice squares with the 14th Amendment.
-The current federal fiscal year ends on September 30. This means that Republicans and their 'Tea Party' fringe are holding the economy hostage to their probably unconstitutional ideological posturing rather than waiting two months for budget negotiations, where such grandstanding belongs.
A piece from last year in The Washington Post sheds some more light on the widening inequality in the US.
From World War II until 1976, considered by many as the "golden years" for the U.S. economy, the top 10 percent of the population took home less than a third of the income generated by the private economy. But since then, according to Saez and Piketty, virtually all of the benefits of economic growth have gone to households that, in today's terms, earn more than $110,000 a year.
Even within that top "decile," the distribution is remarkably skewed. By 2007, the top 1 percent of households took home 23 percent of the national income after a 15-year run in which they captured more than half - yes, you read that right, more than half - of the country's economic growth. As Tim Noah noted recently in a wonderful series of articles in Slate, that's the kind of income distribution you'd associate with a banana republic or a sub-Saharan kleptocracy, not the world's oldest democracy and wealthiest market economy.
It's worth noting that not only Republicans but Democrats, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have been complicit in crafting policies to this effect.
To recap...
-Congressional Republicans are refusing to raise the debt ceiling to pay for expenditures Congress has already authorized as part of the regular budget. Given that 'Tea Partiers' yammer on incessantly about strict fidelity to the Constitution, perhaps they can explain how their demand that spending be approved by Congress twice squares with the 14th Amendment.
-The current federal fiscal year ends on September 30. This means that Republicans and their 'Tea Party' fringe are holding the economy hostage to their probably unconstitutional ideological posturing rather than waiting two months for budget negotiations, where such grandstanding belongs.
A piece from last year in The Washington Post sheds some more light on the widening inequality in the US.
From World War II until 1976, considered by many as the "golden years" for the U.S. economy, the top 10 percent of the population took home less than a third of the income generated by the private economy. But since then, according to Saez and Piketty, virtually all of the benefits of economic growth have gone to households that, in today's terms, earn more than $110,000 a year.
Even within that top "decile," the distribution is remarkably skewed. By 2007, the top 1 percent of households took home 23 percent of the national income after a 15-year run in which they captured more than half - yes, you read that right, more than half - of the country's economic growth. As Tim Noah noted recently in a wonderful series of articles in Slate, that's the kind of income distribution you'd associate with a banana republic or a sub-Saharan kleptocracy, not the world's oldest democracy and wealthiest market economy.
It's worth noting that not only Republicans but Democrats, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have been complicit in crafting policies to this effect.
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