Last Tuesday, I attended a meet-and-greet presentation held by the Lexington Herald-Leader, listening to Executive Editor Richard Green and Managing Editor Lauren Gorla. It was a decent meeting, and Miss Gorla said one thing which stuck with me. While newspapers used to depend primarily on advertising, she stated that currently what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal is primarily funded via subscriptions, and occasional donations from philanthropic organizations.

Available was a complete list of newspaper staffers, 32 to them, of which only 17 were listed as reporters, and only 13 of which were not listed as sports reporters.

I was thinking about that when I read a series of tweets from the News Guild of Greater Philadelphia.

We are disgusted and enraged to report that The Inquirer has laid off 5 of our members today.

This is the bulletin we sent to our members a short time ago:

Less than a week after The Inquirer announced a desire to have employees increase their days working in the office in the spirit of “collaboration, inclusion, and sense of urgency about our work” today the company informed five Guild members who have been extraordinary contributors to our mission that they are being laid off. So much for collaboration and inclusion.

Four of those employees are in the newsroom — three in photography and one in sports. The fifth is in the support center.

As of 8:35 PM EDT, the Inquirer has no story on its own layoffs.

Actually, the sports department is overly bloated, with columnists who apparently believe that they are better coaches for the Eagles, Phillies, and 76ers than their actual coaches.

One has been a generous and valuable contributor to a number of committees the Company at one point described as important to The Inquirer’s culture, including the parental caucus, which achieved impressive gains in parental leave in our last contract negotiations.

Shocking! An employee who won “impressive gains” in an employee benefit — translation: something costing the company more money! — was let go.

Rachel Molenda told us on Twitter that she is the person to whom the previously quoted paragraph referred, writing:

This is me. If I accomplished *nothing* else, I can say I was part of making it a more generous and equitable workplace for parents.

At least she’s getting 16 weeks of severance pay.

Another was an esteemed Lenfest fellow, touted as a “comprehensive management development program providing career coaching and executive leadership resources to Philadelphia-area media professionals of color ….” Remember The Inquirer’s pledge to become more diverse? Ha!

Like any union, the News Guild is going to say that all of the laid off workers were of tremendous value. But it brings the sadly humorous question to mind: if the management had gone to the union and said, we have to lay off five people, so tell us who your worst employees are, would the Guild have actually done so?

This follows the elimination of 32 Guild members in February in what technically was a buyout but would have been layoffs had those employees not accepted buyouts.

That’s nearly 40 Guild members put out of work this year. That’s some kind of people-focused, creative management.

Again, let me remind you that when this company’s ownership was taken over by the Lenfest Foundation, there was much boasting about how we were now different from other newspaper companies.

We were owned by a nonprofit, without the insidious slash-and-burn tendencies of hedge funds and absent the pressure of having to satisfy shareholders, we were told.

And yet, The Inquirer is resorting to the same inhumane, callous, lazy, uncreative playbook that such forms of ownership turn to again and again — cutting employees.

In numerous meetings with the company over the last several weeks, Guild executive director Bill Ross and I have pleaded with the company to reconsider a course that only serves to demoralize employees and send a message to the outside world that we’re a failing company.

My far too expensive Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I could use a senior citizen’s discount right about now.

And this is where the rubber hits the road: the newspaper is a failing company. I’m paying $285.48 a year for my digital subscription to the Inky, and still receive the occasional begging letter from the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism, looking for more. I do not know if the Inquirer is in the same boat as the Herald-Leader, almost wholly dependent upon subscriptions, but advertising revenue for newspapers has been sharply down all across the country.And why shouldn’t it be? Advertisers are paying for eyes on their ads, and if circulation is down, there will be fewer eyes on the paper to see the ads.

But The Inquirer has chosen to respond the same way it did to employee surveys that gave high scores to the company’s hybrid work policy that required employees to come to the office just one day a week with a big middle finger and an unmistakable message: “We don’t care what you think. We’re going to do what we want.”

It thinks this is how it is going to foster an environment that retains current employees and attracts new ones. It needs to follow its own branding campaign and “unsubscribe” to such foolish, ignorant notions.

Speaking of that expensive ad campaign, over the last few months, The Inquirer has touted its brand campaign that aims to get the region to subscribe to the organization by unsubscribing from a bunch of other stuff.

We have a few messages for The Inquirer about what it can unsubscribe from: Unsubscribe from short-sided, uninspired decisions. Subscribe to innovative solutions. Unsubscribe from crushing morale. Subscribe to appreciating and motivating the people who make your company run. Unsubscribe from expensive branding campaigns bragging about The Inquirer as an indispensable information source. Subscribe to investments in employees, who make those words true. Unsubscribe from being an industry follower of tired, lazy tactics. Subscribe to being an industry leader others look to for inspiration. Unsubscribe from cold-hearted cuts. Subscribe to hard-working employees.

As our bulletin noted, at the same time that The Inquirer is laying off valued colleagues and crushing morale, it is telling employees to come back to the office for collaboration and collegiality.

The announcement explaining the hybrid policy ended by stating “we are better together.”

So why are you showing our members the door?

The Inquirer must do better.

If the Inky is to “do better,” then doing better has to come from its people. I almost never see anything from Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar, and read only a few, sporadically, of the non-sports columnists. It’s up to the newsroom employees to produce content for which people will actually pay.

I’ve said it before, in response to the Los Angeles Times<?i> laying off 115 people: to get more subscribers, newspapers have to produce more quantity and quality for which people will pay. Yet, with declining revenue, newspapers cannot afford the larger and better newsrooms to produce that additional quantity and quality.

Newspapers are, in the end, 18^th century technology, updated with better presses and color photos, but still printed on paper with news that’s already old when it gets to readers. We have previously noted the decision of the Inquirer to sell its own $299.5 million printing plant for just $37 million, laying off 500 people, and the Herald-Leader’s similar action, outsourcing printing from downtown Lexington first to outside of Louisville, and now all the way in Knoxville. The deadline for stories to make it to the dead-trees edition of the Lexington newspaper is now early afternoon.

Yes, I believe that the Inky is far too biased toward the left, but I don’t want to see that newspaper, or any newspaper, just fail. Not only do I prefer to read the news rather than watch or listen to it on television, in part due to my seriously compromised hearing, but also because the news can be covered in much greater depth in a written article than in the time-compressed format that television news uses.

In addition, I don’t like to see anyone lose his job.

But, in the end, newspapers are just another business, and profit and loss are the controlling factors.