Time to heal — and move on
4 comments August 22nd, 2008
There’s not a thing I can write about this week’s layoffs at the Rockford Register Star that won’t get me smacked in the face by someone. For every decision I made, for every comment I write, someone — often anonymous — will have a “better” one and it frequently starts with “You’re the one who ought to have been fired….” Yeah, whatever; I’m not asking for sympathy. As my dad said: That’s why they call it work. If it were easy and everyone could do it, they’d be doing it.
What really annoys me, though, are the people who seem to rejoice in the pain of others. I am astounded by the venom that follows such announcements, and I’ve seen it happen enough times with other companies that when we posted our layoff story, I turned off “comments.” That didn’t sit well with some folks. As I told one poster who wanted to comment on the story, we’re hurting enough right now that I decided we didn’t need to listen to what were sure to be rants that we deserved to die. Frankly, I may do the same thing for other companies, if, heaven forbid, they face troubled times. There simply is something deeply wrong with people who get a charge out of “kicking you when you’re down.”
Anyone who has ever been without a job through no fault of their own (and I have, by the way) knows the turmoil, the feeling of being lost in a maze. That’s true for the survivors, too. I saw how tough it was for the staff in the News Tower — in every department — to get back to work minutes after the layoffs spared them. As I said to the newsroom staff Monday afternoon: Wewill have to grieve while we work. There will be a Web site today and a newspaper tomorrow. That’s our job.
As the weekend comes around, where do we start on Monday? Actually, the answer is simple: We’ll be the Rock River Valley’s primary source for news, information and advertising in print and online. That doesn’t change.
Our success in connecting with 80 percent of the adults in the market doesn’t rest solely on how many people we have, but on the quality of what each of us does. Quantity does matter; I’d be stupid to think otherwise. But quality will trump quantity. When we move forward, it will be the quality of what we do that matters: the quality of our local news content, the quality of the customers we connect to advertisers, the quality of our customer service.
When the dust settles, we will be fewer. We will not be less.
