Desperately Seeking the News
Leslie Giallombardo, publisher of The Tennessean since the corporate promotion of Craig Moon in 2002, was summarily replaced—and presumably dismissed—abruptly last week, her successor already waiting in the wings.
An online story on the newspaper’s website Thursday announced the change, variously referring to Giallombardo’s replacement as Ellen M. Leifeld and Ellen M. Liefeld, before the error was eventually corrected. The winning spelling: Leifeld. She comes to the paper from The Post-Crescent in Appleton, Wis., a town of only 70,000 people, and, lucky for the newsroom, she has experience editing a newspaper.
In the story the newspaper published Friday, Giallombardo’s departure was relegated to the eighth paragraph, which, citing a corporate news release, explained that she had “resigned to pursue plans to start her own business.”
Meantime, the top job shift was, by all indications, immediate. The woman who answers the phone at the 1100 Broadway executive offices says matter-of-factly when asked whether Giallombardo is in, “I’m sorry, she no longer works here.” And, of course, the newspaper swiftly added its new chief executive to the masthead in Giallombardo’s place.
Editor E.J. Mitchell was out of town at the time of the announcement, and Tennessean managing editor Dave Green held a brief newsroom meeting Thursday to inform staffers they had a new publisher—though he was unable to answer many of the questions they posed. Staffers say the news came as a complete surprise.
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Like most corporate casualties, Giallombardo’s fall was most assuredly tied to falling revenues at the daily newspaper, whose circulation has seen a downward spiral and whose efforts to lure new readers has manifested itself in the likes of the vacuous All the Rage “young reader weekly.” The publicly traded Gannett Co. does not break down revenues by its individual 99 newspapers, which makes it difficult to assess the health of Nashville’s daily, but the stories of circ declines and sales turnover at the paper couldn’t have been irrelevant to Giallombardo’s higher-ups at the nation’s largest newspaper chain (whose operating revenue was $7.4 billion last year).
Whatever the thinking inside the walls of Gannett headquarters in McLean, Va., Nashville’s paper is losing someone who—unlike her immediate predecessor, and whatever her shortcomings—ingratiated herself to business and civic leaders in town and was involved in the community. She started at The Tennessean in 1995 and managed to work her way up to the paper’s top job, a feat considering that the corporate behemoth almost always promotes publishers from smaller papers to larger ones and doesn’t seem to blench at the fact that its employees often don’t know the communities in which they work.
Unlike many of the automaton, Dilbert-like characters at the paper, Giallombardo was considered good people, down to earth, accessible, someone you could call and get a call back. (Though she didn’t call Desperately back this time.)
“It was pleasant to have someone who cared about the community,” one Nashville business leader says. “Relationships go a long way in business.”
Channel change
Michael Kilbane, WSMV-Channel 4 assignment editor, has given his two weeks’ notice that he’ll be leaving the station to take a gig as assignment manager for third-rated WKRN-Channel 2.
An old-school desk guy who buries his head in the phone and dispatches reporters to cover stories, Kilbane will have his hands full at Channel 2, which is in the midst of moving to a video-journalist model wherein reporters become photographers and vice versa. It means that, unlike its competitors in town, WKRN will have two to three times as many cameras and reporters working stories on any given day, possibly more.
Kilbane says he’s “cool with” the VJ experiment at Channel 2. “This is not spin, this is God’s honest truth: journalistically, this is the chance to do more stories—many more stories,” he says.
Lots of mileage
A recent Tennessean business story charted the rising cost of gasoline and queried large Midstate employers about whether they reimbursed their employees for business mileage according to the IRS’s recommendation of 40.5 cents a mile (“Reimbursement rate lags behind gas prices”). The piece noted, for example, that Crye-Leike Realtors reimburses at 30 cents per mile, state government at 38 cents per mile and Dell at the IRS’s rate. Interestingly, nowhere in the story did The Tennessean disclose its own reimbursement rate, which was recently increased from 24 cents a mile to 26 cents a mile.
A high-level source tells Desperately that reporter Bush Bernard included the detail, only to see it yanked by a top editor.
(Full disclosure: the Scene reimburses at the IRS recommended rate, but does not reimburse for mileage as a matter of rule. It typically does so when staffers have extraordinary travel.)
Email tips, gripes and comments to lgarrigan@nashvillescene.com.