CL catches some shit in the NYT
December 10, 2007 at 1:22 pm by Wayne GarciaLast week, two of Creative Loafing’s new acquisitions, the venerable Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper, laid off nine editorial employees, including some top investigative reporters. These were moves that were not anticipated when the company bought the papers earlier this year, promising at that time that the purchase wouldn’t lower the standard of journalism practiced at those two publications.
Especially disheartening was the dismissal of John Conroy at Chicago. Conroy is not only an accomplished book author but has led a one-man crusade against police brutality in the Second City. As the New York Times’ David Carr pointed out in a story this morning:
The Chicago Reader, which had published his work for over 20 years, decided it could no longer afford to support his reporting. Citing declining revenue and a need to trim costs, Alison True, the editor of the paper, laid off four of its most experienced reporters, including Mr. Conroy. The Washington City Paper, another newsweekly owned by the same company, announced five newsroom layoffs as well.
In a week of media retrenchment — rumors of further cutbacks in network news, continuing layoffs at regional dailies and a “temporary†pay cut at an Illinois daily that became permanent — nine newsroom layoffs don’t seem significant. But of course, that all depends on whose ox is being gored, and in this instance, I felt a bit of the splatter.
At the end of the 1990s, I was editor of The Washington City Paper, a weekly with a history of excellence built by Jack Shafer (now the press critic for Slate), and owned by a group of college friends turned businessmen who also owned The Chicago Reader. In the time I worked for them, I was impressed by their constancy and their willingness to support good work in the belief that if you produced quality journalism, the business would look after itself.
In the case of The Reader, it seems like that turned out not to be true. The owners in Chicago sold out last summer to an unfortunately named outfit, Creative Loafing from Atlanta, which has mandated cuts across the organization. It is as if Creative Loafing executives bought a shiny new doll and then once they got their hands on it, felt compelled to tear its head off.
Reader media writer Michael Miner called Conroy “the canary in the coal mine” for the journalistic health of his publication and printed a longer, less corporate-sounding (than his quote in the NYT) explanation for the changes from Eason:
Eason and Creative Loafing have some interesting, and let’s hope brilliant, ideas about the future of the Reader and the CL chain of six newspapers. “It’s ultimately to me a navigation problem,” Eason told me. “How do you keep putting out a newspaper at a quality people expect and how do you migrate this stuff to the Web, which is ultimately the future? We’re in a fight over who can tell you more about the street corner in Chicago. You’ve got a mobile phone and you’re hungry or you want to rent an apartment and you’re consulting your cell phone, and its going to be Google or Yahoo and they’re getting their information from somebody. Those guys” — Yahoo, Google — “they’re not even pretending to be journalists,” said Eason. But “we’re the journalism right behind them, the stories and information that’s still the most comprehensive and best stuff out there. But the challenge is make that turn. I guess I felt that if I was doing fundamental damage to the Reader I wouldn’t have bought the Reader.”
The comments from Reader readers was harsh:
First, it’s bullshit to lay people off right before Christmas. I don’t care if it’s a Jewish or Muslim operation, it’s still crap to lay someone off right before the biggest money-guzzling holiday in America.
and:
Christ, this is depressing. So, Chicago will get less hard-news and investigative reporting during a critical time in the city’s history? I don’t know about others, but I certainly don’t read the Reader for the entertainment fluff or crappy features about struggling musicians/artists, but rather the meaty city news the dailies don’t often cover.
Is the future really [the faux alt weekly] RedEye?
Fucking shoot me now.
I’m neither going to defend nor criticize the cuts until I get a chance to investigate the matter further, except to express dismay at their timing right before the holidays. I don’t believe, however, this is a CL plot to soak the readers of Chicago and Washington for cash by slashing budgets. My company, as every other company involved in media, has to make a profit to keep the door’s open. And we’re not talking about Wall Street-demanded 25 percent margins.
We’ve been very fortunate at the Tampa Bay edition not to have to go through editorial losses, although one open position in the newsroom isn’t being filled because of the slump in advertising. Cutbacks are a reality in the alt industry and the MSM alike; newspapers are hemorrhaging, and the business model is on life support. Journalists don’t have the resources to do the job they need to do, and that is hurting our democracy.
In Chicago. In Washington. In Tampa Bay. And parts beyond.
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December 11th, 2007 at 11:24 am
it seems to me that many journalists are disconnected from the revenue part of their own business model. The don’t seem to fully comprehend the idea of a the effects of a down turn in advertising dollars, shrinking readership and losses of revenue within their industry.