"Our AP source says a majority of the staff — 90%, this person claims — are about to send a jointly-signed letter to Business Editor Hal Ritter accusing him of 'installing a culture of fear.' Chief among their complaints: An annual review process 'in which the entire staff is slammed.' Why would the news cooperative's management want to demoralize staff like that? One theory is that the negative reviews would allow the newswire to cut more staff loose without having to pay severance."USAT staffers remember well 2004's Kelley Report, the result of an investigation into how the foreign news reporter fabricated untold numbers of stories, despite warnings by colleagues to upper management. The report found, yup, a culture of fear at Gannett's top-selling paper, prompting a house cleaning that included Ritter's departure. He's been AP's top business editor since 2008.
I just read Gawker's article three times. Nowhere did I see a reference to crappy stories or arbitrary story counts at the AP. There were perhaps three grafs that dealt with the AP; the rest had to do with Reuters and Bloomberg. I'm very confused about your summary here.
ReplyDeleteSorry about the confusion; there are actually two Gawker posts on this subject. I've now made that distinction, and linked to both of then.
ReplyDeleteback in the day when hal was running the money section at usa today, it was better known as the House of Pain.
ReplyDeleteAs meticulous as hal was playing copy editor and sending out marked up copies of stories that had run in the paper, he was completely out to lunch when it came to naming managers both in money and later the news section. talk about morale killers.