Legitimate concern or sour grapes?

This is often the question raised when a former employee says something negative about his former employer.

In this case, it’s Murray Chass, the former veteran baseball writer for The New York Times who carries on his thoughtful prose on his own website (not a blog, mind you, since he has no use for bloggers).

In his latest posting, dated Feb. 17, Chass writes about the difficulties The New York Times Company — not the paper itself — is having selling off its stock in — wait for it — the Boston Red Sox. Sacrilege!

A lot of his story focuses on the non-communication he has had with Times Company president Janet Robinson. She doesn’t talk with him on the phone or returns messages, deals with him through generic emails, and in other veins doesn’t seem to want to bother with him. In turn, he tells his readers the questions he would ask her if given the chance, and relates to a contentious communications they had/didn’t have several years ago on the same general subject of the propriety of the Company owning a(ny) baseball team.

Some of the soap opera:

I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention my one previous experience with Robinson. In November 2001, when the Red Sox were in the process of being sold, I learned from someone outside the Times that the Times company was part of the group that eventually would get the team.

In the course of writing an article for the Times, I called Robinson, and that time she talked to me, though reluctantly because the Times didn’t want it known that it was seeking to be a part-owner of the Red Sox.

But she didn’t talk only to me; she spoke to the Boston Globe, too. Until hearing it from Robinson, the Globe knew nothing about the involvement of the Times company, which also owned the Globe. In other words, Robinson gave away an exclusive story. In the newspaper business, that is an act of high treason. It is unconscionable.

Robinson never said anything to me about it, why she gave away an exclusive story, but I heard from someone else that she had said she felt she had to give it to the Globe because the Globe was a Times company newspaper, the story was about the Red Sox and it wouldn’t have been right to have the story appear in the Times and not in the Globe. With thinking like that, no wonder the Times is hurting.

And this, which is more to the point:

As a baseball writer for the Times, I never liked the idea of the company owning any piece of the Red Sox. It never affected my coverage of the Red Sox or the Yankees, but I believed it was a major conflict of interest. The Times cautions its employees to avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflicts of interest, but the Times itself seems to feel it is above that danger.

In fact, Times executives excused the ownership issue by saying it was the company and not the newspaper that owned a share of the Red Sox, as if readers and others made that distinction.

Given Chass’ reputation and his dismissal, along with hundreds of other Times‘ employees, I wonder how much of that non-communication — then and now — with bad break-up syndrome.

Discuss.

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