Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with high of 63. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 7:09 PM for 12h 36m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Erik Gunn reports How government aid helped Ron Johnson (‘A senator who votes against safety net programs benefited from government-sponsored financing for his business’):
In his two terms in office, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has run hard against government spending. Since his first Senate campaign in 2010, the Oshkosh Republican has described himself as an outsider and business creator who has succeeded without government help.
He has dismissed big-ticket bills as wasteful, telling a TV host in June that measures backed by Congressional Democrats were intended to “make more Americans dependent on government.”
Yet in the 1980s, the company that Johnson was running at the time [Pacur] expanded by raising money under a government-sponsored financing program instead of conventional corporate bonds — a program made possible by the federal government as well as the city of Oshkosh that saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest payments.
The company also benefited from a direct federal grant from the city of Oshkosh to build a rail spur to serve the new factory it built in the city.
….
Pacur was originally founded as Wisconsin Industrial Shipping Supply in 1977. In 1979, Oshkosh authorized a $1 million IRB for the company to finance its new buildings in the city. After the company was renamed Pacur, Oshkosh authorized two more IRBs to finance additional expansions: $1.5 million in 1983, and $2.5 million in 1985.
When Pacur’s use of IRBs in its early expansion was first reported in 2010, Johnson’s campaign issued a statement that defended their use: “No taxpayer money was ever involved in those bonds, nor were taxpayers ever put at risk,” said the statement, which also noted that the loans were repaid in full with interest.
But that defense sidesteps the central benefit that the company received thanks to the government program.
“Interest rates were really high in the 1980s,” [Good Jobs First nonprofit executive director Greg] LeRoy says. According to federal data, commercial corporate bonds in 1979 paid about 9.6%-10.7%. In 1983, the year of Pacur’s second IRB, those rates were 12%-13.5%. By the year of the third IRB, 1985, they had fallen only slightly, to 11.4%-12.7%.
For Pacur, however, opting for IRBs each time saved the company substantially. “IRBs would be let at about 25% less,” LeRoy says. “That’s a huge difference in your cost of money.”
Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with high of 61. Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 7:10 PM for 12h 39m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 2001, al-Qaeda launches the September 11 attacks, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks killing 2,996 people using four aircraft hijacked by 19 of its members. Two aircraft crash into the World Trade Center in New York City, a third crashes into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and a fourth into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The couple first purchased a home in exclusive Greenwich, a bedroom community for celebrities and millionaires who commute to Manhattan” the publication [Wisconsin Right Now] reported. An LLC traced to Michels “purchased that four-bedroom, five-bath home in December 2017 for $4.6 million…. The LLC then traded up, purchasing the $17 million house in Riverside, Connecticut, a neighborhood of Greenwich, in 2020. They sold the first Greenwich home in April 2021 for $6.5 million.”
The couple also owns a New York penthouse along E. 68th St that they purchased in 2015 for $8.7 million. “Barbara Michels listed the $17 million home as her ‘residential street address’ when she made a campaign donation in December 2021, and she listed the couple’s Manhattan penthouse as her address when she made a campaign donation in 2020,” the story reports.
The couple’s two youngest children “attended Connecticut and New York City high schools for their entire high school years. The oldest child graduated from Xavier High School in New York City in 2016 (he started attending that school in 2013); the daughter graduated from Marymount School of New York in 2019; and the youngest son graduated from Brunswick High School in Greenwich in 2021. A call to each school confirmed none of them are boarding schools… Dartmouth University lists the hometown for Michels’ youngest son, who graduated from high school in 2021, as Riverside, Connecticut.”
In short the Michels children have been attending schools on the East Coast since 2013.
Michels insists that he meets the Wisconsin’s technical residency requirements, and he may do so. Having one of his houses somewhere in this state, however, does not demonstrate a primary commitment to Wisconsin. In 2020 and 2021, Michels and his spouse bought or used Manhattan properties as their residences.
Michels is running to be governor of Wisconsin, not mayor of New York, or King of Connecticut the Nutmeg State.
However far I might sometimes travel, I am always happily returned to this small city. Those faraway places that I visit are not my home; Whitewater is my home.
There are many communities that need help and support. That help and support does not take one form (as the narrow of mind and small of heart believe), but it does require a primary commitment.
People cannot be in two places at once physically, and are improbably in two places at once emotionally. Somewhere will be primary in heart and mind. All the rest is unpersuasive talk, excuses, and rationalizations.
Overweening ambition is not a primary commitment; it’s a vice masquerading as a virtue.
Saturday in Whitewater will see scatted afternoon showers with high of 79. Sunrise is 6:30 AM and sunset 7:12 PM for 12h 42m 30s of daytime. The moon is full with all of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1813, the United States defeats a British Fleet at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812.
Within the request for proposals released by the city and announced Friday, [Whitewater Director of Public Works Brad] Marquardt requested proposals to:
• assess the tower’s current structural viability to determine if it can be repaired or must be demolished.
• provide potential solutions for repairing the tower or for demolishing the tower, if necessary.
• provide cost estimates for all potential solutions.
• identify public safety measures to implement while awaiting restoration or demolition and removal, if necessary.
The city is anticipating the development of a full report by Dec. 2., according to its Friday release.
The tower has cultural significance to many in the community; it’s likely that some residents will have strong feelings about its fate.
There is good reason, however, to be patient and wait for the report. Whitewater has a full autumn of public policy considerations (a fire & emergency services referendum, a school district referendum, and selection of a new city manager among them). We are a small community with a few big issues before us.
Whitewater is better off, as she now is, with a tower report return date that falls after those other questions are settled.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with high of 82. Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 7:14 PM for 12h 45m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Ahead of the 2022 midterms, FRONTLINE’s two-hour season premiere investigates political leaders and choices they made at key points that have undermined and threatened American democracy. This journalism is made possible by viewers like you. Support your local PBS station here: http://www.pbs.org/donate.
In “Lies, Politics and Democracy,” FRONTLINE examines how officials fed the public lies about the 2020 presidential election and embraced rhetoric that led to political violence. An epic examination of former President Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican Party, the documentary presents startling details from GOP insiders on how the indulgence of Trump’s authoritarian impulses and embrace of his rhetoric enabled his power over the American political system, leading the nation to a precarious moment in which most Republican voters now believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
Told in part through the perspectives of key Republican players and party leaders, the two-hour special provides first-person accounts from those who sounded the alarm about Trump, and those whose warnings were minimized or silenced all along the way.
Tuesday, September 13th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of CODA@ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Comedy/Drama/Music
Rated PG-13; 1 hour, 51 minutes (2021)
As a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults), Ruby is the only hearing person in her deaf family. When the family’s fishing business is threatened, Ruby finds herself torn between pursuing her passion at music college and her fear of abandoning her parents. Winner of 3 Oscars, including Best Picture, Supporting Actor and Screenplay.
Cheetahs can be very vocal cats, with a wide “vocabulary” of noises: from purring and hissing typical of a house cat, to trills, chirps, and yips which are almost bird-like.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with high of 82. Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 7:16 PM for 12h 48m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1966, the landmark American science fiction television series Star Trek premieres with its first-aired episode, “The Man Trap.“
Our area is now a news desert. The APG newspapers have withered and retreated behind a paywall, the Register has slipped into an irreversible coma, and the Banner does not have a professional journalist. There is nothing journalistically worthy in the area except Fort Atkinson Online.
(Needless to say, FREE WHITEWATER is the work of a libertarian blogger, not a journalist. This steadfast blog is, however, the work of someone raised in a newspaper-loving family, long before the internet, where there were newspapers, magazines, journals, and books all about the house. A literate person can and should be able to tell the difference between good journalism, good commentary, and everything else.)
Fort Atkinson Online is good journalism.
And so, and so, what to make of the headline and story on Whitewater Police Chief Dan Meyer’s discussion before the council on challenges near Fox Meadows?
I’ve watched his remarks and the Whitewater Common Council’s discussion three times, and Meyer speaks in an even, neutral, and professional tone with carefully chosen words. There is nothing in that presentation from which one could infer of him, or attribute to him, a contempt for immigrants. His presentation was business standard, so to speak (as it should be).
As much as we live in a community where some immigrants struggle to adjust, we live in a community where some native-born residents bitterly decry newcomers.
Meyer’s remarks were always going to be those of a man speaking as though he walked through a mine field. That’s the time in which we live.
On policing, there’s a view that libertarians naturally dislike the police. It’s false. (I don’t, for example, believe in ‘defunding’ the police. Local government should not budget by particular departments but holistically. In any event, Whitewater was never a community where defunding was gong to happen, and anyone who thought so is deluded.)
Former chiefs Coan and Otterbacher deserved dogged criticism for their mistakes, and of Raap this website mostly offered links to news accounts published elsewhere.
About Raap, I will say this: more than once I have remarked that community policing is a matter of what happens at a distance of fifteen feet (where we live), not fifteen miles (where he lived). As it turned out, ironically, Raap’s employment challenges were both at a distance of fifteen feet where he lived and fifteen feet where we live. There was no way to see that outcome in advance. For it all, I’m genuinely disappointed about how his career ended in Whitewater: the city handled the matter secretively and unprofessionally. One truly hopes the best for Raap and his family.
About the 9.6.22 council session: a headline that reads Police Chief Expresses Concerns with ‘Ongoing Influx of New Community Members’is journalistically accurate and fair, but — most likely — is not the headline that Whitewater’s responsible government, in the city or school district, would have wanted. City officials, however, do not and must not get to pick.
(Funny story, about blogging in Whitewater: years ago, a woman who once lived in Whitewater mentioned to me that it might be a good idea if I showed my posts to the city manager at the time, before publishing them. Of course, my answer was no: if government should not by law exercise a prior restraint or editorial control over publishing, then publishers shouldn’t voluntarily accept one. I’m happily still here, publishing freely; the woman moved away, and the city manager’s long gone, too.)
It’s not a libertarian’s calling to advise government, and one wouldn’t expect the advice to be taken in any event. Still, a sincere offering, as a matter of advocacy: in cases where officials speak on sensitive topics, the beginning and end of those remarks should include a plain, clear statement of principle that inoculates the official against particular remarks that others may latch upon. It should be expressed in a simple, conversational, congenial way (nothing stifled or stuffy). Then, against particular, selected quotations, the speaker or interviewee can plainly state: but most important of all is how I began and ended. If the speaker or interviewee does not begin with a conversational statement of inoculating principle, then that responsive opportunity is lost when a story hits the web.
In the discussion from Tuesday, a nativist resident calling in latched onto remarks about particular domestic violence to make general, exaggerated cultural claims. These nativists love those opportunities, to exaggerate the particular into the generally derogatory. They wind up soiling others with their own muck.
As for any interviews, they should also be recorded. The official being interviewed should politely ask to record the full call, or make sure a meeting is recorded, and then begin and end with a general (and conversationally-expressed) statement. A professional reporter will often also record an interview, and will respect a request like this. Calm, relaxed, friendly, only a few sentences in the beginning and end are needed: ‘Thanks for this opportunity. I’d just like to say that we believe…’)
Whitewater is better off — much — for having a professional journalist (a reporter-editor) who covers our community. Officials who shy from the press do a disservice to the community. For officials, it’s stand and deliver or walk away. The Fort Atkinson Online tagline states that the publication is “[y]our local news source serving Fort Atkinson, Whitewater and surrounding areas.” Yes, it is.
We are a factionalized city, however, and we’ve only recently acquired good journalism from this nearby website (years having passed since the Gazette was a solid publication).
Our current condition requires craft, for all of us, to make ourselves plain.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with high of 80. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:18 PM for 12h 51m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
During the Revolutionary War on this day in 1778, France successfully invades Dominica in the British West Indies before British Caribbean authorities are even aware of France’s involvement in the war.
Whitewater’s city manager left his position in mid-August. The City of Whitewater has contracted with GovHR USA to find a new city manager, and in the meantime hired an interim city manager through GovTemps USA (a subsidiary of GovHR USA). The city’s human resources director, Judy Atkinson, described the hiring process in brief remarks to the Whitewater Common Council (embedded above) with a written description of the process in the evening’s council packet (embedded below).
What to say as this process begins?
There is no portion of the process, that one can easily see from the video remarks or the written document, that provides for a community forum for the final candidates. The law does not require a forum of this kind; open-government principles call for one.
Perhaps I’m missing that portion of the packet; my apologies if that’s the case. One needs to be clear: if the requirements include hiring a “City Manager [who] is Whitewater’s chief executive officer in charge of the city’s day-to-day operations and budgets of approximately $24 million” then this city government owes its residents a community forum with final candidates before a hiring decision.
I’m truly puzzled — isn’t this obvious? Whitewater requires a limited and responsible government, and to be responsible to the city’s residents, this government must be forthcoming.
With so many needs, and so many problems, this is an unexpected and unwelcome misstep. It’s hard to understand how the hiring firm and the city’s human resources manager might have overlooked the crucial open-government requirement of a dedicated and plainlyspecified community forum.
If a community forum with the final candidates doesn’t happen, then it’s not possible to support this process or its result.
Of all the candidates in the initial round, another point is worth making. The City of Whitewater has hired a firm, and pledged to a process, that will produce several qualified candidates for the consideration of the Whitewater Common Council. That process must assure that each of these candidates is capable, and that each receives fair and equal consideration.
While the interim city manager has expressed an interest in a permanent position (in both a news feature story and during the 9.6.22 council session), he should not (and must not) receive preferential consideration. This city government has not promised, and is not paying a consultant, for a temp-to-hire process.
While it may be true, as this interim manager told a reporter, that most city managers remain in a position for less than five years, that’s not what Whitewater needs or deserves.
Whitewater is not a day job, a line on a résumé, or a stop along the way.
Deeply and truly: Whitewater is the work — and the adventure — of a lifetime.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with high of 76. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:19 PM for 12h 53m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 79.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1803, British scientist John Dalton begins using symbols to represent the atoms of different elements.
So if boosterism was (and is) grandiose, then how so? The answer is that boosterism was grandiose for publicly-subsidized capital projects, but small in its grasp of society.
In Whitewater, boosterism collected adherents of different politics, under a single banner, although most were traditional conservatives.
Capital. Of capital, they invariably felt that if a community would only pay or subsidize a big capital project, then presto!: a shiny new world would emerge. If there is any group that held to the view that if you build it, they will come, it was the boosters. A pool, a bridge, a roundabout, a university office building masquerading as an ‘innovation’ center, a road project on the east side, etc. It was all about capital for them.
They were project men, business men, but not, so to speak, market men and women.
They pushed particular projects and particular businesses, but had no theory whatever of markets. It’s not the project or the particular business that brings prosperity, it’s free and voluntary private transactions among people that bring prosperity.
These free and voluntary transactions by their nature are not, and cannot be, within the control of a small-town group.
Society. What the boosters didn’t have, and have never had, is a comprehensive view of society. They consistently conflated their small circles with all the city. From their point of view, they understood society very well, person by person, name by name. That, however, was a narrow view. They were ludicrously myopic, and thought of their small social circle as all. In a town of thousands, they could see no farther than dozens.
They weren’t less naturally intelligent than others, but they were instead dim by acquired perspective. (Almost all people are sharp; it’s a poor outlook and lack of knowledge that dooms some to error.)
From their perspective, it would be impossible for someone outside their circle to understand the community better than they did. On the contrary, it was only by being outside their circle that an accurate understanding was possible. They couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Along the lines of their confusion, see Perspectives Narrow or Wide and The End of DYKWIA in Whitewater.
There are various competing ideologies to libertarianism, some serious, some silly, some benign, some malignant. Boosterism is notably pathetic in its thirst for subsidies, willful ignorance of social ills, and hunger for self-promoting group-think.
Old Whitewater ran on boosterism, although many from that time have now retired or passed on. (There’s still some of it around — the school district’s justification for a $1.6 million field project reeked of the if-you-build-it-they-will-come perspective.)
That perspective is, however, afflicted twice over: it doesn’t work, and its adherents will struggle to be remembered for it. The first contention is economic (it indubitably hasn’t improved individual or household incomes) but the second is (however harsh it must seem) equally significant.
The obliging local newspapers that printed boosters’ claims during the century’s first decade are mostly finished now, having withered and then retreated behind paywalls. A few in Whitewater spent so much time getting a favorable headline from a sycophantic reporter, but the collapse of local newspapers has left their efforts mostly inaccessible. Facebook, by its nature more immediate and participatory, doesn’t allow for the prominent, one-sided accounts that the boosters wanted and expected from an obliging reporter.
Families will, of course, remember their own histories (as they should). As a movement, however, boosterism today has neither the energy nor a prominent medium by which to tout its supposed successes.
Sad, truly, but telling: this ideology is more alive (by way of criticism) on this website than elsewhere in the city (by way of support).
Criticism, however, didn’t do the boosters in.
Actual conditions, beginning in the Great Recession, proved their outlook wrong. (These years later, those of this ilk who remain probably don’t understand as much. It’s unlikely they ever will.)
What has come along after them, however, is more trouble for the city than even boosterism has been: an assertive, agitated conservative populism wants what it wants without limits.
In their tenuous arguments and treacly claims, the boosters only true accomplishment has been to pave the way for something worse.
Labor Day in Whitewater will be party sunny with high of 74. Sunrise is 6:24 AM and sunset 7:21 PM for 12h 56m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 69.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Foxconn project in Wisconsin wasted money, destroyed people’s homes, and saddled nearby communities with decades of municipal debt. It would not have happened had people not been susceptible of the grandiose (lit., characterized by excessive self-importance or affected grandeur; pompous.) Yet they were.
RACINE — Unrealistic, grandiose plans with a touch of greed is how panelists at a Foxconn town hall meeting described the last five years since the mega factory was announced.
Mount Pleasant, a bedroom community of Racine, was catapulted to international prominence in 2017 when the Taiwanese-based manufacturing company announced its plan to invest $10 billion and create 13,000 high-paying high-tech jobs there.
Foxconn has massively scaled back those plans and it is unknown what the company is doing in Mount Pleasant in the four buildings it has constructed.
Lawrence Tabak, the author of “Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes, and the Sacking of Local Government,” said every economic developer is looking for the next Silicon Valley. That’s what Mount Pleasant and Wisconsin hoped it was getting with Foxconn.
….
[Professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois Chicago David] Merriman, who has studied tax incremental financing since the 1980s, said it doesn’t seem like it’s in Foxconn’s interest to continue making payments to the village.
“We don’t know what will happen — people can tell you they know, but they don’t,” Merriman said.
“The basic question is, is the community better off than it was before? The burden hasn’t fallen on the community, but the risk has. If Foxconn decides to default, Mount Pleasant is not in a good space.”
For an entire category at FREE WHITEWATER dedicated to this wasteful project, seeFoxconn.
Whitewater’s suffered, and sometimes still does, the affliction of grandiosity. Old Whitewater, a state of mind more than a time or person, produced nothing so much as boosterism’s grandiosity (accentuating only the positive and exaggerating the importance of whatever public project the boosters were promoting). In Whitewater, the years 2006—2007 were its high water mark. The public officials of that time — Brunner for the city, Coan for the police department, Steinhaus for the school district, and Telfer for the university— were exemplars of small-thinking and big-talking. One looks back and thinks: not one of these officials or their hangers-on was worthy of his or her position.
(The City of Whitewater recently decided against choosing Brunner’s consulting firm to gather candidates for its next city manager. Honest to goodness, that was an easy, sensible decision. To have chosen otherwise would have opened the city to a lengthy recitation of Brunner’s past managerial mistakes while in Whitewater’s or Walworth County’s employ. Ignoring the past, condemned to repeat…)
Gains that the boosters touted as extraordinary and eternal (e.g., campus enrollment, a so-called Innovation Center, various road projects) have proved exaggerated and ephemeral. Although their outlook continued for many years after ’06—’07, and even now has a grip on a few, in each subsequent year boosterism has grown less credible.
The Great Recession of ’07—’09 set Whitewater on a course from which she has yet to recover. The boosters had no cure for that downturn; on the contrary, their outlook exacerbated the city’s ills through willful ignorance. An accurate understanding of the city’s political and socio-economic condition requires that one see this clearly. Alternative explanations are erroneous to the degree of their departure from this understanding.
Government should have been, and should be, limited, responsible, and humble.
Grandiosity? It was a problem in Whitewater long before Foxconn came along.
Sunday in Whitewater will see a mix of clouds and sunshine with high of 70. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:23 PM for 12h 59m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
The 65 Project filed ethics complaints against 15 lawyers Wednesday, including Michael D. Dean of Brookfield and Daniel J. Eastman of Mequon, who were involved in a series of lawsuits on behalf of former President Donald Trump.
Neither Dean nor Eastman responded to a request for comment. All 15 lawyers were involved in litigation in Wisconsin.
The 65 Project is named for the 65 lawsuits filed by Trump-allied lawyers in swing states immediately after the 2020 election that seek to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
The group states that it aims to hold lawyers accountable for “fraudulent legal actions aimed at overturning legitimate elections.”
Since March, the project has filed about 40 ethics complaints against attorneys across the country.
The complaints are meant to deter lawyers nationwide from filing baseless lawsuits by exposing some lawyers, said Michael Teter, the group’s managing director.
“We want to do that by holding them accountable for their efforts and by publicizing their work so that they are known within their communities as having sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election through abusing the court system,” he said.
Because the results in Wisconsin were close, and because the state Legislature is dominated by Republicans, Teter said lawyers throughout the country targeted Wisconsin. They aimed “to convince the Republican legislature to then disregard the people’s will and to change the outcome of the electoral vote.”
But these lawsuits, he said, were mainly a political tool. Most lawyers didn’t expect to win, he said, and many dismissed their own cases within a week of filing. Despite that, he said they chipped away at public trust in the election results.
That case, the ethics complaint read, “lacked any basis in law or fact” and was “nearly a carbon copy of litigation filed in other cases.”
Wisconsin’s Office of Lawyer Regulation isn’t known for scrupulous enforcement, so these two will probably carry on as before.
Dean was graduated from Marquette Law in ’87, and Eastman from the University of New Hampshire School of Law in ’87. They’ve represented their schools poorly.
Each man is an embarrassment to his alma mater and to the profession.
Saturday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with high of 80. Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:25 PM for 13h 02m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 48% of its visible disk illuminated.
Understanding the difference between mere production and productivity is critical to measuring meaningful economic achievement. While production is the manufacture (or conversion) of raw materials into goods or services, productivity is the making of those goods or the provision of those services more efficiently than in a prior period. It’s an easy distinction, and most people grasp it it well and intuitively. As it turns out, however, some well-placed executives have embarrassing trouble understanding either of the concepts.
Josh Barro, writing at his newsletter Very Serious, describes a story in the New York Times about Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan. Ryan wants his reporters to be in the office more often, and he’s been pondering ways to compel them to come back. As Barro observes, this shows that Ryan doesn’t understand production or productivity at his own paper — despite having been the Post publisher for years, and despite having been appointed by businessman-billionaire Jeff Bezos (owner of the Post).
First Ryan’s plan, and then Barro’s spot-on critique.
He has expressed his belief to members of his leadership team that there were numerous low performers in the newsroom who needed to be managed out…
Mr. Ryan has expressed annoyance with senior newsroom leaders at what he sees as a lack of productivity by some journalists at the paper. Last fall, he asked for the company’s chief information officer to pull records on which days employees held videoconference meetings, as a way to judge production levels, and found that fewer meetings occurred on Fridays, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
He has also grown increasingly frustrated that some Post staff members are still not in the office at least three days a week, the company’s policy.
In recent weeks, Mr. Ryan asked for disciplinary letters to be drafted and sent to employees who had not made any appearance in the office this year, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. He ultimately decided that the letters should not be sent, and that the people should be called instead.
If this reporting should be accurate, it suggests that Ryan doesn’t understand a key aspect of production or productivity in his own industry.
Having observed other managerial failures at the Post from the outside (I’ve never worked there) it would not surprise me in the least if it’s possible to identify dozens of staff who could be cut with little impact to the quality of the news report.
But the thing about these low performers is that middle managers almost always already know who they are. And especially at a newspaper, it’s not that hard to tell who’s producing and who isn’t. It’s not as simple as looking at how many words per week someone is filing, but if you have a writer who’s producing very little copy, there is generally either an identifiable reason that writer is highly valuable — does she do months-long investigations that break huge news and win awards? — or there isn’t.
And that’s what makes Ryan’s apparent fixation on videoconference meeting schedules and badge scans pretty odd.
There are valid reasons you might want workers in the office (collaboration, supervision, etc.) and also valid reasons not to force them back (competitors are more flexible, and if you aren’t, some strong performers will quit). But for evaluating the performance of individual employees, you can look directly at their actual work, rather than relying on their physical presence in the office as a proxy.
So the whole thing kind of seems like the worst of both worlds, from a personnel-management perspective: antagonizing the staff by scolding them over their physical presence, while failing to actually weed out the staff whose performance is sub-par.
(Emphasis added.)
For reporting that leads to publishable writing, the measure is what you produce and how efficiently are you produce it. If strong and efficient production of news stories comes from reporters who do their work in treehouses, VW buses, or gin joints, so be it.
Does Ryan understand his product? Readers want news, features, and commentary from the Post, and they look for those written words online or in newsprint. Where the stories are drafted doesn’t matter. Showing up in the office only matters if that location is the place of greatest production and productivity for reporters’ work. If it’s not the place of greatest production, then compulsion of workers to the office only leads to lesser production and productivity.
In any event, for writing, it’s what lands on the page that matters to readers. Ryan already knows what’s on the pages of his paper; he doesn’t need reporters’ office time to measure production.
