Why is the Daily Tribune such a crappy newspaper?

By LOU ANTONELLI

It’s been over a year since I got the heave-ho as managing editor of the Daily Tribune, and for the past year I’ve heard nothing but criticism of it.

Of course, I suspect people might be freer with expressing their negative opinions to me because they assume I am unhappy with my departure.

Which is not completely true. I took over at the Tribune on July 31, 2007, and was let go on Jan. 2, 2015. That was a tough time, many bad years. I’ve enjoyed the slower pace of working at a weekly paper like I do now – although and of course, I don’t like the drop in income. But you simply don’t get as much money for running a weekly as opposed to a daily newspaper.

But the fact remains, the Tribune IS a crappy newspaper. It’s a problem that started many years ago. Problems like this don’t appear overnight.

The Tribune and its predecessor publications were owned by the same family since 1942. When I went to week there in 2007 things were doing great, but then troubles hit. Publisher Bob Palmer was right in 2014 when he said after he sold the paper that it was a combination of bad luck, bad timing and bad decision making.

The Great Recession kicked in soon after I arrived in Mount Pleasant. That was a horrible strain, and the newspaper industry itself is going through changes, mostly caused by technological changes.

The Palmer Family had to cut back and cut back and squeeze blood from stones to keep publishing. 

By 2014 I was the only full-time writer left at the paper. I had to cobble together an issue each day with articles I wrote, plus articles from the Associated Press as well as news releases that came in.

But by 2014 the paper was returning to the black, and obviously was doing well enough that someone was willing to buy it. The Palmers were forced to sell because they had a deficit they had to meet, but I believe the paper itself, on a day to day basis, was on the upswing.

Newspapers, like so many other businesses in the U.S., and undergoing constant consolidations. At the time of its sale, the Tribune was one of only 13 independently-owned daily newspapers in Texas.

But newspapers are a business that doesn’t do well under chain ownership. For one thing, they are not tremendously profitable. Also, almost all the business is done on credit – with all the open advertising accounts – the cash flow can be exasperating.

A wise old publisher told me that you can make a living from a newspaper, but you won’t make a fortune – until you sell it.

Newspapers often – at best – cover costs and turn small profits. Now, when a newspaper is owned by a chain and is expected to, in addition to covering costs and making a small profit, produce dividends for investors – well, it doesn’t usually happen.

There is one way a newspaper chain can squeeze a profit from the papers it owns, and that’s by cheating its journalists by making them work off the clock. Unlike some businesses where the product is uniform and the time for its manufacture quantifiable, journalism is very fluid. It’s impossible to come up with a system to determine how much time it takes to write a newspaper story. Some stories are simple reporting of public events; others fall into place quickly, others may take hours of digging.

Most large newspaper chains cheat their employees by giving them a workload that any honest or intelligent person knows can’t be done in 40 hours, and then refusing them overtime.

I’ve been at the receiving end of this scam a few times in the past. The company that currently owns the Tribune does the same thing, with the resulting poor quality of its product and, of course, a high turnover rate among its employees. The employees are overworked, tired, and short-term.

There was a half year – from the summer of 2014 until the start of last year – when I worked for the current owners, Granite Publications. It’s one of those typical chiseling corporate outfits that gyps it employees by making them work off the clock and enjoys running them off so they never have to give raises.

Ironically, the family that owns it is named Chionsini (which is NOT Italian for “Chiseler”, though it should be). The founder is retired, and it’s his daughter who wields the whip hand now. As so often happens in the U.S. with spoiled children of privilege, she’s a left winger. She was a big Wendy Davis pink shirt in the 2014 governor’s election.

When the Tribune changed hands in June 2014, she brought in a similarly left-wing publisher, so right off the bat there was a shift in the ideological foundation of the paper. This is a bad fit for a community that votes about 70 percent Republican in general elections.

Of course, they pulled the same baloney of working me 60-80 hours a week for 40 hours a pay, but I knew they would do that, and I expected it. I thought it was kind of cute in an evil sort of way. I know they detested me, but with almost everyone else at the paper being a member of the Palmer Family – and therefore having left when the family sold the paper – I knew they couldn’t fire me immediately. They wouldn’t even know where the toilet paper was kept.

I was surprised I lasted as long as I did. It was a sort of a game. It reminds me of a line from a 1940s horror/comedy uttered by a character played by Peter Lorre: “I’m tired of wasting my time outwitting fools.”

The publisher wanted me to give an excessive workload to the new employees, but I would not be complicit in employment fraud, so he had to give them the assignments himself.

The upshot is there was already been a 100 percent turnover in the journalistic staff of the paper in the past year. Nobody is going to stay and work under those conditions. The product obviously suffers.

This is normal for a chain-owned newspaper such as the Tribune is now. The paper has no stability or continuity, and the employees have no experience, because of the high turnover. What’s particularly funny is that this is under corporate leadership that would welcome Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders as president. It recalls the saying, relative to the old Soviet Union, that “Communism is the highest form of monopoly, because under Communism the government owns everything, and so whoever owns the government owns everything.”

One logical thing to do to cut costs at the Tribune would seem to be to cut back on its publication schedule, make it a semi-weekly or weekly, But Granite Publications tried that in 2014 with the daily paper it owns in Taylor. The result was catastrophic – its circulation dropped by at least half. The same thing would surely happen in Mount Pleasant.

Having a daily newspaper is an asset to Mount Pleasant, but chain ownership is not working. It would be nice if some community-spirited business stepped forward and offered to take it off Granite Publications’ hands.

UPDATE: As of Feb. 3 our reliable sources indicate the current managing editor is leaving. This makes perfect sense, in that the owners of the Tribune cheat and abuse their employees by making them work off the clock and/or do multiple jobs.

The Tribune hasn't had a publisher for months; they made the editor do both jobs. Now that they've hired a publisher, they'll make him do both jobs.

The Tribune has had three publishers in a year and half. Before being bought by Granite Publications, the company had three publishers in 62 years.