Long Beach’s daily newspaper is dead. Would someone please tell the management?

It probably would have been overkill if Dave Kuta had actually shown up for his long-scheduled panel discussion at Monday’s meeting of Leadership Long Beach. As it turned out, his absence at the prestigious personal-and-community-development course set an appropriate tone for the afternoon’s general topic: changes in the media. Kuta was fired as publisher of the Press-Telegram last Friday. Talk about changes! He didn’t have to.

Still, it would be nice if somebody in a position of power at the Press-Telegram would say something about the Feb. 29 purge in which the paper’s corporate owner—MediaNews Group, Inc.—eliminated Kuta and about a dozen newsroom employees and advised a dozen others to apply for positions at the Torrance Daily Breeze. Hell, it would be nice if there were somebody in a position of power at the Press-Telegram at all anymore. Somebody from Long Beach, that is.

The worst part of Friday’s terrible dismemberment of the city’s century-old paper is that its head was cut off. Kuta was not replaced as Press-Telegram publisher. Authority over Long Beach’s only daily was assigned to the publisher of the Daily Breeze—a much-smaller newspaper in the much-smaller city of Torrance.

Why? Great question. Good luck getting an answer.

Executive editor Rich Archbold, the last man standing at the P-T, wasn’t even quoted about the change in the paper’s own story. New publisher Mark Ficarra—the former general manager of a Pennysaver in Phoenix, who’s only been publisher at the Breeze since mid-January—was barely more effusive; he had somebody slap out a statement about how much he looks “forward to working with all of the employees and management at the Press-Telegram to best serve our readers and advertisers in these great communities.”

Meanwhile, here’s a theory: The Press-Telegram was folded into the Daily Breeze—instead of vice-versa—because P-T workers still have a union, whereas Breeze employees don’t. The dozen P-T workers who have been invited to apply for positions in Torrance will surrender their union protections. With the combined staffs, union members will be in the minority and the company won’t recognize their right to collective bargaining.

It’s not as though the P-T’s union has ever been a match for MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton. He decimated it in 1997 by calling his purchase of the Press-Telegram an “asset sale,” which allowed him to fire the entire staff, force everybody to re-apply for their jobs and pay the re-hires an average of 21 percent less with bare-bones benefits. But the little labor organization reassembled itself and has striven to be a voice for local control of Long Beach’s newspaper. On Friday, it lost that battle, too.

Archbold, however, looked unfazed on Monday during an earlier session of Leadership Long Beach’s daylong meeting in a huge circular conference hall at California State University headquarters. Strolling around the center of the wrap-around auditorium with a microphone, he bullshitted the group of Long Beach’s best-and-brightest the way he’s been bullshitting everybody since he arrived at the Press-Telegram some 30 years ago.

Archbold downplayed the loss of Long Beach’s historic newspaper, describing it as a “restructuring.” He talked up the Press-Telegram’s decimated, underpaid, overworked and demoralized staff, expressing admiration for his “staff of great reporters”—but failing to mention that there are only 10 of them left to cover 19 cities. He claimed the Press-Telegram is the No. 1 source of news in Long Beach. He bragged about the paper’s “great business page,” but didn’t reveal that it’s been reduced to one day a week and that its only reporter, Don Jergler, just resigned. He touted the people page, saying “the story we just did on the kid with leukemia, the one who got the bone-marrow transplant—that was just so heart-warming.” And he championed the coverage of local government. “You’re not going to know what happens at the City Council meeting Tuesday night,” Archbold said, “unless you read the Press-Telegram.”

We’ll see about that.

Press-Telegram workers and supporters throughout the community were planning to convene at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting for a big show of opposition to the “restructuring” that Archbold minimized—and for a big show of support for an item agendized by Councilwoman Tonia Reyes Uranga that would “reexamine” the city’s financial relationship with the Press-Telegram.

City documents show that the P-T receives over a quarter of a million dollars a year in taxpayer money for various printing and advertising services. Some council members wonder whether the city should spend that kind of money with a paper that isn’t locally controlled anymore. P-T profits aren’t reinvested in the paper, anyway. Public documents reveal that MediaNews made a $16.7 million profit in 2006 when it sold the historic Press-Telegram building at Sixth and Pine for $20 million—but not even one position was restored to the tiny news staff.

Was any of that story in Wednesday’s Press-Telegram? Go take a look.

There’s a better chance you’ll find another oblivious column by Tom Hennessy—acclaimed as “Mr. Press-Telegram” and “Mr. Long Beach” when he took a semi-retirement in December—who totally ignored the demise of the newspaper and the damage to the city in his March 2 piece, published just two days after the P-T was shifted to Torrance and his colleagues lost their jobs.

Oh, the column started promisingly enough. Hennessy began: “This is about a magic place that may be on the brink of losing its magic; a place whose memory may become as remote as the sands of Carthage.” But his next sentence revealed his priorities: “This is about Wrigley Field, home of the hapless Chicago Cubs.”

That’s right, two mornings after Long Beach lost the Press-Telegram, the city’s most-prominent journalistic voice wrote a column bemoaning the fact that Wrigley Field—a baseball diamond in Chicago—may be selling its name to a corporate sponsor. Amazingly, it got worse. Here’s Hennessy’s next paragraph: “What does any of that have to do with Long Beach? Well, as strange as it may seem, there are Cub fans right here in town. [ . . . ] One is the P-T’s executive editor, Rich Archbold.”

Now that’s leadership, Long Beach.

Tags: Daily Breeze, Long Beach, newspapers, press telegram, Rich Archbold, tom hennessy, unions