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When executives at Belo, the parent company of Dallas' Only Daily Newspaper, announced the executives who will run the company after its spinoff next year, a couple of names were missing: current editor Robert Mong and current managing editor George Rodrigue (Jim Schutze's favorite News employee).

The Belo-ologists among us have pondered this development for a week. We have sent emails, pored over tea leaves, poked at chicken entrails and otherwise tried to figure out what this means. All of the people named are business types; none of them have anything to do with the editorial operation. This does not seem to bode well for the news side of the business.

And this is what we came up with:

 

• After the spinoff, the Decherd family will take the newspaper company private. This is not news -- the Dallas Business Journal had an excellent piece in October discussing the possibility. Meanwhile, an analyst said last week that the company's stock is undervalued and that money is available to finance a buyout.

• More on the buyout, based on a Belo presentation to analysts today: Expenses have been cut 9 percent so far this year, while cash flow has increased significantly. That has all the earmarks of a company getting its balance sheet ready for a sale.

• More cuts, in the wake of buyouts and layoffs over the past couple of years. These could include the elimination of some sections, like food, and reducing the number of features, like comics. This has been done at other papers in Texas and elsewhere to save money.

• Less local news and reporting. This is expensive, and buyouts almost always result in those kinds of cuts.

• Mong's and Rodrigue's departures from the paper. Both have been valued employees, sticking up for The News and its staff during the Trinity referendum and after a very unflattering story in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review this year. But if they weren't named, it's difficult to believe something isn't going on.

Comments

[Brian]

If there are any more cuts to news and reporting, there isn't going to be much to print. Who is going to subscribe to this paper?

I'll admit I've considered cancelling my subscription in the wake of the slanted reporting on the Trinity issue. But there is still some good content in the DMN. See the story in this morning's Business section on health care in Texas for an example. If your tea leaves are right, though, this sounds like a harvesting strategy: stop marketing for new subscribers, cut costs dramatically, and just take the cash until there is no business left.

Reminds me of something Molly Ivins said in a 2006 column: "I don't mind so much that newspapers are dying -- it's watching them commit suicide that pisses me off."

[Bill Kennedy]

Upon re-reading that excellent CJR article, and seeing how lousy the DMN wbesite *still* is, this jumped out at me: "Belo is investing in the future, Moroney and Mong contend, by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Web training and video equipment."

Turning over your entire web operation to IBM Global Services, who sells services to enable companies to save money, is not "investing in the future." As someone who has been involved in web services and related technologies since the nascent days of the web, it astounds me that the DMN allows IBM to operate such a poor online excuse for "their future."

Whomever invests in the spun-off newspaper biz better have a large supply of lipstick.