The Political Whore

For those keeping score, the Tampa Tribune laid off some 70 employees companywide, with only a handful coming in the editorial department. They included longtime film critic Bob Ross, BayLife columnist Judy Hill, photographer Augie Stabler, and reporter Jim Tunstall. Far less carnage than many expected.

Other cuts included production employees at some of Media General’s weekly publications, including the South Tampa News.

The cuts were demoralizing, and editor Janet Weaver was appropriately saddened while addressing her troops yesterday. The affected employees are being given severance packages that give them additional pay based on how many years they had worked at the Trib.

The Trib calls the layoffs a realignment of its focus, moving local sections in the daily into their weekly publications, merging some sections to save newsprint, and creating “hyperlocal” websites that will eventually do the job of publishing local news.

At least one industry website posits that the Tribune is doing the right thing in moving away from print and toward a multiplatform delivery of news. Philip Stone writes in Followthemedia.com that “publishers around the world should study closely” the Trib’s new business model:

The economics of print dictate that the less copies one has to circulate or print, the lower the costs. Newsprint and circulation take up about 17% of a newspaper’s total expenditure. So reducing paper use, restricting circulation areas, goes straight to the bottom line.

But it took investment to allow all of this to happen. “The Tampa Tribune has invested approximately $16 million in capital improvements over recent years, including a new shared editorial and advertising system and tools for Web partner TBO.com. These improvements facilitate content sharing and improve reader functions such as Internet search. In addition the new tools will enable readers to contribute content and interact with the papers more easily,” a company statement said.

Stone continues by quoting a senior associate at the Project for Excellence in Journalism:

And he asked the all-important question: “Will hyper-localism lead newspapers to a new, more sophisticated way of covering their bigger backyards or will it simply become a new way to describe doing less?”

In the Tribune’s case, they have reduced the boundaries of their geographical franchise that they wish to own, but they are maintaining most of their current editorial staff to cover that franchise not only in print via community newspapers but also online, they are inviting citizen participation, and they are showing imagination as they figure out the way forward. Time will tell if all of that is editorial resource enough to cover all of the local governments, schools, businesses, clubs, neighborhoods, etc.

Local weekly newspapers are returning about 6 – 10% annual revenue increases. Can metropolitan newspapers take advantage of the local weekly newspaper business model and increase revenues accordingly? The answer to that will probably come when the print newspaper and the web site see just how many journalists and how much local reader participation is necessary to be considered really hyper-local.

If this doesn’t work, then it’s really legitimate to ask, “What next for metropolitan newspapers?”

In the wake of the Tribune moves, you are going to hear a lot about the phrase “hyperlocalism.” It is the catch phrase du jour in attempting to explain how daily newspapers are trying to recapture their new monopoly. It has led many larger papers to close foreign bureaus and turn their attention to news at the community and neighborhood level.

I worry, however, that hyperlocalism will equate to a spate of what we old-timers called “chicken dinner news,” fluffy stories about neighborhood art shows and quilt-bee gatherings. Hyperlocalism needs to evolve an investigative component, digging deeply into local public affairs, city budgets, government projects and the like rather than just telling us what new restaurants are opening this week. A critical component that continues to hold a mirror up to communities so that its residents can see how their lives are really being played out, how their decisions impact their neighbors, how they are affecting the environment, to name only a few examples.

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