Gutless Post-Dispatch owners get full day's work from employees, phone them at home to fire them

The brief article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch describing the latest cuts at that once highly-respected publication has most of the ingredients that have continued to send print journalism on its downward spiral.

Qualified employees are shown the door, no mention is made of the fact that the Post-Dispatch's parent company CEO received a hefty bonus for her work, the second in less than four months, last week despite the continued problems Lee Enterprises has been having, and of course, the article is listed as coming "from staff reports," which means it is verbatim from a news release dictated from corporate:

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has laid off 23 staffers from the newsroom, advertising and production, the company announced today.
The cuts continue the trend of downsizing at the newspaper, the largest in the Lee Enterprises chain, as the industry struggles to contend with declining print advertising revenue.
Lee earlier this month announced that it had narrowed its losses in the fiscal third quarter. The loss of $1.5 million, or three cents a share, compared with a loss of $155.5 million, or $3.46 a share, a year earlier.

I don't know why I put the link to the article in the opening paragraph since the little snippet above is the whole story.

Apparently, Lee Enterprises knew these cuts were coming last week when it announced CEO Mary Junck had been awarded $655,000 in stock shares, in addition to the $500,000 bonus she received in March:

That report, also attributed to "staff reports" said the following:

Lee Enterprises Chief Executive Mary Junck was given a restricted stock grant of 500,000 shares, according to a regulatory filing this week. The stock had a value of $655,000 as of Monday, the date when the grant was made.
This was Junck's first restricted stock award since fiscal year 2007.
A Lee spokesperson said details on the award would be released with another regulatory filing on Friday.
For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the CEO earned $1.15 million, which included a $809,100 salary and $329,700 in stock options.
Earlier this year, Junck received a $500,000 bonus for getting Lee, publisher of the Post-Dispatch and other newspapers, through a prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy that allowed the publisher to refinance its debts.

Notice in that story, there are no mention of any cuts, as if these are two separate, unrelated events.

The St. Louis Riverfront Times included another bit that will never find its way into a Post-Dispatch story, quoting a tweet from the United Media Guild:

PD Managers who were laid off worked all day at office, then informed via phone call at home after work they were laid off.#coldhearted