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If there is any silver lining in the cloud hanging over Clinton Square after the announced changes that will be rocking The Post-Standard come New Year’s, it may be in the reputation of the man coming to town to run the new combined website and print news operation known as the Syracuse Media Group.
The big news announced last week was that The Post-Standard will only come out on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays beginning in 2013. Closer scrutiny of the shuffling going on at the daily reveals that longtime publisher Stephen Rogers has been kicked upstairs to a newly created post of chairman, and the reins of the struggling operation are being handed over to 48-year-old Tim Kennedy, who just moved here from Allentown, Pa. Kennedy has just the resume that newspaper people fear most: a corporate manager with no newsroom experience.
He worked for Tribune Company, first as a manager dealing with taxes and finance, later as a vice president who put together $10 billion worth of media sales, including the 2000 purchase by Tribune of the Times-Mirror Company, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. A gifted crisis manager, apparently, he was sent in to salvage the remains of the Spanish language daily Hoy in 2004 after three Tribune executives were indicted for inflating its circulation figures and those at the Long Island daily, Newsday.
In February 2006 Kennedy became publisher of the Allentown Morning Call, a Tribune-owned daily newspaper in a media market comparable in size to Syracuse. Kennedy’s four years there coincided with print journalism’s worst years, and the Morning Call went through a serious contraction involving two rounds of buyouts and layoffs, and the bankruptcy of the Tribune Company itself.
Nonetheless, when Kennedy was pushed out as publisher in 2010, himself the victim of cost-cutting corporate consolidation, the newspaper’s staff mourned his departure. (No one is commenting on the full reason he was moved out, but the Tribune Company replaced him with a publisher who splits his time between the Allentown paper and the Baltimore Sun, another Tribune property).
Bill White has worked at the Morning Call since 1974, as a reporter, editor and currently a full-time columnist, one of two still employed by the paper. He felt so strongly about Kennedy’s sudden exit that he dedicated a blog post to his departed boss, and hinted that he thought the man had gotten a raw deal. Some of his friends on staff were so stunned when they heard the news, on April 2, 2010, that Kennedy was gone, that they thought it might be an April Fools’ joke.
“When he was here it was a tough time,” White said in a telephone interview from his Allentown office. “We closed bureaus. I went from one closed bureau to another after another. First they offered us buyouts, and cut staff that way.”
On two occasions the staff went home on a Friday with instructions to wait for a call from their supervisors to let them know if they had a job on Monday. “We called it the Grim Reaper weekends,” says White, adding that his colleagues gathered late into the night attempting to fend off the reaper with hefty doses of alcohol.
“One of the consolations in all that,” says the 60-year-old White, “was the way he {Kennedy} handled himself. He kept us in the loop. He answered our questions. He spoke openly with us, and he had some compassion for what was happening. He is not just some cutthroat corporate guy.” Another consolation is that the Morning Call survives today as a daily and Sunday paper as well as a growing digital presence.
Kennedy arrived in Allentown, in White’s view, as “one of those Chicago guys they sent over to take over our paper.” In time, he earned the respect of his staff and the community. “The first time I met him,” recalled White, “was at a viewing for one of our old editors who had passed away. It wasn’t anyone he knew or had worked with, but I thought it was pretty cool that he was there. He was always out there, he represented us well in the community, and he cared about good journalism. He was doing his best to protect us from the cutbacks.”
Still, White has no illusions that Kennedy has a magic bullet for what ails the newspaper business. “He’s going up there to preside over something I’m not happy about.”
But White believes that Kennedy, whom he described as a friendly guy with a common touch, helped “protect the paper from the sometimes baffling vagaries of distant corporate ownership, to maintain some kind of local control.” If Kennedy wasn’t there through those tough times, White contends, things could have been a whole lot worse. “For all the bad times we’ve seen at the Morning Call under Tim Kennedy,” he wrote in his blog on April 2, 2010, “he fulfilled {his role} with distinction.”
If he ever needs a job reference, White suggested that Kennedy come by the Morning Call office at Sixth and Linden streets in Allentown. “We’ll be lined up.” Then again, if he manages to set things right at the Post, he may not need any references at all.
