When executives at Belo, the parent company of Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper, announced the executives who will run the company after its spinoff next year, a couple of names were missing: current editor Robert Mong and current managing editor George Rodrigue (Jim Schutze’s favorite News employee).
The Belo-ologists among us have pondered this development for a week. We have sent emails, pored over tea leaves, poked at chicken entrails and otherwise tried to figure out what this means. All of the people named are business types; none of them have anything to do with the editorial operation. This does not seem to bode well for the news side of the business.
And this is what we came up with:
• After the spinoff, the Decherd family will take the newspaper company private. This is not news — the Dallas Business Journal had an excellent piece in October discussing the possibility. Meanwhile, an analyst said last week that the company’s stock is undervalued and that money is available to finance a buyout.
• More on the buyout, based on a Belo presentation to analysts today: Expenses have been cut 9 percent so far this year, while cash flow has increased significantly. That has all the earmarks of a company getting its balance sheet ready for a sale.
• More cuts, in the wake of buyouts and layoffs over the past couple of years. These could include the elimination of some sections, like food, and reducing the number of features, like comics. This has been done at other papers in Texas and elsewhere to save money.
• Less local news and reporting. This is expensive, and buyouts almost always result in those kinds of cuts.
• Mong’s and Rodrigue’s departures from the paper. Both have been valued employees, sticking up for The News and its staff during the Trinity referendum and after a very unflattering story in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review this year. But if they weren’t named, it’s difficult to believe something isn’t going on.
