George S. May Business Blog

LA Police union takes an interesting approach to PR

As newspapers across the globe are being forced into cutting budgets and handing out pink slips, the San Diego Tribune has actually been able to find an investment firm to help prop them up. While this is great news for an industry whose forecast is looking very grim, the trouble is, the firm “Platinum Equity” has already expressed a bit of a conflict of interest.

From the LA Times:

“Platinum relies on a $30-million investment from the pension fund of Los Angeles police officers and fire fighters, along with large sums from other public-employee pension systems around the state, to help fund its acquisitions of companies. As League President Paul M. Weber views it, that makes the League part owner in the flagging Tribune and League officials are none to happy with the paper’s consistent position that San Diego lawmakers should cut back on salaries and benefits for public employees in order to help close gaping budget deficits.”

“Since the very public employees they continually criticize are now their owners, we strongly believe that those who currently run the editorial pages should be replaced,” Weber wrote in a March 26 letter to Platinum CEO Tom Gores.

Former police chief and current San Diego Mayor, Jerry Sanders (left), is likely to get behind the efforts of Platinum Equity. Sanders, while running for mayor in 2005, promised the city that if he were elected he would not collect his pension from the force. Sanders currently collects $92,400 per year from his pension, on top of his $100,000 per year salary.

The worst part of all of this is not about how much Sanders makes yearly or about promises he has not followed through on. The fact is, the editorial section is one of the only reasons that people still buy newspaper. People don’t need to buy the newspaper for news anymore. Readers can spend five minutes on yahoo news and get every highlight from every story around the world as the news breaks. What readers can’t get from sites like yahoo news, however, is the pulse of their city. In our local newspaper we get a flavor that caters to the interests of our community, something that yahoo can’t do. Meddling with the editorial section will be like trying to fix the only thing left in the newspaper that isn’t broken.

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