the rix mix

The Star-Ledger announced today more than 200 non-union employees had signed up for buyouts, achieving the second of three goals set by the ownership to avert a sale or shutdown of New Jersey's largest newspaper.

The newspaper also appeared to be close to a settle­ment with its union drivers, which must be achieved by Oct. 8 to meet the final condition. An agreement with the mailers union was ratified last month.

Publisher George Arwady said in an email to the staff that discussions with the drivers union are continuing and stressed that the deadline is final.

"I urge the Drivers to vote 'yes' to protect their own jobs and those of everyone else who works at The Star-Ledger," Arwardy said in his email this evening.

Nobody has a long-term solution for this. Newspapers are dying, have been for decades, cable news & the internet just hastened the process. The Star-Ledger has been handicapped by needing to function as an all things to all people newspaper. It couldn't regionalize like Asbury Park Press, now centered culturally in provincial Red Bank NJ. I can buy the APP at the 7-11, but this is a fringe area. The Ledger views itself as a newspaper for the state generally in politics & high school sports; & as a news source for the entire northern part of the state despite sharing the geography with a few other dailies. To be sure, the Star Ledger missed some opportunities. The byzantine website should have been redesigned a few years ago. But the basic problem remains real circulation & advertising revenues, & the pressures of those force newspapers to downsize & specialize, cut back on field reporting, investigative journalism, & in-house columnists.

I grew up in era when print journalism was an enviable vocation for young writers. Even the writers covering Unon County high school sports for the old Elizabeth Daily Journal were demigods. The pub across the street from the Journal home on North Broad was legendary for every kid who worked on a high school newspaper in the county. Reputedly any word uttered in that bar by a Courthouse politician was considered off-the-record. The Daily Journal is long gone, done in by similar pressures the Ledger faces, & ironically by forced expansion of the Star-Ledger itself into the Journal's territory as Newark's economy declined. Many of my high school classmates probably thought I'd work at the Journal, maybe become what the Ledger's Paul Mulshine is now; a curmudgeonly but oddly forgivable (by me) conservative columnist, Jersey raised & educated. But few newspapers can afford to carry a real spectrum of local opinionators on staff, stalking through city halls, pestering board of ed members. They were in fact already disappearing in the Seventies. Mulshine is a fortunate survivor of a once-thriving breed.

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