StreetWise Boss Feels the Heat
The divide between Oliver and his staff had been widening for months. At the urging of board president Pam McElvane, a weekend retreat was held last fall at the home of editor in chief Jalyne Strong, but it settled nothing. Staffers remember with some bitterness that the “facilitator” was Oliver’s friend Sharon Allen, whom he subsequently hired as an executive assistant.
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The charges in the letter to the board this week ranged far beyond Oliver’s treatment of Strong. It accused him of “mismanagement, unconstructive leadership style, and refusal to deal forthrightly and directly with staff” and of tactics that “consolidate all authority…yet delegate blame.” It complained that he failed to provide extra resources when StreetWise shifted from biweekly to weekly publication last March and again when StreetWise DC was launched last July, yet added “unnecessary and high-cost upper-level management positions, which serve primarily to create a buffer between staff and the Executive Director.” It told the board that “of the six full-time staff members with supervisory responsibility” when weekly publication began, “only one remains.”
The staffers, who asked the board for a written response by next Monday, added, “We anticipate retaliatory action, as Mr. Oliver has prohibited anyone on staff from contacting the Board without his permission.”
When I first spoke with Strong two weeks ago, she refused to speak publicly about StreetWise because she believed that any criticism could imperil it. The readers who buy 90,000 copies of StreetWise each month from its 270 vendors (the figures are Oliver’s) do so in large part as an act of charity, and many would happily keep their dollars in their own pockets if they had an excuse to. But some of the colleagues Strong left behind felt differently. They concluded that publicity was a necessary component of their own protest. “Collectively, we in editorial have been talking about whether we should approach the board in writing pretty much since Jalyne was fired,” Crouse told me. “We waited to see if the board would respond to Jalyne, and the executive committee did not respond.”
One plank in the proposal stood out: “Use the StreetWise newspaper to publicize your company’s philanthropic support to community organizations and social events.” This sounded to Crouse and other staffers like an invitation to exchange advertising for news coverage. “The barrier between advertising and editorial is in jeopardy,” Wilson says. “The editorial department has always been under pressure to be less critical.”
I tracked down the edition and flipped through section one. There was the Cheney item, not just buried but camouflaged. It appeared at the very bottom of page ten, at the end of a one-column story headlined “Bush ready to offer plan on Rx drugs for elderly.”
