'Cincy Post' Shutting in 3 Weeks -- How Staffers Spend Final Days

By: Joe Strupp With less than three weeks to go before it shuts its doors for good, life at The Cincinnati Post is not all doom and gloom.

After three years to think about the pending closure, which also includes the sister Kentucky Post, most staffers accepted the prospect of lost jobs a while ago. Many have already lined up other employment and a fair amount of veterans are able to take the severance package and enjoy some time off.

Still, as the countdown to the final edition on Dec. 31 ticks along, the remaining 50-plus newsroom employees say the "Dead Man Walking" feel about the place is somewhat surreal.

"We are working in a newsroom where any minute they could be hauling furniture away," says Tom O'Neill, an education reporter with three years at the afternoon daily. "It is also sort of jarring to get information about jobs and be pitted against each other."

The paper's demise has been known for more than three years, since Gannett Co. Inc., owners of the rival Cincinnati Enquirer, announced plans to pull out of its joint operating agreement with E.W. Scripps, the Post's owner.

But that does not mean the final weeks are any less-strange, say staffers. "You walk out of an editorial board meeting with people and you realize it is the last one they will come to," Editor Mike Philipps said of recent meetings with local officials and other visitors. "That is always a poignant moment."

A 30-year Post employee, Philipps says most staffers have chosen to stay with the paper until the end and collect the two-weeks' salary for every year of service. With a good number of longtime veterans, it is worth it for many.

Along with getting out each day's editions, Philipps is contending with other shutdown priorities ranging from clearing out files to organizing a job fair for employees.

"It is a slow process, we didn't want to have it all happen on the last day," Philipps explains. "There is a lot of stuff covered with dust that should have been moved out 10 years ago."

At 61, Philipps plans to go into retirement. "If someone makes me an offer I couldn?t refuse, who knows," he says. "But I plan to be on the deck of my boat." Philipps has already timed exactly when the final edition will roll, saying "we will push that button at 9:25 a.m." on New Years Eve.

Given the dwindling economic times of the industry in recent years, Philipps and others at the paper are not surprised that Scripps has had to pull the plug after being cut out of the JOA, in which the two papers shared production and delivery costs.

Although discussions occurred about the Post making it on its own, or even becoming a Web-only paper, nothing concrete ever materialized. "I think the timing would be terrible to try to start a new newspaper and that is essentially what you would have to do," Philipps said. "Five years ago it might have been different, five years from now it might be different."

Future plans for many of the staff are telling about the bleak journalism prospects. Shelly Whitehead, a police reporter, is going to work in internal communications at a hospital, while former Managing Editor Mark Neikirk, a 28-year Post veteran, has signed on to run a project at Northern Kentucky University.

"There is life after journalism," Neikirk says, but admits, "I liked going to battle everyday in the newsroom." He says he has still not let himself think about the paper's eventual end: "It is bad, there have always been two voices in Cincinnati."

Whitehead, who spoke via cell phone while working her beat at a local police station, said she is glad to get out of news because the industry has strayed from storytelling into "quick, constant updating." "There is a kind of gallow's humor going on now," she said of the newsroom atmosphere. "It is hard to take; everyone who works at this paper is so incredibly proud of it."

Luke Saladin, who has been at the paper six years and is president of the local Newspaper Guild, is also leaving the business to study engineering at the University of Kentucky. "We all had so much warning, it is not a big surprise," he says of the shutdown. But he admits that seeing employees walk off with books and other newsroom items, at the paper's request, is strange. "They are telling people to take what they want," he says.

As part of the long goodbye, the Post has been running columns by former staffers with memories of the daily's past. Among them was one on Tuesday by Barry M. Horstman, who served two tours of duty at the paper in the 1970s and 1990s. Now an assistant managing editor at the Las Vegas Sun, he wrote: "Long before I worked here, I was familiar with the Post's laudable crusade to rid Cincinnati City Hall of bossism in the 1920's and in succeeding decades to lift the city's quality of life in innumerable ways."