Commentary by Joe Grimm

Thank goodness that common sense prevailed about the non-compete agreement that Halifax Media Holdings tried to force on employees it acquired with the purchase of the New York Times Regional Media Group.

The agreement would have forbidden an employee who left Halifax from doing work for any other news medium in town for two years. The restriction would have applied to people who were fired or laid off and would have extended to cities where Halifax had established plans to do future business. I don’t expect that Halifax has plans to identify those places.

What did Halifax think the journalists should do? Go to welding school?

The non-compete would have made it illegal for a laid-off Halifax journalist to freelance for websites in any of its towns — and other, undisclosed towns. It would have been an absolute career killer.

Fortunately, reason or sheer embarrassment prevailed. Julie Moos, for whom I work at the Poynter Institute, other watchdogs and attorneys critiqued the situation, and Halifax backed off. The Florida-based company now will require only new employees to sign the get-out-of-town or get-out-of-the-business agreement. Employees that came with the acquisition are exempt.

We might ask why a new hire would sign such an agreement, but we know the answer, given the difficulty of finding jobs these days. The real question is whether any of this is really necessary.

Does any newsroom really need a reputation as a career trap? Does a newspaper really have that much to lose when a journalist moves to another job in town? And what’s fair about companies buying and selling newsrooms, and then forbidding employees to change newsrooms?

When I left the Detroit Free Press in a buyout in 2008, Gannett let me leave without this type of restriction. That helped me make the transition to new work and let me maintain contacts with my former employer that I think have benefited us both.

It was simply the decent way to be.

Joe Grimm, a consultant and adjunct faculty member of the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, recruited for the Detroit Free Press, Knight Ridder and Gannett from 1990 until 2008. He now teaches at the Michigan State University School of Journalism. He has run the JobsPage journalism careers site at www.jobspage.com since 1996. Questions about careers? E-mail Joe for an answer.