Mighty Metro not so mighty

The Daytona Beach News-Journal fired 99 employees and closed its New Smyrna Beach, Palm Coast and DeLand bureaus today. The Daily Journal, the zoned local section has also been eliminated. And get this: The ownership is going to raise the rates for home delivery and the Sunday paper is going up by 25 cents to $1.50 starting this Sunday. You are going to get even less news now and pay more for it. But there's a way you can tell the News-Journal owners this new arrangement is unacceptable: Don't buy their newspaper. Cancel your subscription. You can get their news for free at www.news-journalonline.com.
When the News-Journal started its cost-cutting in March, its biggest target was Southeast Volusia. They started by cutting the Daily Journal back from five days a week -- Wednesday through Sunday -- to just three days a week -- Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. And most of the new content had nothing to do with Southeast Volusia.

They also fired their longstanding correspondents -- some of whom had contributed stories and columns for decades. Thursday's Daily Journal was particularly horrible with half a page devoted to syndicated word puzzle games.

The Canal Street bureau is now closed. So much for a commitment to Southeast Volusia.

It's not the economy that's to blame for the Mighty Metro's failure as the publisher Georgia Kaney would have you believe. The reality is that corporate greed has led to the crippling of the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

"As you know, the company is being prepared for sale," Kaney wrote to the employees today. "These preparations are occurring during a major downturn for the US newspaper business, a downturn we are feeling in our market."

Kaney continued, "As part of the sales process, Cox Enterprises and News-Journal Corporation hired a sales broker and a consultant to help us prepare the company for sale. It is their recommendation that some major changes need to be made now to make the company more attractive to a potential buyer, as well as strengthen the financial condition of the company in this economic downturn."

The economy has nothing to do with the News-Journal's plight. The ownership is to blame for squandering company assets that include $13 million in naming rights for the News-Journal Center" and millions more spent on the arts by the Davidson family under the late patriarch Tippen Davidson, which led to litigation by the News-Journal's minority partner, Cox Enterprises.

And of course, the Davidson family was advised by Georgia Kaney and her husband, Jon Kaney Jr., the newspaper's attorney, who actually came up with the idea of the naming rights.

And while Georgia Kaney had assured her employees everything was being done to protect the jobs of the 800-plus employees, secretly deals were made for buyouts for the company's chosen top 29 managers who would be aid a collective $13 million by whoever buys the paper, something Cox is fighting in court.

Publisher Kaney dismisses her 99 fired employees under the heading "Headcount Reduction" in her memo to the employees.

Reporters were summoned to the Daytona Beach office of Editor Don Lindley and told of their fate. One was a first-rate reporter who covered New Smyrna Beach. Another covered the Orlando Magic for more than a decade.

The reporters and editors working out of the bureaus will now be working out of Daytona Beach, meaning even less time locally to report the news.

And while the number of employees being utilized to report and edit the news has been drastically cut back, the local coverage will cost readers more. Buried in Sunday's paper is a story in the Money section that describes home delivery and Sunday costs going up.

As publisher Kaney stated herself, "these changes are to make the newspaper more attractive to a buyer."

What doesn't say is that you, the loyal subscriber, will pay more to enhance her profits and you will get less in return.