OT: Media Layoffs: George Johnson & Randy Sportak have been laid off

Lunatik

Normal is an illusion.
Oct 12, 2012
56,176
8,336
Padded Room
Well it's a sad day for sports fans in Calgary. Veteran writers George Johnson and Randy Sportak have been laid off.

Thanks for everything George and Randy.

Confirmed by each of their twitter accounts.

Hopefully no more names will come.
 

Calculon

unholy acting talent
Jan 20, 2006
16,578
4,035
Error 503
Liked most of Johnson's work with the Herald. And Sportak was pretty frank when it came to assessing the Flames.

Tough business.
 

Anglesmith

Setting up the play?
Sep 17, 2012
46,441
14,715
Victoria
Sportak seemed like a really nice guy on Twitter. A little bit of a dork, maybe, but very genuine. Not that familiar with Johnson.
 

Tkachuk Norris

Registered User
Jun 22, 2012
15,600
6,639
George is a cynic. But he's hands down the best writer that covered the Flames. My guess is he was getting paid a ton more then the young guys and got chopped as a result.
 

I Hate Blake Coleman

F*** the oilers
Jul 22, 2008
23,414
7,160
Saskatchewan
Does anyone have any insight as to why this happened? Indeed very sad to hear this.
Over the last couple of weeks you’ve probably seen some rather unsettling headlines in print, posted online and shared through social media. Many of these stories have been generated by competitors facing similar revenue challenges and undertaking significant cost cutting initiatives themselves.

While I’m certainly not going to dissect each article and post line-by-line, I thought it might be helpful to share some important points with you.

· We have been quite transparent with all of you, and publicly, that we have undertaken a massive reengineering of our cost structure. We are in the process of identifying $50 million in cost savings over the next two years.

· Since the inception of Postmedia, we have made debt repayments of $267 million. We have met every debt repayment obligation.

· Industry-wide revenue declines have increased pressures on both reducing our cost structure and exploring every possible revenue stream.

· We have recently launched a number of initiatives aimed at new revenue generation. As with anything new, it will take some time to show results that we can report on but kudos go out to the revenue team that has recently launched Content Works, Digital Marketing Services and have accelerated our success in the programmatic area.

· We also continue to roll out our reimagined products most recently in Saskatoon and Regina and update our apps and online offerings on an ongoing basis as we have recently with our tablet and smartphone platforms. And, over the last few months we have seen consistent digital audience growth and our rankings and audiences are at record highs.

· We have also been criticized recently with respect to election endorsements – even from those who made strong and sometimes curious endorsements themselves. As Canada’s largest publisher we are going to take knocks like this as we have in the past and in every election cycle. You may find it interesting, as I did, to discover that traffic to our newspaper websites on election day was up 68% versus the May 2011 election day traffic. We generate strong opinions both for and against issues and stands on all of our platforms. It’s public discourse and it’s what journalism is all about.

· On that same note we were criticized for running certain election ads. All ads were paid for and directed by the parties that ran them. Over the course of the election, all four major parties: Conservatives, Liberals, NDP and Green ran ads across various Postmedia properties. Homepage takeovers on websites, full page ads, and yes, even newspaper wraps. While it certainly caused a lot of buzz, these ads conformed to election guidelines and our advertising guidelines too.

There is no doubt that these are challenging times for our industry and for our company too. The executive team at Postmedia has always been open to employee feedback and we are as transparent as a public company can be with respect to keeping you informed of our important initiatives.

The most important thing is that you and your teams stay aligned to our overall objectives which include engaging our audiences across all platforms, generating revenue from traditional and emerging areas and transforming our cost structure to align with a new revenue model.

This is hard work. To our people across the organization who continue to work hard and adapt in a constantly changing environment you have the sincere thanks and support of your leaders, the executive team and our board of directors.

Sent from Godfrey late in 2015 to Postmedia employees. Compare those words to the 90 jobs lost today. Ridiculous.
 

Johnny Hoxville

The Return of a Legend
Jul 15, 2006
37,549
9,343
Calgary
Interesting read, thanks for sharing!

Did anyone see that the Calgary Herald building was spray painted this morning? I can't remember what it said exactly, looked like someone's name but the "tag" itself was huge.
 

Lunatik

Normal is an illusion.
Oct 12, 2012
56,176
8,336
Padded Room
I read somewhere that Francis is a freelance writer, so he couldn't be fired as he would technically not work for them.
 

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