The Star
And the recent layoffs at the money machine that made $9-million in profits this year
This cynic used to joke that I’m leaving this crisis in journalism to the young and the billionaires to solve. After the most recent bloodbath at my beloved Star I’m choking on those words.
Forgive me for any typos with this screed which I’m hurriedly posting. But, if you’re a Star reader you’re accustomed to typos. Like the Star I don’t have sufficient staff to do the job as well as readers might expect.
When I retired in January from my beloved Arizona Daily Star, I happily took the buyout. I was ready. When word of this week's savage layoffs hit this retiree I was stunned, saddened and alarmed for my colleagues. And reminded of the perilous state of journalism and our democracy.
I realized today my work will never appear in The Arizona Daily Star again. Why? Because in my "freelancer contract", which I cheerfully signed in January, I agreed to never disparage my former employer.
I guess I won’t be freelancing for my former employer because I have no choice but to scorch Lee Enterprises. I will continue to support and subscribe to The Arizona Daily Star because, like you, I want journalism to survive in these perilous times. Even if it is limping along we must continue to support the extraordinary writers who remain.
My colleagues who were summarily laid off today, who were discarded like yesterday’s news, gave their lives to Lee Enterprises. Like so many of the good souls shit-canned through the years. They missed games, graduations, birthday parties and holiday gatherings and the life events normal people with normal hours enjoy to serve this community, year after year, byline after byline, exhausting deadline after exhausting deadline. Because they believed in what they were doing.
They sure as Hell weren’t getting rich.
They were romantics, dreamers, poets, jokers, reformers and patriots. And Lee Enterprises rewarded their devotion by discarding them like litter.
Our former editor, Jill Jorden Spitz, an extraordinary journalist I revere, admire and respect, was in a tough, untenable place, at the helm of our Lee Enterprises paper. Jill always had our backs. Jill gave her life to the cause of quality journalism and she was rewarded with betrayal.
As for the opinion pages, who knows? Tossing Curt Prendergast, my former Opinion Page Editor, aside, Lee and the state of Arizona is losing an exceptional journalist.
I’m disgusted by this corporate butchery by a corporation that made $9-million dollars in profits off the backs of the workers at The Arizona Daily Star—but I was not surprised by the inevitable.
I know how the company scavenges every dime off its workers because I was their content-producing “intellectual property”.
When I was first syndicated I was thrilled to be internationally distributed. Lee confiscated all of my earnings from my syndication which my syndicate described as “unusual”. Roughly $3000 a year. The only other political cartoonist in our group treated similarly by his employer was a Communist Chinese cartoonist in Cagle’s stable.
When I hoped to donate my 10,000 cartoons to the University of Arizona Special Collections Library, an honor and a joy, that move was killed by the Lee lawyers who demanded a financial compensation clause from the Univeristy lawyers. Over nickels and dimes. If a University of Arizona Special Collections Library gallery catalogue featured a cartoon of mine they demanded compensation. Are you kidding me?
So my cartoons sit in crates rather than at the UA library.
I'm heartbroken for my friends, my colleagues.
I'm mournful for the loss to our community.
America is losing two small town dailies a week. Thousands of once great newspapers are history. Across America these beacons of liberty are going out, one by one, leaving behind a darkness where partisan media and disinformation is metastasizing, unanswered and unquestioned.
I wish those remaining at the rising stern of the Arizona Daily Star well.
We need you, damn it. We need you to move us, to inform us, to connect us, to cheer us, to challenge us, to inspire us and to tell our story. And to tell us the vetted, double checked verified truth about ourselves.
I have no answers. If you have any let me know.
Keep subscribing. I know the remaining crew, poor bastards, will give it their best.
Those photos bring back incredible childhood memories: excitedly getting to go to work with you on “take your child to work day” or really, any day I could fake being sick so I could come with you. The smell! The noise in the printing press room! The dark room for processing pictures. The winding halls with twists and turns. The friendly security guards giving me a “visitor” badge. Your coworkers - some of who babysat me. This is like watching one of my favorite parts of childhood being neglected and trashed. I’m so sad.
And I’m really really upset they have your archive and won’t donate it.
The saying used to be that the only things inevitable were death and taxes. Corporate greed and dirty deeds done on Fridays must now be added to that list.