Sunday, March 17, 2013

Labor Relations and the News Cycle

The current work stoppage by the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony have kept me busy for about the last half week. Every day I have received a press release about the cancellation of a concert, meaning than none of this week's subscription performances of Gustav Mahler's ninth symphony took place. Now the question is whether or not the tour scheduled to begin at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday, March 20, will also have to be cancelled.

While I have been putting out information about concert cancellations by trying as hard as possible to act on announcements when they show up in my Inbox, I have noticed that, except for a story about the only press conference to be held, the San Francisco Chronicle has been pretty much quiet about the whole affair. Indeed, the San Francisco Symphony advertisement in its usual place on the right side of page 3 of the Sunday Datebook did not even have the word "cancelled" superimposed over the announcement for today's concert.

The problem is that the release of information about negotiations was not following the timing of the news cycle. This was one of those cases when Internet speed trumped print journalism. Also, as might be imagined, the Web site for CBS San Francisco was doing a pretty good job of keeping up with releases as they happened. However, I should also note that my Yahoo! home page, which includes links to "stories of interest" from local sources, never created a link for anything about this work stoppage.

I suppose the prevailing opinion is that the only real way to be informed about such matters is through Twitter.

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