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CQ-Roll Call Fires Editor for Questioning Layoffs
Last week, 44 employees of the company that publishes Congressional Quarterly and Roll Call were given pink slips. Today, the newsroom editor, Brian Nutting, was fired for an email he sent to top management demanding to know the reason for the layoffs. Or, to be more precise, he was fired for refusing to apologize for sending the email. Nutting worked at CQ-Roll Call for 27 years, and was very highly regarded by his co-workers.
Now, Fishbowl DC reports, “morale is in the dumpster.”
Last week, in the midst of the CQ-Roll Call layoffs, FishbowlDC posted a “We need answers” email response from CQ editor Brian Nutting. The email demanded answers and clarification from upper management regarding the layoffs and falsities surrounding the Economist‘s acquisition of CQ.
Many outraged sources now tell FishbowlDC that the hero-editor has been let go over his stance and determination to defend his employees’ jobs.
One source tells FishbowlDC:
He is a 27-year veteran of CQ. He fostered many careers at CQ and many are crying this morning in the newsroom. He was fired for “not showing remorse” after sending the email. Before the layoffs he offered to be laidoff himself if it would save his two reporters who were cut. Management said no because they couldn’t afford this severance.
Sounds like management ought to start ordering Prozac in bulk because morale is in the dumpster…
In a separate Politico post, Nutting tells Michael Calderone that the reason for the layoffs was, essentially, greed:
Brian Nutting, who was fired after 27 years with Congressional Quarterly, says that the reason given by management Tuesday morning was “insubordination.”
[...]
“The key question that I wanted answered was for somebody in a position of authority, from someone who made the decision that there needed to be layoffs, to tell us why there needed to be layoffs,” Nutting told POLITICO.Nutting said he spoke with CQ-Roll Call editorial director Mike Mills on Thursday and Monday evening about the email, but refused to apologize. Today, in a meeting with Mills, Nutting was fired.
“We now know the real reason was money,” Nutting said, of the 44 layoffs. “Nobody has yet acknowledged that. Why do they need to make more money?”
Indeed, CQ was a profitable company under previous ownership. So Nutting believes the motive behind last week’s layoffs has to do with trying to increase the now-merged company’s profit margin.
“A number of people who were laid off last week,” Nutting said, “could not possibly be redundant.”
Outrage is the appropriate response to all this, I think — but at the same time we can also feel inspired by one man’s personal integrity, courage, and selflessness:
Despite 27 years on the job, Nutting will not get severance. And unlike staffers laid off Thursday, Nutting did not sign a non-disparage agreement. “I guess I was given one last chance to say I was sorry, that I’d done something impulsive, and I apologize,” he said.
But Nutting didn’t apologize and potentially keep his job or walk away with decades worth of severance.
“I didn’t feel like I could turn my back on the people I worked with,” he said.
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8 Responses to “CQ-Roll Call Fires Editor for Questioning Layoffs”
[...] about Politico as of September 29, 2009 CQ-Roll Call Fires Editor for Questioning Layoffs – themoderatevoice.com 09/29/2009 Last week, 44 employees of the company that publishes [...]
ROTFLMAO…
What goes around comes around…
I don't remember to hearing to many press people saying much of anything when blue collar America got sold down the river so that Corporate America could improve it's ROI by a couple of percentage points…
Cry me a river…
WTF?
The Corporate Owned Media spent the last forty years writing and celebrating mass layoffs, downsizing, and righsizings, it was good for business…
Now it's their turn…
Maybe reporters will have a little more sympathy towards people like this…
The 44 editors and writers who lost their jobs are not the Corporate-Owned Media. The people who laid them off and who fired their editor for speaking up in their defense are the Corporate-Owned Media.
I am stunned at a response like this from you of all people, Don Quijote, which is why I used that abbreviation, which I should not have. I read your comment twice, thinking that I must be reading it wrong, missing something.
You don't even know these people. How do you know what they wrote or what they think or feel about corporate-owned media? They were just trying to make a living, and certainly not on CEO salaries. Brian Nutting said goodbye to 27 years worth of severance pay out of loyalty to the people he worked with who had lost their jobs. He could have stayed and protected his own backside, but he didn't.
Why do you say, “Maybe now reporters will have a little more sympathy for people like these” when you don't know that they don't! I mean, how do you just turn 44 human beings you don't know into this big unit of something or other that you know everything there is to know about them?
I don't understand your reaction, Don Quijote, not from you. From someone else, sure, but not from you.
From your story:
If the economist isn't Corporate Media, I don't know what is…
Acquisition, followed by layoff of “Redundant Personnel” is standard procedure.
With a tiny handful of exceptions, the press has sat on the sidelines and cheered on all the Mergers, Acquisition and Layoffs of the last thirty years. If it was good enough for other people, it's good enough for them. I have no sympathy…
If the economist isn't Corporate Media, I don't know what is
ROFL!! The 44 editors and writers who lost their jobs didn't choose to work for “The Economist.” (Not that it would make any difference if they had.) “The Economist” acquired CQ in July, and the layoffs occurred last week — two months later — after employees had been assured the company was doing well financially.
Again, I don't know why you think that the mere fact of being employed by a company that is owned by or is part of a corporate entity means that you have no sympathy for people in low-paid menial jobs, or that you have it coming if you are laid off. A lot of very sympathetic people work at the Washington Post and at Slate, which is owned by the WaPo. Eugene Robinson and Ezra Klein are among them. Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz all work for MSNBC. Are they heartless supporters of exploiting hotel workers, too? If you say no they're not, you're only saying that because those individuals are famous enough for you to know what they stand for and what they believe. For you to assume that 44 nameless, faceless people are corporate hacks who all operate on the philosophy of “I'm all right, Jack,” shows an astonishing failure of imagination, not to mention basic fairness.
If you think these 44 people should stand in for the entire institution of “the press” and thus conclude that “if it was good enough for other people, it's good enough for them” and you “have no sympathy,” then it's certainly not in my humble authority to stop you or change your mind.
That said, I have lost a significant amount of respect for you over this. (Not that you're devastated by that, I'm sure.)
Don Quijote's bizarre, rambling, and unfounded remarks suggest that he's one of those folks who denounce the media as liberal when that suits their rant but now snark about how corporate it is. Uh, WHAT???
As someone who has worked in the mainstream media — and that's not a dirty word! — for 10 years, including a stint at CQ (and, yes, Brian Nutting is a supremely good guy), I agree that that ownership is corporate, and unfortunately more and more so in the past 20 years; gone are the single-family-owned newspapers where the mission was more important than superfat profit margins and where employees were treated like human beings (what a shocking, and very-un-corporate-HR concept!).
But most of the reporters and editors I've known are driven by a somewhat idealistic desire (“somewhat” because they're not naive) to see our democracy thrive — that's what a free press does. We newsroom people are the antithesis of corporate, in behavior and outlook, and our choice of profession makes that clear: All of us could earn more working as technical writers/editors for defense companies or in the communications department of investment firms, but we don't, because that would conflict with our values.
And by the way, DJ, you might want to stop being an insensitive jerk, given that most of us are grieving profoundly these days; a lot of us have the mega-stress of no money, no job/no sense of purposefulness, and no job prospects because the ratio of seekers to openings is about 10 times what it was even five years ago. These changes have come so rapidly (the past year has been a particular bloodbath) that most of us haven't been able to transition into other careers. And we're not just suffering in the wallet; many of us are grieving over the rapid deterioration and death of the profession we love — it's no less painful than the deterioration/death of a parent. So, basically, DJ, howsabout you gather some facts, or at least think a little, before you start typing your hateful and stupid posts?