The Las Vegas Gleaner is a very liberal web site, but they are also an honest web site. If a politician or other liberal person strays off the liberal politician, the Gleaner will call them out on it. The Gleaner is a honest liberal who believes in the cause.
The Gleaner has a good blog in which he states the real reason why the Las Vegas Sun has lost money and had to lay off money: Alas, in 2007, just as the Sun was starting to get interesting, Greenspun invested an undisclosed but reportedly "significant" portion of the $315 million put up by real estate wheeler-dealer Sam Zell to secure a highly leveraged acquisition of the Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and other papers and holdings. This particular variant of the billionaire model didn't result in a high-minded preservation of journalism's "iron core." But it did produce workplaces rife with blatant sexual harassment, massive newsroom layoffs while managers were awarded tens of millions of dollars in bonuses, billions of dollars of debt that threatens to wipe out employee pensions that had been used to finance the deal in the first place, and the biggest bankruptcy ever in the media industry. However many millions Greenspun contributed to the deal, he'll probably never see them again.
Meantime, back at the Sun, Greenspun fell under the spell of an in-house high priest of page-view worship. As detailed by Amy Kingsley in CityLife last year, Greenspun devoted not only resources but organizational focus to an expensive "new media" division....
It would have been nice if money frittered away on multimedia geegaws or the untold millions blown on the Tribune Co. fiasco had instead been used to establish a trust or endowment to assure the Sun's continued commitment to journalism's "iron core." Greenspun's wealth -- and his wherewithal to finance a "billionaire model" of journalism -- has presumably suffered with the rest of the economy, especially given the collapsed value of his family's vast real-estate holdings. Getting seduced both by Zell and a glib website designer hasn't helped.
And so naturally, when announcing the most recent round of layoffs at the Sun, Greenspun blamed ... the R-J?
A "central reason" for this month's layoffs, Greenspun said in a statement published on the Sun's website, was that under the shared-revenue agreement with the R-J, the Sun was "too exposed to the fortunes of the Review-Journal."
True, the papers are sharing a smaller pie. People have been laid off at the R-J, too. But Mike Ferguson, who replaced Sherman Frederick as the Stephens Media CEO after Frederick discredited himself and his newspaper during the Reid-Angle campaign, was absolutely right to remind everyone that if it weren't for the JOA with the R-J, there would be no Las Vegas Sun.
http://www.lasvegascitylife.com/articles/2011/09/22/opinion/damned_pundit/iq_47465345.txt
The only other thing I would add is that Brian "The Coward"Greenspun also frittered away money investing in property that eventually was foreclosed on.
So, thanks to the Gleaner, we now know the real reason why the Las Vegas Sun laid off 12 employees and is in serious financial danger.
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