Clockwork feels obliged to point out the latest comments left on our recent blog posts about the continuing turmoil within the Grand Avenue headquarters of the Orange County Register.
To recap, it all started with our March 9 “Publisher to Register Employees: Let Them Eat Hawaiian Bread,” which detailed the different messages publisher Terry Horne was giving to editorial employees (your salaries are frozen, your colleagues have been let go and you have to work harder) vs. top executives (we're partying hearty on Maui!). That was followed March 12 with “Source Says Furloughs Will Be Forced on Register Employees,” which upped Clockwork's batting average when it comes to items that actually come true. Finally, to point readers to various comments to those posts, came March 30's “Insiders Take Potshots at Freedom Communications.”
Where we'd left off with these was with
R.C. Hoiles, who in this instance is not the Register's long-dead founder but an “ad gal” with a Freedom paper that is not the Santa Ana flagship, comments this week on the furlough post that even if Flanders did take a furlough, his hard landing would be cushioned by the compensation he receives sitting on six corporate boards. She calls Flanders “a hack and a loser,” a description seconded by “Hank Paulsen,” who nominates Flanders for the CEO position at General Motors before thinking better of it. “He
wouldn't have time, too many boards to be on, as his own ship is turning
round and round and round and round and round…….”
The latest vitriol is even more intense in the comments section of the insiders post.
]
The faux Hoiles strikes again, explaining, “If
it seems quiet around the country clubs of Orange County this week,
you're not imagining it; many of the hard working suits for Freedom
Communications have jetted off to Spain to lavish themselves in yet
another free trip all the while employees back home are figuring out
what bill not to pay because they are on furlough.” She also shares
this Blackberry-composed email “blowing along the gutters of Fitch”
(the Irvine street where Freedom's offices are located).
Colleagues:
Valentines Day began well for me but it didn't have a great finish as I
spent a less-than-romantic night in Intensive Care at Mission Hospital.
Yesterday afternoon, since it was such a fine day, (spouse's name)and I took a short motorcycle ride to do some errands.
Not far from home, an elderly woman pulled right out in front of me and I hit the back end of her car.
The motorcycle and I did a flip and landed on the pavement.
I was wearing full leathers and a full face helmet and didn't get so much as a scratch.
However, I did break my pelvis and have some internal bleeding.
They did a procedure last night to stop the bleeding and that seems to have been successful.
The orthopaedist was in a little while ago and said hour he didn't the
break warranted surgery.
Further tests today will answer that question.
In the meantime, I am here in ICU growing fond of my morphine
drip, which helps with the pain but not my typing on th Blackberry.
If all goes well, I will be moved to a regular room tomorrow.
The doctor says I may have to be here a week to 10 days and that I
should not fly for several months. So that takes care of Las Vegas,
Naussau and Spain. You will have to fly the flag for me there.
In any event, I don't want fllowers or anythiing here.
As you see, I do have my Blackberry for calls and messages.
More later
Regards / (guess who?)
Not R.C. Hoiles suggest OC Deathwatch run a contest where people can guess who the individual is. “Evil Knievil” adds, “Guess
he shouldn't have taken off his training wheels from his bike.” Next
comes some back-and-forth between the players regarding other Freedom
executives.
One would suspect management's response is best summed up by “Be Happy You Have a Job“:
How
dare the employees complain at this point in time. The Hoiles Family
hasn't taken an income for more then a year. The ones who stuck around,
instead of selling are about to go broke. How about being glad you
whiners still have a job in the newspaper biz.
Upset at the CEO? He can't help the fact that there are no ad
dollars. That poor man has to be the one who faces angry family
members, angry employees, and angry banks. Incredible that journalists
would want to bite the hand that feeds them when every day we read of
yet another major daily going out of business.
Probably still cranky over having to share a room in Spain.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.