Rants & Raves - EDITOONERY CASUALTIES

 At the end of July last summer, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch 
laid off 23 staffers from the newsroom, advertising and 
production—including R.J. Matson, the paper’s staff editorial 
cartoonist. The Post-Dispatch is the largest in the Lee 
Enterprises chain, which owns 53 daily newspapers and 300 
weeklies, shoppers and specialty publications mostly, plus 
online sites, in 23 cities. Founded by A.W. Lee in the 1890s, 
Lee Enterprises acquired Pultizer, Inc., owner of the Post-
Dispatch, in 2005, in a deal now seen by many as the purchase 
that saddled the property-gobbling company with debt that forced 
it into bankruptcy last year. The reductions in staff continue a 
chain-wide budget-balancing purge.

While cutting costs by dropping staff, Lee gave CEO Mary Junck a 
stock bonus worth some $655,000 last winter. Junck’s previous 
employment includes being publisher and president of the 
Baltimore Sun (which laid off its legendary staff editoonist, 
KAL, a couple years ago) and the St. Paul Pioneer Press (which 
laid off the esteemed Kirk Anderson several years back). When 
Lee merged the Lincoln Journal with the Lincoln Star in 1995 to 
create what was then the chain’s second-largest daily, the 
paper’s staff political cartoonist, Paul Fell, was laid off. (He 
now self-syndicates his work, which, with additional editorial 
comment by the perspicacious Shawn Peirce, is available by free 
subscription at PaulFellCartoons.com.) It’s a track record that 
makes me fear for the continued livelihood of the Lee-owned 
Arizona Star’s superlative editoonist, David Fitzsimmons, whose 
cartoons we’ve featured in the Usual Place (Rants & Raves at 
RCHarvey.com) almost every time we discuss the current crop of 
visual comedic mayhem.

Junck’s bonus is a reward, perhaps, for her negotiating a deal 
last year with Lee’s lenders to refinance $759.5 million of its 
distressed loans and forestall collapse.

Lee employees are understandably outraged by the news of layoffs 
at the papers Junck is responsible for. In Montana last winter, 
missoulanews.bigskypress.com reported that one former staffer 
described Junck as “no strategist,” saying, “You could have 
thrown water balloons in the newsroom and hit ten better 
candidates for CEO.” ... Another said Junck and other managers 
“crossed the line from managing to looting a long time ago.”

United Media Guild, which represents St. Louis area workers, 
pulled no punches in its assessment of Junck’s work: “Junck and 
[CFO Carl Schmidt, who got a $250,000 bonus] are the fiscal 
geniuses ... [responsible] for eliminating promised health 
insurance to its retirees, forcing current employees to take 
unpaid furloughs, freezing pensions, and cutting pay” while 
laying off hundreds of employees across the country.

Paul Friswold at Dailyrft.com put it this way: “If I may be so 
bold as to ask, what the hell kind of business strategy do you 
call giving the boss a big bonus and then giving staff their 
pink slips? Is this trickle-down economics at work, or merely 
simple plundering?”

No one has heard any post-employment comment from Matson, who 
continues to cartoon for Roll Call; he gave no interviews that 
I’m aware of (although his September 20 cartoon depicting the 
“47 Percenter” might have an alternative message).

Matson has cartooned for Roll Call since 1986, the year after he 
graduated from Columbia University. At the same time, he was art 
director for the Washington Monthly (until 1988) and then 
cartooned for the New York Observer (1989-2010) and the Post-
Dispatch, which he joined in July 2005.

https://gocomics.typepad.com/rcharvey/2012/12/