In a break from the daily five news stories, here are five other items flying under the radar of your nation/world page. Yet they represent a frightening trend across the nation. The tenets of journalism — a critical component of a healthy nation — are being cast aside for the lure of advertising profits. Newspapers are being traded and dumped like commodities on our rollercoaster stock market. We’ve all seen movies about the day after a nuclear blast. What if we all wake up one morning and there are no more local newspapers?
O P I N I O N
Despite what Paul Simon sang about ways to leave a lover,
you only need five ways to kill a newspaper.
And that’s what’s happening to my hometown paper.
1) Let the facility deteriorate with no effort toward repairs. Loading docks are crumbling to the point that the cables in the concrete below are exposed and rusting. Dodging the potholes in the parking lot resemble what it must have been like in late March 2003 driving through downtown Baghdad. One at an entrance to the lot is so big, it was dubbed Lake Pontchartrain. I learned yesterday that they’ve just put up orange cones to make workers take another entrance instead of repairing it.
The roof is in shambles. When it rains, it rains inside some parts of the building. The HVAC is so messed up that when it’s cold out, it feels like the air conditioning comes on.
2) Demoralize the staff. The staff was already skin and bones when I left. In a month’s time, four workers departed and there are no plans to replace them — just shuffle around what’s left. Reporters who show a strong interest in a particular subject are denied any chance to pursue it.
In a move reminiscent of “1984,” the publisher posted banners reminding the newsroom employees of their daily digital goals on walls where you can’t miss them if you look in any direction. (The day one plummeted to the floor when the tape fell off, there was a raucous standing ovation.)
On top of this, for the first time in the paper’s history, they are making the employees punch in/out on a timeclock that reads their fingerprints. But one of the biggest insults was when a flashing light was installed (with an accompanying signal in the publisher’s office) to let the whole newsroom know a phone was ringing and hadn’t been picked up by the third ring. (Who needs waterboarding — this works fine enough on newsroom employees.)
3) Force mandates on reporters instead of allowing them to do their important job of gathering the news. The latest is forcing every newsroom employee to be trained on video. Certainly this is a good skill to acquire, but the understanding is that if there is breaking news, the first available reporter (or editor or clerk) will be pulled from his/her daily beat and sent out to take video. Besides the breaking news, each trained “videographer” will have to produce a video a week to make sure skills remain sharp. Will these be investigative videos, probing important issues affecting the community? Not likely. That would take time. Think more cute puppies and washing salt off your car when unseasonable warm weather hits.
If you had a newsroom flush with employees, that would be one thing. However, making a video takes at least one full work shift (for filming and editing). That means stories for the newspaper (and, dare I forget the almighty Web) are put on hold, copy that needs to be typed up and edited is put on hold, and on some days, ringing phones that need to be answered will not be answered. *See above.
Of course there is a method to their madness for pushing all to do Web site videos, as Jim Hopkins notes astutely on his Gannett Blog. “The advertising rates are irresistible compared to conventional banner or text ads,” Hopkins says.
4) Disregard a community’s history. Our newsroom got its digital archive in 1996. If a reporter needed information that pre-dated that, you took a very brief stroll down a hall to the library where all the old news clips, obits, columns, photographs and microfiche were stored. The walls were filled with all sorts of old reference books that provided invaluable information on our community. When the new publisher (Mr. Your Sole Purpose is to Connect Advertisers With Their Target Audiences) came on board, he ordered the librarian to throw out all the old books. When his order was refused, he hired a moving company to take all of the hard-copy archives and move them into the basement of the building. Somehow the microfiche were given a reprieve and were allowed to stay.
Once the library space was cleared, he filled it with a team of advertising execs dubbed “The Majors.” A handful of desks sit in that big room. Now reporters researching stories before 1996 have to walk to the other end of the building to get to the archives in the unheated basement. (What effect will that flux in temperatures have on priceless photographs?)
This publisher once remarked about a man who built this community that “He’s dead, his company is long gone. Why do we care?”
5) Treat your loyal customers like dirt. This community has a good number of senior citizens. Some are tech savvy, but many will never own a computer. Reading the newspaper is often an important part of their day. These are the people paying employees’ salaries, yet little regard is given to their needs. Yes it’s important to have a strong Web presence, but these people shouldn’t be forgotten. Why give them barely more than a page and a half of nation/world news? Why force inane stories targeted toward 18 to 34-year-olds (who never were much for subsribing to a newspaper anyway) on them?
The worst abuses come from the Circulation department. Many of these senior citizen subscribers ask that their newspaper be slipped inside their doors or mail boxes because they could fall if they went down steps to retrieve it. It used to be that such requests were honored gladly. Not anymore.
A friend of mine used to have a great paper carrier. Then just after the new publisher came on board, things went haywire. The carrier quit and a replacement was hired. One day there’d be no paper; the next day she’d get two copies. On many days this long-time subscriber would buy the paper for both herself and a neighbor in her 90s just to ensure that they both got it. They were paying the newspaper double, in a sense, for horrible service.
My elderly neighbor is on vacation for the second time since Christmas. Both times she called Circulation to ask that the delivery was stopped until she returns. Both times, the paper continued to be delivered.
One of the problems is that Circulation is no longer within the crumbling building. Workers were laid off and the service outsourced several states away. (At least that’s better than the advertising artists who lost their jobs to workers in India!) When you call for help, you have to wait and wait and wait for someone to pick up — just to be told that by the time you got through to them, it was past the time they send out drivers with replacement copies for the day.
All of this makes you wonder if the corporation that owns our newspaper is trying to drive it out of existence (leaving us with no newspaper) to go all-Web-all the time. Or, maybe they’re paring the newspaper down to bare bones so it can be sold off more easily.
The scary thing is this is not a chance occurrence. Mega-media are doing this across the U.S. Meanwhile, in 2006 the top five executives and two retired executives of the corporation that owns this community’s paper were paid more than $36 million in salary, bonuses, stock awards, option awards, deferred compensation earnings and other compensation. When was the last time employees at our newspaper got a bonus? Couldn’t a portion of that money be reinvested in the dying papers it supports? Have they no sense of responsibility to the communities they serve?
Unfortunately, the day we wake up without a local newspaper is not a sci-fi story plot. It’s coming soon… to a neighborhood near you!
♣ Nation/world news tally in my local paper today: 1½ pages
Feed me 5 Under the Radar
