By Mark Fitzgerald
Morris Publishing Group and its creditors took practically forever to agree on a reorganization plan, but when they entered U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the publisher’s home town of Augusta, Ga., with a prepackaged Chapter 11 filing on Jan. 19, they began racing to the exit doors.
The judge overseeing the case immediately set the confirmation hearing for less than a month away.
The only speed bump was a quixotic pair of St. Augustine, Fla., businesspeople and community activists “horrified,” they said, at the decline of their local daily and other Morris-owned papers.
Ed Slavin and Judith Seraphin argued in a court motion that the alleged decline in the quality and quantity of coverage at the St. Augustine Record was a direct result of “Morris family mis-management,” and that the paper had been so weakened under Morris ownership that it was no longer capable of alerting citizens to government and private corruption. They asked the court to appoint a trustee “to protect the public interest in zealous local, government and investigative reporting.”
Nice try, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John S. Dalis said in effect in a 13-page ruling released Thursday -- but you two have no standing in terms of economic or legal interest.
Slavin and Seraphin hung much of their argument on a statement in the Morris bankruptcy announcement that "readers and advertisers should expect no change" as a result of the filing.
Now that sounded like PR boilerplate the first time we read it, but Slavin and Seraphin saw it a little differently: "After the debtor's massive indebtedness and resulting low-quality news coverage, the promise of 'no change' is an outrage."
Judge Dalis noted in his ruling that, with Slavin and Seraphin officially out of the case, there were no objectors to the prepackaged plan, making it virtually certain that Morris will emerge from Chapter 11 after a confirmation hearing Feb. 17.
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