As Newspapers Continue To Gut Their Newsrooms Can Publishers Justify Their Spin That The Editorial Quality Remains The Same?

Philip M. Stone August 7, 2007

There’s hardly a day that goes by that some US newspaper doesn’t announce it is cutting back on staff and also resourcing jobs elsewhere. But usually with such cutbacks publishers and editors try and convince their readers it will make no difference to the end product. Hogwash!

So it is somewhat refreshing to see a community newspaper editor tell it exactly like it is. Steve Smith, editor of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington , a daily with close to 100,000 circulation, told his staff in a note that by this time next year the newsroom would be down anywhere from 8 – 12 positions. But what was different is that he didn’t try to pretend the same good job could be done with less people.

“None of us should hold any illusions here,” he told staff. “A smaller staff means a lesser paper. There is no ‘working harder’ or ‘working smarter’ rhetoric that can hide the impact of staff reductions. Doing more with less is corporate BS and you won’t hear it from me. There is no way to make this pig look like anything other than a pig. As we reduce staff we will have to make very tough choices and some of what we do now simply won’t survive the process,” he warned.

Refreshing candor. Don’t recollect that type of explanation given by Tribune, for instance, as the Los Angeles Times culled so much of its newsroom over the past couple of years, although we shouldn’t forget the editor and the publisher both lost their jobs when they publicly said that enough was enough. They were replaced by people from Chicago who toed the corporate line.

And this is really the sorry story of print today. Because advertisers are sending some of their spend to digital the newspapers are cutting back on their print expenses. Making it worse, circulation nosedives as readers switch to digital, more reason for further cutbacks meaning a lesser product. 

If the never-ending cycle continues at what point will readers rise in rebellion and say they are no longer getting true value for money? For publishers, it is all about margins, seemingly at any cost to the product itself. Never forget that above all else, newspapers are a business, open to all market forces,  and for all of the freedom of the press issues and how democracy is served by having the finest independent newspapers possible, at the end of the day, it’s all about margin.

The real shame here is that time and time again newspapers have shown that get hold of a good local story and the readers will come. Tragedies, of course, are a particular interest especially when that tragedy personally affects the reader. The folks in Minneapolis-St. Paul gobbled up additional issues of their newspapers to read about the bridge collapse. In England when the severe floods hit a couple of weeks ago, community newspapers also found themselves increasing the print run even if distribution in some cases meant kayaking down Main Street!

But how do you really cover all the local news that a newspaper should be covering if management is busy culling that local reporting staff?

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is a pretty good example of a newspaper going through wretched editorial cutbacks, and editors had to hustle to get enough reporters out there on the biggest story to hit their city in decades – the bridge collapse.

This is the same Star-Tribune that McClatchy sold last December in basically a fire sale with some tax advantages to a private equity group, Avista Capital Partners. When that sale finalized in March, 24 newsroom writers, editors and support staff took buyouts.  By May the newspaper announced another 145 jobs had to go, including 50 in the newsroom, so in just the space of this year alone 74 newsroom jobs vanish.

To compensate, editors had to decide what continued to get covered locally and what didn’t. And that meant that about 100 newsroom staffers were taken off current assignments and forced to apply for new assignments. Some beats just weren’t going to exist anymore. Can that newspaper truthfully say its daily product was serving its public better than before the cuts?

Managing editor Scott Gillespie explained it in business terms, “We’re in a business and the business model that we came to know and be comfortable with in the 90s changed dramatically.”

So with all that under its belt how did the newspaper manage to throw 75 reporters and photographers onto the bridge calamity?  “We pulled people from sports, business, features and everyone who was here,” said Editor Nancy Barnes. She had 15 photographers at the site, even pulling the photographer from the Minneapolis Twins baseball game.

By all accounts the Star Tribune can be proud of a job well done. It quickly did some investigative work on the physical condition of the bridge, it added four pages and increased the day’s press run by 25,000 copies. Its web site had the first news about 20 minutes after the disaster and the demands on the site became so big during the day that registration was canned.

No one can say that the bridge was not number one that day in Minneapolis and anything else came in a distant second, but the newspaper had to ravage its beat system to throw the resources it thought necessary to do the job right, and everything else suffered accordingly.

Editors must now be asking themselves whether they have enough resources to follow this story thoroughly for the next year or so as investigators try to figure out what went wrong. Are the additional resources going to be for the daily investigative journalism this story requires, or will editors be forced to give up even more beats in order to cover this story? Will there be reporters available to concentrate on why, for instance, the structurally deficient bridge was not taken completely out of service, to investigate whether the bridge could really take the weight of all those heavy cement trucks and the like being used for reconstruction work that were parked on the bridge, and so many other angles that will come up?

All lines of inquiries that the newspaper should be following on a daily basis. It should “own” this story, whether it is in Minneapolis or Washington. Or is it going to let the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and others come and steal their thunder and do that investigative journalism, beating them to the punch? After all, those kind of coverage costs are really going to hit the editorial bottom line.

Will Avista Capital Partners actually figure out that this could be a great story for  adding readers, which should mean adding advertisers, which could mean increasing advertising rates…

After all, isn’t that what newspapers are really desperate to do these days?

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