Growth plan to strain overworked newsrooms
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I read with a fair amount of skepticism Lynne
Marek’s story in Crain’s Chicago Business about Michael Ferro’s plans to
make the Sun-Times and its ragtag fleet of daily and weekly suburban papers the
nation’s top local newspaper.
Ferro is chairman of Wrapports LLC, which purchased Sun-Times
Media in December and, more recently, the Chicago Reader. Some believe the
company is planning more acquisitions.
Marek’s story, under the headline, Sun-Times
owner: ‘We’re not buying the Trib,’ laid out how Ferro said he intends to
boost the media company’s subscriptions by 100,000 in the next two years.
I shook my head as I read, not at Marek’s reporting, but in
wonder. Ferro’s plans are ambitious — beefed up sports coverage, a daily column
written by celebrities with Chicago roots, a new Monday business section.
Nowhere in the story did I read anything about hiring more
people to do the work. In fact, that would be counter to what is happening
elsewhere in the industry.
Tens of thousands of newspaper employees have lost their
jobs in the past five years as the industry suffered a stunning one-two punch:
·
Just as dinosaurs failed to adapt to a changing
environment in a time of planetary upheaval, the newspaper industry fell victim
to its own institutional smugness with the advent of the Internet. By the time that
media companies realized their errors in this — either ignoring it or trying to
force their own business model upon the Internet — they had little choice but
to scramble and dash to try to find a new business model that would work
online. It appears to date that few companies are doing that successfully.
·
·
The Great Recession of 2008 was near fatal to
many publishers. Since the late 1990s, newspapers already had lost much of
their revenue — classified advertising — to online rivals like Craigslist,
which offered the same service for free. The recession, which followed one as
we entered the new millennium, prompted advertisers to cut back. For some
papers, it was too much: They simply closed. For others it was ugly —round
after round of layoffs that were desperate bids for survival.
·
Ultimately, most papers these days have far fewer
journalists doing far more work.
I can say from experience that journalism never has been a
lucrative profession — except for the owners. So those who remain and were
underpaid to begin with are more overworked than ever. I’m assured that’s just
as true today at the Sun-Times publications as anywhere else.
Sadly, the cuts have been hell on newsrooms at multiple
levels. Fewer reporters means they must scramble like seldom before — because
each paper still has to have solid news coverage to remain relevant — both to print
and online readers.
Assignment editors, who should be coaching writers, planning
and assigning stories and directing news coverage, have been forced into
broader rolls with more varied responsibilities. Consequently, there is little
time to coach young reporters to become better information gatherers and better
writers, let alone time enough to ensure their stories are ready for the copy
desk.
Quality control is another great concern. Many newsroom
casualties have been skilled copy editors — the people who ensure the reporters’
stories have names spelled correctly, that punctuation is in order, facts are
correct, headlines make sense. Quality is expected but virtually invisible;
lack of it is jarring and can push readers away. Seriously, can you trust a
paper that fails to spell correctly the name of a four-term mayor? Failing to
take the time to sweat the “small stuff” like spelling and punctuation reflects
poorly — and detracts from the paper’s credibility — on coverage of greater
issues.
With ever-shrinking copy desks, fewer sets of eyes are
looking over each story. That greatly increases the likelihood of mistakes
slipping through. Consider, too, that a copy editor who 15 years ago was
editing, say 20 or 25 stories in a day, when workloads were considered tolerable,
may be looking at twice that number of stories today. I stress the use of the
term “looking at,” because with that kind of expectation, true editing cannot
be taking place on each story. I worked under such conditions in 1990, when I
coined the phrase “spray-and-pray editing” — meaning you sprayed your eyes over
the story and you hoped to high heaven that you would catch all the mistakes.
The same is true of page design and graphic art. Instead of
unique and compelling news and features presentations each day, many papers are
relying on templated pages, where stories and photos are dropped into slots.
That takes away much of the designer’s creativity and makes the job an assembly
line kind of drudgery.
These kinds of work conditions breed mistakes.
I heard a newspaper executive in Cheyenne once describe
newspapers as the impossible product from the outset. No other product sold
anywhere, he said, has its content put together from scratch every day, and
with each day comes a completely new list of ingredients, a completely
different recipe and a completely different package design. That makes
newspapers a unique, daily miracle to begin with, he told me at that time,
which was about two decades ago.
Certainly he was talking about the printed product, but the
same is true in many ways today about the news websites — new ingredients, new
recipes daily.
Imagine if candy bars were made the same way, he said. But
of course, if you scrimp on the ingredients or in their preparation, they might
not taste as good. Then, when your fan base diminishes, you must cut back
somewhere else, and the same thing happens, so you cut again, and again, and
again. Soon, that candy bar tastes like crap, and no one wants to buy it.
That, in my view, is the hole many — not all, but many news
organizations have been digging for themselves. They have been killing their quality,
their own relevance in the communities they serve. It is no wonder that fewer
people desire their declining level of service.
Yet here is Mr. Ferro telling a lunchtime audience at the
Chicago City Club that he is going to add new features, new sections — and more
work — to an already overburdened crew.
I wonder when they — my former co-workers who, unlike
myself, survived the layoffs — will start to break. Will I start hearing of
heart attacks, strokes and forced retirements?
Or will Ferro and his Wrapports investors step up with some
relief for my ex-colleagues?
I hope but am skeptical that the latter will prove true.
In the meantime, I scour the online job boards with growing desperation.
I want to work again, full-time and for at least a living wage. So I hope and I
pray. But each day, I watch as the industry continues to languish and I wonder
if the answer to my prayer is no. Each time I ponder that question my hope
fades a little more, my desperation grows, and the seeds of bitterness begin to
take root.
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