The Red & Black student editors’ contretemps last week reminded me painfully of a walkout I precipitated myself back in the ‘90s. After having sold my interest in The Athens Observer some years earlier, I came back to manage it at the request of the new owners, who had picked it up as it teetered into oblivion.

The day I arrived, people were cleaning out their offices, carrying potted plants out to their cars. What I found inside the building was one of the best newspaper staffs I have ever encountered. It is always that way. When a paper goes down the tubes, it’s not because of the staff; it’s always the owners. Think of all those stories you’ve read and seen: the editors, reporters, designers and ad people gathered in the newsroom while some owner’s rep reads a statement regretfully informing them that as of tomorrow they won’t have jobs. That never happens because the staff didn’t know how to put out a good newspaper. It’s always because the owners miscalculated or couldn’t adjust to changing markets in difficult times. The end may be inevitable, but it’s never about journalism. It’s always “just business,” as Tessio says in The Godfather.

When The Athens Observer proved not to be a cash cow, most of the businessmen wanted out, and I bought their stock and ended up the minority partner with the one who was left. In our uneasy alliance, he owned the controlling interest, and I managed the paper. That worked OK until he became fascinated with the newspaper business and wanted to be more hands-on, which meant cutting costs, which meant firing reporters, which brought on a confrontation between us and an ultimatum from me, which he declined to honor, and I was out the door.

Then, most of the staff quit, too, in the belief that the businessman couldn’t put out the paper without all of us and would have to come to terms. Of course, he could hire more staff to supplement those who stayed, and The Athens Observer continued without us. It was not the same paper, and eventually it succumbed, but it survived our leaving. The kids who walked out behind me weren’t college students; they were grownups who were dependent on their jobs for their livelihood. Full of indignation and blinded by emotion, I let them do it, allowing myself to think it would work. The net result was that I cost them the jobs they were so good at, and I also contributed to the eventual destruction of the newspaper I had helped found.

So, maybe Blake is right in his advice to The Red & Black staff in this week’s City Dope: that it’s better to stay and fight from within. On the other hand, their blow-up may have been the only way their subjugation to hired, professional staff could have been avoided. It certainly appears to have worked. The owners have backed down and disavowed the draft memorandum outlining management by paid professionals who would make The Red & Black more smiley-faced in content. Whether or not the walkouts return, The Red & Black will continue and, thanks to them, students will at least for a while be in control of the editorial content. Maybe some day these editors will, as I do, wish they had done it differently, but I think they will always be proud that they acted on principle and walked out on what they saw as a corruption of the editorial integrity they have been taught to value.

As an added footnote, I cannot help commenting on the news that The Red & Black paid its publisher $189,000 and netted half a million dollars last year. Before anybody calls me for a loan, let me state emphatically that his pay rate is so far above the norm that it probably even exceeds The Banner-Herald publisher’s wages and makes mine laughable by comparison, if I weren’t crying. And clearing half a million dollars would be astounding even at The New York Times or just about any other newspaper in the country. It just goes to show you that at The Red & Black, just like at the University of Georgia Athletic Association, the sky’s the limit when most of your help works for free.