The Political Whore

I was out of the office last week but was in town and heard all about the latest round of layoffs at Media General in Tampa (including some high profile folks at the Tampa Tribune). I had a few vodkas with Phil Morgan, a three-decades features reporter, after he got the axe last week, And in the past day, a few of the ex-Tribsters even won a mention in a New York Times article on the failing media biz:

Last week, Media General, a company that owns newspapers, television stations and Web sites in the Southeast, eliminated 80 positions in Florida, including a prominent columnist and the editorial page editor at The Tampa Tribune. “The Book of Ruth,” a long-running wiseacre feature by the longtime columnist Dan Ruth, will be missed, now and then. He and the editorial page editor, Rosemary Goudreau, follow a political columnist, Joe Brown, the movie critic Bob Ross and the classical music critic Kurt Loft to the exit.

Readers, especially the ones cranky and serious enough to still be buying newspapers, have not missed the trend.

“Fire your best employees and watch your business go out of business, just like Circuit City is finding out right now. Who wants to read old news when one can find quality articles outside of the TampaTribe. Bye Bye TampaTrib, you have fired one too many of your excellent personnel and now I am firing you!” said a reader, Bob, in a comment posted to The Feed blog at TampaBay.com, a media blog by Eric Deggans, a media and television reporter at The St. Petersburg Times.

The verdict at StopBigMedia.com is that greed and profit-motive is blame, in an article titled “Bloodletting in the Newsroom”:

Greed and Profit
The Internet has transformed the media industry and how the public consumes news. More people are reading their local newspapers online than ever before. Online ad revenue grew for 17 straight quarters until its recent decline. Nevertheless, the NAA expects online ad revenue to continue its growth next year.

Despite the changing industry, newspapers remain extremely profitable. The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) reported that the average pre-tax profit margin for newspapers was 18.5 percent in 2007. Some newspaper profits remained above 20 percent. “The industry remains profitable, but it has come time to take the ‘obscenely’ out of that commonplace observation,” PEJ said in its annual State of the News Media report.

But the majority of newspapers are publicly traded companies for which any decline in profits is unacceptable. As a result, newspapers are trying to please Wall Street by axing jobs and scaling back coverage.

With fewer reporters on the beat — and less quality local coverage — it’s no wonder people aren’t subscribing to the paper. While these cuts may please stock analysts, they harm the public. There are fewer journalists covering the business of government at city halls and state capitals across the country. Media companies are closing their Washington and foreign bureaus, while the number of lobbyists pushing the legislation agendas of their corporate clients at the local, state and national levels has increased under the diminishing watchdog eye of the Fourth Estate.

I take no glee in any of the layoffs. With Creative Loafing working to reorganize its finances in Chapter 11 bankruptcy court, the view from here is nothing but sadness about this industry and our clear failure now to provide the information that people will need to make good decisions in a democracy. You can blame Wall Street, but there is plenty of blame to bring home to this industry, which spent almost nothing on R&D for technology and new products until it was too late, did little training of its employees to give them digital skills and continues to wander mindlessly from technofad to technofad in search of eyeballs.

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