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| Ivory |
Ivory announced his retirement this morning, effective Friday. I'm not sure why he's giving such short notice, however.
The C-J is one of GCI's bigger dailies. Weekday circulation is 131,208, and Sunday is 224,420, according to the March 31 statement from the Alliance for Audited Media. (AAM circulation lookup database.)
Ivory is one of the good guys. He was willing to fight against bad decisions by corporate and deeply cared about the product and community. He could challenge the Gannett conventional wisdom and get away with it (and sometime even effect change in the process.) There are very few editors of his caliber left in the company. A loss for Gannett, not that Gannett really care about quality and the product from what I have seen of the GCI papers I pick up.
ReplyDeleteKnowing Bennie, he likely put his own name forward in lieu of RIFs of other news personnel and agreed to a hasty departure so that The C-J could quickly take advantage of salary savings.
DeleteOr... it also could be that Bennie was given a number to cut and decided, when all was said and done, he'd rather leave, lower the cut number and leave the cutting to the next editor.
Ivory's departure gives us cause to reflect on the divergence of two Gannett papers in that part of the country, the Louisville C-J and the Cincinnati Enquirer. The C-J has managed to maintain a relatively decent journalistic reputation and an investigative reporting staff, while the Enquirer became a bush-league news outlet in 2003 when Gannett parked the loyal but hopelessly overmatched Tom Callinan as exec editor in 2003. Callinan was on the outs with everybody and in the course of clinging to employment adopted the position of never saying no to newsroom cuts. He will forever be remembered for eliminating columnists (he didn't like them), eliminating the lone investigative reporting position (he thought it unnecessary) and for his short workdays, general uninvolvement, unfamiliarity with anyone who wasn't a direct report, and unwillingness to stand up to a publisher who made shambles of the paper's editorial integrity. Ivory was just the opposite. When you consider that metro Cincinnati has about 2.2 million people and metro Louisville has about 1.4 million, it's amazing that the C-J's daily circ of 131,208 exceeds the Enquirer's 129,901.
ReplyDeleteBut I would add that Louisville had a rich history of public-service journalism, where Cincinnati had been long mismanaged by Gannett into a lapdog of the business community.
DeleteI don't think you can lay the Enquirer's decline all on Callinan. It started with the departure of the last real editor we had, Larry Beaupre, under the "leadership" of Bushee and Goudreau. The damage those two did was incalculable. Callinan just maintained the status quo. (And Ivory was indeed one of the good guys.)
DeleteA sad day for The C-J and for the community. Bennie held back the tide and well and as long as he could.
ReplyDeleteShort notice is still curious.
ReplyDeleteAll of the above may be true, but what's irrefutable is the C-J's reign as one of the top papers in the country under control of the Bingham family. Check this out from Junior's obit at:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Bingham,_Jr.
Bingham Jr. was a different breed of newspaper publisher. Besides his distinctive mustache and fondness for Scottish tam o'shanters, Bingham Jr. was a stickler for journalistic ethics—sometimes to a fault, critics claimed—and public service that sometimes trumped profits. He insisted on professionalism at all levels, even to the point of insisting on the removal of his own wife, mother, and two sisters from the company board of directors. This ongoing struggle, particularly with sister Sallie Bingham, eventually led Bingham Sr. to break up the company in 1986 and sell off the parts, with the newspapers being sold to Gannett Corporation and the radio stations sold to a predecessor of Clear Channel Communications.
During the tenure of Bingham Jr., the C-J won Pulitzer Prizes in three separate years: 1976, for photography regarding of court-ordered public school busing and desegregation; 1978, for an investigation of the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire; and, 1980 for a series of stories and photos from Cambodia.
After the sale of the media properties, Bingham Jr. briefly published a newsletter about ethics in journalism. After that effort ended, he largely stayed out of the public light, surfacing only on occasion and then usually to criticize the management of the former Bingham companies. He also was an active supporter of and fund-raiser for Actors Theatre of Louisville and Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest.
Bingham Jr. was particularly critical of Gannett's operation of The Courier-Journal, particularly its practice of running advertisements on the front page (in a banner across the very bottom) and its closing of the newspaper's regional bureaus throughout the state. Bingham Jr. kept the bureau network in operation throughout his tenure, despite their high expense.
But let's be realistic. Ask his heirs if, even knowing what happened to the C- J under Gannett, they'd sell all over again?
DeleteThe Binghams got $300 million from that sale nearly 30 years ago. Invested conservatively, they're sitting pretty today, and I doubt they'd go back.
True Jim but beside the point.
DeleteBennie had his pets. He also blinked on some big stories. But he did have staying power, he knew how to play the Gannett game and survive. He killed the bureaus in 05 to delay layoffs inside the building for as long as he could. Louisville did some good work under Ivory, but the sad thing is most of the reporters who did it are long gone. The only bad mark I ever heard was the hiring of some truly incompetent low and mid-level newsroom managers during his tenure. He have have deferred those hiring decisions to underlings but it happened on his watch.
ReplyDeleteAny speculation on replacement?
ReplyDeleteInternally, ME Jean Porter and multimedia mngr John Mura are waiting in the wings. But too good of a job not to be the reward for some loyal corporate hack from a smaller elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteIf they decided to sell the paper today, it would be worth less than $10 million. I'd say they did ok.
ReplyDeleteBennie's been one of Gannett's best editors, a class act all the way.
ReplyDeleteAs for his successor, Des Moines Register Editor Rick Green may have his sights set on this one. His wife is from Louisville, and he has family and professional ties to nearby Ohio. It could be his next dream job.
I am always disappointed when I read comments blamming a manager or Publisher for cuts that happened between 2007 and now. Our industry, not just Gannett but the entire industry cuts thousands of jobs. Other industries suffered the same fate. This was not any single manager's doing, this was the economy tanking. Managers had to make very tough decisions and most hated making those decisions. Yes, they could have resigned to make a point, but does anyone really think that would have fixed the economy? We lost a lot of GREAT people over the past 5 years. Dont blame Gannett for that.
ReplyDelete^^^ Oh, you can totally blame Gannett for their massive bloodletting and the way they chose to cut their way to maximum profitability -- which isn't helping now, by the way. But you are right that it's unfair to lay the blame for a paper's demise on a single person.
Deleteso would it be better if Gannett took the route of companies like Circuit City and closed the doors? I should state that I was laid off in 2008 from a Gannett newspaper. Gannett is a corporation thus has to keep the shareholders happy. This means cuts and too often the cuts are people. There are some bad managers in Gannett, buthere are some great managers. I personally do not agree with every move they make, but they must keep the shareholders happy or they may end up like Knight Ridder.
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