Hanna Skandera
The Albuquerque Journal’s Leslie Linthicum is out with a new column that illustrates why the out-of-state consultants Public Education Secretary-Designate Hanna Skandera has hired have sparked so much controversy.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that the Journal paid Linthicum $125,000 a year, she wrote – and that her bosses had also frozen several positions “after a long, loud public relations campaign about the importance of tight belts and budgetary restraint.”
“Now let’s say I ask those bosses to pony up $152,000 of that saved salary money so I can hire eight consultants to advise me on how to write my column,” Linthicum wrote. “(I wouldn’t dare.) But if I did, I’d have my idea consultant, a person to do all those pesky interviews and someone else to transcribe them. And I’d get a typist, a grammarian, a spell-checker and a writing coach. I would pay a pretty penny for a Synonym Czar.”
“I’d find them all outside of New Mexico because (I gather) that’s where all the brains and talent reside,” she wrote. “Wow. Writing my column just got a whole lot easier. It’s almost as if I’ve outsourced a good part of my job with the newspaper’s money while still cashing my big, fat paychecks.”
“Now I just have to cross my fingers that no enterprising reporter discovers my nice little scam and slaps it all over the front page of the newspaper,” she wrote.