It’s no secret that for years Orange County’s top journalists have steered their careers down the proverbial one-way street from the Orange County Register to the doorstep of the Times Orange County.
But in recent years, new challenges have exacerbated the Register’s brain drain: a tight labor pool and dot-com fever. And Register parent Freedom Communications, Irvine, which publishes 27 daily newspapers and 20 magazines and operates eight broadcast television stations and numerous Internet sites, is finding that the phenomenon is not confined to Orange County.
So Freedom is moving to enhance employee retention, authorizing a $100,000 morale survey to be headed by Register Publisher N. Christian Anderson, instituting recruitment efforts, reviewing the company’s salary structure and looking at an employee stock-ownership plan.
“The fundamental reason is the old employer-employee contract has collapsed,” Freedom CEO Sam Wolgemuth said in a company newsletter. “It used to be that the employer had the jobs, which were scarce, and therefore the power. The employer also held the means of production (plant and equipment) which made worker productivity possible. Now, thanks to education and technology, most jobs require knowledge workers. Talented knowledge workers are scarce and since they hold the means of production in the form of knowledge, they hold the power.”
A few months ago, the Register began getting more aggressive about recruiting employees.
“Historically, companies figure on getting applications from people, but that has to change in this kind of a job market,” Anderson said. “So we now have a recruiting function at the Register.”
Also, the Register is studying its competitiveness in terms of salary for virtually every position in the company, Anderson said.
“We want to make sure we are competitive for comparable jobs in comparable markets,” he said.
It’s certainly not news that the Register, which ranks No. 23 in circulation in the nation among newspapers to the Times’ No. 3, has been fertile recruiting ground for the Times Orange County and other publications, but recently, the departures have increased, say insiders at both papers.
But “it’s not something endemic to the Register,” Anderson said. “Historically, reporters are always trying to better themselves, trying to get a better beat or promotion or moving to a bigger paper. … People are more committed to the business than to the company.”
“But for every one that leaves we have got 20 people who aren’t going anywhere who love working at the Register,” Wolgemuth said.
Perhaps the biggest black eye was the departure of the three key members of the paper’s Pulitzer-winning investigative team. The Register won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for investigative reporting for its 1995 coverage of the UCI fertility clinic scandal.
But team reporter Kim Christensen left for the Portland Oregonian in March, 1999, followed by Susan Kelleher, who left in November to join the investigative team at the Seattle Times, and Michelle Nicolosi, who took a job this year as product manager for HomePage.com in Los Angeles.
More than a dozen Register staffers have moved to the Times in the past two years alone. Employee morale has always been a concern for Freedom, Wolgemuth said. “Even if the job market wasn’t as tight we would do this,” he said.
Wolgemuth, who previously headed the company’s magazine division, also is moving to offer stock ownership for Freedom employees as a means of attracting and retaining staffers.
In other news, Freedom gobbled up one of its competitors last week with the purchase of Irvine World Publishers for an undisclosed sum. The 30-year-old newspaper group, which employs about 50, publishes the Irvine World News, Tustin Weekly and Irvine Spectrum News. The newspapers competed with two of the Register’s 25 news weeklies, the Irvine Citizen and Tustin News.
“We (bought the newspapers because we) have admired their success in the marketplace in Irvine and as part of our building community newspapers,” said Anderson, adding that the Register will close the Irvine Citizen and Tustin Weekly. The Register will retain about 90% of the company’s staff. n
