Will Faculty Soon Be Cleaning Law School Bathrooms?

New York Times:  When the Forces of Media Disruption Hit Home, by David Carr:

I read on Friday that the price of taxi medallions in New York City had fallen about 17 percent, a drop created by competition from ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft. The impact is remarkable because neither company possesses big capital assets, or a huge number of employees. Instead, they put a new user interface over cars and drivers already on the road. In the same way, Airbnb has remade the rental markets, not by buying properties, but simply by surfacing available units on the web to people in need.

In both cases, inefficiency was reduced by using software and smarts to create a new market of underused assets — and consumers have benefited. ...

I work in an industry that has also been profoundly disrupted. The shift of news and information to the Internet meant that the heavy investment in trucks and presses that once served as a barrier to entry disappeared. Insurgents flooded in with new approaches that eliminated much of the inefficiency and created whole new streams of content. Again, great for consumers, not so great for the traditional news industry, because those inefficiencies were also profits by another name.

Right now, The New York Times is in the middle of a round of buyouts in an effort to cut 100 positions, to stretch existing revenue over a smaller cost base. ... Buying out those folks — layoffs will follow if the goal of 100 jobs is not met — also allows the organization to invest in new technologies and the people who build them. ...

[I]t’s always good to remember that things could be worse, far worse, in a business as challenged as journalism. ... At The Orange County Register, which has struggled through layoffs and misguided expansions, the delivery of the newspaper was interrupted after the company failed to pay The Los Angeles Times for the service. ... Reporters are also among those now being asked to, um, deliver the newspaper.

People willing to rise early and deliver the paper on critical days would receive not cash, but gift cards. “A full route — which averages about 500-600 newspapers — earns $150 in Visa gift cards,” a company memo read, adding, “as a novice, sorting papers and delivering a route typically requires between 3-6 hours to complete.” The memo then suggested that employees bring “a companion to help toss papers and navigate the route.” (When I read that, I ran a scenario in my mind in which I asked my spouse or children to get out of bed while it was still dark and help me deliver newspapers to support my journalism habit. It would not go well.)

So while some disruption leads to innovation and new ways of reaching consumers, there’s this other kind, in which news organizations are so bereft that they beg professionals whose job it is to fill the newspaper to then switch job assignments and throw it into people’s front yard. To reporters at The Register who have suffered through job cuts, rollbacks and retrenchments, and now these latest indignities, that probably doesn’t scan as progress. It probably feels like a whole lot of disruption.

Update:  Life imitates art:

Inside Higher Ed, Should Faculty Have to Take Out Their Own Trash? (Nov. 18, 2014):

Perks are fewer and farther between for faculty members these days, especially those teaching at public institutions. But they can still expect the basics, such as somebody else emptying their trash cans at the end of the day, right? Not any more, at least not at West Virginia University. The institution recently announced that faculty members must begin taking out their own garbage, in order to encourage recycling. But some professors object to the measure and its premise, saying that the move is more about conserving the bottom line than the environment, and that the new policy comes at the expense of faculty morale. ...

Some faculty members barely registered the change. But others said they were shocked that the university was taking away, without much notice or any discussion, a basic service that saves them precious time, however little. And some said they were doubtful of the university’s recycling rationale, suspecting the move was more about cutting the janitorial budget by eliminating the need for staff to enter each faculty office every day to empty trash. ...

Several others raised concerns about the trash policy at faculty meetings this week and last. Brent McCusker, associate professor of geography, estimated at a recent Faculty Senate meeting that emptying the trash would cost the average university employee 11 hours per year, according to an Associated Press report. He suggested that hiring more janitors might be cheaper, and that starting a recycling campaign might be a more efficient way of promoting the practice among the faculty.