‘Bloodletting in the Newsroom’ is an understatement for journalist layoffs
November 17, 2008 at 12:05 pm by Wayne GarciaI 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.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Greed and profit is not to blame. Newspapers were always published for money.
The decline of newspapers is due to agenda driven editors and journalists.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
If that is the case, why didn’t newspaper go out of business en masse in the early 1900s, when they were all openly partisan in nature?
November 17th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
And why is it that the only folks making money in this biz are highly partisan? (Fox News and Rush on the right, for instance)
November 17th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
I didn’t read Ruth, Loft or Ross but I did read Joe Brown. That was the end of The Tribune for me. Next renewal ain’t gonna happen.
November 17th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
If that is the case, why didn’t newspaper go out of business en masse in the early 1900s, when they were all openly partisan in nature?
Because they were still niche commodity.
Present-day editors and journalists have driven this industry to the toilet of bankruptcy.
Sadly, the newspaper industry is infected with the most stubborn people on the Earth and don’t realize their agenda journalism has turned off their audience.
November 17th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Mark, if “agenda journalism” was the problem then Daily Kos wouldn’t get as many page views as they do. The real problem is ownership of newspapers by corporations that care a lot more about an extra one or two percent profit than they do about running a quality newspaper - they don’t have any real skin in the journalism business, so their first instinct is to cut costs instead of being creative to increase revenue.
November 17th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Daily Kos is certainly not as profitable as a major newspaper company because online advertisting revenue pales in comparison to print.
The decline in newspaper quality is mainly due to lousy editors and journalists creating a product the public no longer wants.
Newspaper circulation isn’t down to cutting staff. It’s quite simpla.
A lousy product = loss in circulation and revenue = cuts
November 17th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
“If that is the case, why didn’t newspaper go out of business en masse in the early 1900s, when they were all openly partisan in nature?”
Huh? Because newspapers at the beginning of the 20th century had no competition. No radio, no TV, no cable, no movies, no internet. Big city dailies were the only game around. Have you no historical sense? I can’t believe a person who writes for a newspaper, even CL, could ask a questions so fucking dumb.
November 17th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Mark — and exactly what is the “agenda”, if I can ask? Because I didn’t get the memo on that over the past 25 years
November 18th, 2008 at 6:45 am
Niche/agenda journalism is what is thriving, however a newspaper has to serve an audience much more broad in tastes and scope if it is to prosper. There are only a few things that any news organization can offer over any old self-published blog. The big one is integrity of it’s journalists and trust of the readership. That is what has disappeared with this polarization for profit. Combine that with the lack of timeliness that burden’s any printed media and we may very well be seing the end of the hometown newspaper followed by the wasting away of print altogether. It may never die off completely(I’ll never read a book on a screen as long as I have a choice), but it will likely become nothing more than a boutique medium.
One thing of which I am often guilty is a lack of understanding where Joe Sixpack get’s his information. Without much contemplation on the subject, I often assume everyone reads multiple outlets for their news, only to find many of my neighbors still don’t really know what a blog is and get most of what they know of current events from the water-cooler and TV. I get the feeling that the big outlets were so quick to get moving chasing new media they forgot to figure out just where they want to go.
November 18th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
WP you got that right - Convergence here in Tampa Bayw ith MG never had a focus or an understanding of what to do with the new technoloigy media, only that they should be using it.
February 20th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
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