A layoff tale from the Daily News

Matthew Kredell was a Daily News sports writer who lost his job in the Feb. 29 payroll purge. A kid from El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills and USC, he enjoyed working sports for his hometown paper even though they kept him in a part-time slot and his yearly take-home dropped each year. "I put up with it and was told my loyalty would eventually be rewarded," he told blogger Paul Oberjuerge. Kredell tells how it ended for him:

On the Wednesday when the layoffs were officially announced as going to take place Friday, I went in for a meeting and was told I was in no danger. I would continue on the Kings beat in my 29-hour position. The only way I would be affected is that I would have to help out with some preps during the NHL offseason. Then on Thursday afternoon I get a call from [Kevin] Modesti and Gene [Warnick] saying there was a new development....
All part-time positions were being cut. However, I had the choice to take a full-time position covering preps. I said I would take it and I would work whatever extra hours were necessary to finish up the Kings season on top of the preps work. Thursday evening, they tell me that Ron Kaye ran into a roadblock trying to get my full-time position past HR. Now they didn’t know what would happen. Then Friday they tell me they couldn’t get me the full-time position.

Ever since I graduated from USC in May of 2001, I worked full time for the Daily News in a part-time local position without benefits. I was paid for 40 hours about half the time as well. Most of the rest of the time, I got about 35 hours. It was only over the last 10 months that I regularly got the 29 of my position. I was a local guy who grew up reading the Daily News at El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills, so I put up with it and was told my loyalty would eventually be rewarded. But once I moved up to doing the USC basketball beat (which I traveled on) and the Kings beat, any full-time positions that opened up were frozen. So I was laid off because I was stuck in a part-time local position while doing full-time pro and college beat jobs.

I’m looking at this as a positive, though. (Former LADN staffer) Howard Beck said he doesn’t know of anyone worse off for having left the Daily News. I subscribe to this theory. If stuck in the part-time position, I was going to make 34k this year, my fourth consecutive year making less than the year before. So now I’m trying to figure out what to do next.

Read it all.


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