Matthew Kredell covered just about everything during his tenure with the Los Angeles Daily News. Even though he never was a full-time staffer. Something most of the rest of us didn’t know — because he seemed to be at a major L.A. event five days a week. Dodgers, Lakers, USC … and then the Kings, for most of this season.
Anyway, Kredell was laid off/fired during The Great Leap Year Day Massacre at the Daily News, on Feb, 29, the day 20-plus LADN newsroom staffers were sent packing, reducing the paper’s staff to 100.

We were chatting electronically about the vagaries of the layoffs business, when he related the circumstances of his downright bizarre final 48 hours with MediaNews, a tale he said I could relate on this blog. Some layoffs are personal. Some are financial. Some are competence-driven. Kredell’s was so utterly random as to stand out in the sea of sad stories.

Wrote Kredell:

You should have seen what happened with me. 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.

This is when I asked Matthew if I could relate this incident on the blog. He consented, and added:

Oh, I forgot the best part. In my Wednesday meeting where I was told I was in no danger, I also was given a small raise for my annual review. I went from getting a raise to finally being full time to being laid off in less than 48 hours.

I noted that he seemed to have a very successful dailynews.com blog devoted to the Los Angeles Kings, his beat the final year. And suggested that, sometimes, not even being an ace blogger (as well as productive part-timer) could save a guy.

Wrote Matthew:

Yeah, I think the Kings blog got the third-most hits of any blog in the newsgroup. And my last two weeks were the most active in the blog’s history. I had 22,489 hits at the trading deadline with an unheard of 10.1 minutes per viewing and nearly 250 comments on that one day.

Reconstructing this, after the fact … and this is based on knowing some of the players and how suburban newspapers get put out (and I’m not sure Matthew agrees with this; it’s just me) … I think Kredell came “this close” to being salvaged by Ron Kaye, Daily News editor of the time who was agonizing over the MediaNews-mandated layoffs.

Check the history. Word comes down that all part-timers are being cut. That would include hard-working Matthew Kredell who also is, apparently, the third-most popular LANG blogger (after Scott Wolf and Brian Dohn, apparently) … and Daily News sports managers (Modesti, Warnick) with Kaye’s involvement try to save him by making him full-time. And it looks for a moment there as if this is gonna fly. And Matthew had no idea, but I imagine Kaye, Modesti, Warnick were holding their breath and crossing their fingers.

But then MediaNews honchos (the publisher in Woodland Hills? Steve Lambert in San Bernardino?) tumble to Kaye trying like hell to save his most productive people through whatever means, some of them fairly overt juggling acts, and Kaye gets hammered down on this “make Kredell a full-timer” gambit — because, after all, Dean Singleton wants money OFF the payroll, and making a guy full-time while 20 people are being dumped pretty clearly is an editor trying an end run on the system.

So Matthew Kredell is gone, and there goes 6-7 bylines a week and twice that many blog items.

I don’t know if it makes Matthew feel better or worse, but I would not be surprised at all if the inspired/desperate maneuverings by Daily News editor Ron Kaye to try to save as much of his staff as he could from that awful, Feb. 29 purge, were a significant factor in Kaye’s own demise, five weeks later.

LANG thinking? This is no time to have some editor trying to play personnel shell games with us and evading the reality that we’re looking to cut serious money here. And this is the last time we’re going to have to deal with this journalism-obsessed foot-dragger. And Kaye was gone, one month after Kredell.

Anyway, the ways we head out the door … sometimes they can be downright wacky.