The buyer of the East Valley Tribune is asking staffers to re-apply for their jobs

Things don’t look good. Nick Martin writes in Heat City:

First, [Thirteenth Street Media owner Randy] Miller asked employees which position they are applying for – a problem because Miller has not said which positions might be available.

Later, Miller asks applicants to include three references, but he adds one instruction: “Please do not include relatives or former employers.”

No former employers, you say? So who does he want listed? Friends? Community leaders? A journalist’s sources? It’s unclear.

We should prepare for some grim holiday news from the East Valley Tribune. The smart business move is to radically downsize the serious staff and let the malleable souls remaining keep the thing filled with business-, advertiser- and government-friendly newsblurbs.

That, coincidentally, is what the company did when it took over a paper in Tucson called the Explorer. Here’s a former staffer quoted in the Tucson Weekly talking about where things were headed:

[The new editors] asked me and Oro Valley reporter Patrick McNamara if Marana and Oro Valley had [public information officers], and we said, “Yeah.” Do they send press releases? Do you put them in the paper? “No, not always. It depends on what it is. We never run a press release from a PIO.” They seemed a little taken aback by that. I quipped that most of the press releases for Marana were, “Come take a picture of this cactus we just planted.” Everyone else seemed to chuckle, but when they didn’t chuckle, I sort of knew I wasn’t going to be a part of these guys’ plan."

I can’t imagine the EVT was losing a lot of money. Its current owner, Freedom Communications, has claimed only that it had been “unprofitable” for the last two years. You can view that as a careful choice of words; on the other hand, the company is in bankruptcy, so maybe the word doesn’t have a special meaning. On the third hand, the company was loaded down with debt and might have been trying to unload a paper that wasn’t losing money just to raise cash.

The big question is how much debt Thirteenth Street is taking on to accomplish its own acquisition. The poster child for this scenario is Tribune Company, which took on oceans of new debt solely for the purpose of the privilege of being owned by Sam Zell. It, too, is in bankruptcy.

The EVT is a serious newspaper right now; if Thirteenth Street is rigorous in the cost-cutting, it can coast on that reputation (and the reflexive ad buys) for a while before folks really start noticing the decline in quality. In the meantime, again, its hard to see how a lot of local journalists won’t be facing a tough holiday.