Behind the Green Door

Yesterday the New York Times provided a revealing peak at the state of the Star Tribune's corporate culture.

The story so far ... in a cost cutting move, management decided to cease giving the employees free copies of the newspaper, instead suggesting they read the electronic edition instead. Apparently, they felt the online edition was every bit as good as the dead tree version.

The employees rebelled over losing what they considered to be an entitlement of employment by engaging in the mass pilfering of copies for sale at the Star Tribune offices. According to an internal memo, leaked to Jim Romenesko's site, from the Senior VP of Circulation:

During the first week that the additional on-site racks were in service, 43 percent of the Star Tribunes removed from those racks were not paid for. For the second week the rate was 41 percent.

This is called "pilferage" in our business; but put more plainly, it is theft, pure and simple.

Taking more than one newspaper from a rack when you have only inserted enough money for one paper is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Employees who steal newspapers will put their jobs at risk. There is zero tolerance when it comes to stealing from our company, even if it is a 25-cent newspaper. And I encourage our hundreds of honest employees who observe co-workers stealing newspapers to challenge them on the spot to refrain from doing so.

Anti-authoritarian rabble rousers who feel they are entitled to certain elite privileges and will do whatever they have to in order to get their own way? Who knew the Star Tribune had employees like that? Unfortunately, the pool of suspects meeting that description may be too deep to allow for profiling techniques alone to make an effective positive identification of the perpetrators.

So who is stealing the newspapers at the Star Tribune? Twin Cities news consumers want to know. But I don't like our chances of finding out any time soon. Monopolies are funny that way about reporting on themselves. Yes, it's times like these that I harken back to the good old days when one company didn't own all local newspaper coverage in this town. Oh well, we can always write requests to the Reader's Representative (cue laugh track).

One other revelation from the NYT story bears mentioning:

"The whole free newspaper-Romenesko leak issue is our version of the gay marriage debate," said Jon Tevlin, a staff writer. "We're deeply in debt, circulation is falling and profits are down 14 percent this quarter. So let's obsess about something that isn't really very significant."

Deep debt, circulation dropping, and profits declining at the Star Tribune? That is news to me, but it's not the revelation I speak of. It's that a reporter at the Star Tribune thinks that potentially changing the definition of marriage contrary to thousands of years legal precedent, without even allowing the people to vote on it, "isn't really very significant." For future context puropses, duly noted.