thursday, september 14, 2006
Hard Times for the Rock of Truth and Righteousness
"Build the news upon the rock of truth and righteousness, conducting it always upon the lines of fairness and integrity, and acknowledging the right of the people to get from the newspaper both sides of every important question." - George Bannerman DealeyI can still vividly remember the October day back in 2001 when I got a phone call at home from the managing editor of the paper I worked at. This was a little strange since 1) it was 8 p.m. on a Sunday night and 2) I didn’t really like her that much nor she me.
Anyhow, I was told my presence had been requested at a meeting early the next morning and, sorry, she was not at liberty to tell me what it was about.
Needless to say, when I went into the main office the next day all the paper’s panjandrums were sitting dourly at the table and a properly beefy security guard was just outside the door. After an exchange of my security card and beeper for a somewhat tawdry severance check I was invited to leave the building through the loading dock.
My offense? Having the misfortune of working for a Belo Corporation newspaper.
I was reminded of this distasteful experience this week as Belo announced that 111 newsroom employees at the company’s flagship paper, The Dallas Morning News, had taken buyout offers. The move, reportedly, will keep the dreaded specter of layoffs at bay but it leaves 450 editorial employees to retrench and focus mainly on local news.
The Dallas Morning News was where I started my professional career as a journalist, doing my dues as a news clerk on the metro desk in the mid-1990s. By the time I got that ominous phone call I had spent four years working for The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California – the far western outpost of the Belo media empire.
I had the good fortune to join the California paper when it was headed by one of the best editors I have ever worked for, George Rodrigue. But he had been called back to Dallas and there was little left at the paper that matched the journalistic zing he gave it during his tenure.
Being thrown aside by the corporation after the time I spent working for them left me pretty bitter for some time after. But eventually I realized I was miserable working under the conditions at the PE and an even worse experience at another paper afterward convinced me my future did not lie in the newsroom of a daily, major or otherwise.
So now, when I hear about what has happened in Dallas, well, I’m just filled with a sense of sadness for a great institution that has fallen about as far as one can imagine.
In recent months the ranks of papers that have announced buyouts and job cuts has grown at an alarming rate and include some of the most venerable mastheads in the country; The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, The Sun of Baltimore and The Hartford Courant.
The fingers point at the usual suspects, rising newsprint costs and the evil Internet swiping readers and advertisers. The former has been invoked so often I have a hard time believing companies have not had the time to prepare for the reality of the situation. The latter, I believe, is a red herring.
The Internet isn’t stealing anything from newspapers, it is the other way around. People are actively seeking out other avenues for discovering information about the world around them since they have learned they can’t rely on the newspaper to do it for them any more.
The deep dark secret that all the mission statements and memos to the staff don’t explain is the fact that newspapers are astonishingly and obscenely profitable. Belo, as a company, boasts a 17.75 percent profit margin.
I lost my job in 2001 as part of a round of company-wide layoffs that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. This incredible event put an unbelievable strain on newspaper budgets across the country. Basically the attacks and their aftermath required tons of news to be printed without the advertising in place to pay for it, that effect was magnified when the economic shock of the attacks slowed down the economy in the final quarter of that year.
But that's not entirely the whole story. Perhaps you have heard of Belo’s first glorious effort to enter the wild world of the Interwebs – Cuecat.
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Salon dismissed it as "an improbable creation that accomplishes nothing but that's absurd in its complexity." But Belo stuck with it for a year and sank almost $40 million into the effort before it went belly up in ’01. (A pretty good synopsis of the situation is found in this article from the independent weekly, The Dallas Observer).
This type of sharp business acumen reared its ugly head again in 2004 when the company admitted the DMN had been overstating its circulation by 9 percent daily and 13 percent on Sunday. (The Dallas Observer dissection of the ugly situation can be found here.) Needless to say, investors were not happy. Repaying its advertisers and the loss in ad revenue eventually have to be balanced somewhere to keep that 17-plus percent profit margin healthy.
But, to be fair, Belo is not alone in this situation. The Los Angeles Times has slashed more than 200 positions over the last five years from an editorial staff that now numbers about 940. Its editor is now in a stare down with the owners concerning the threat of another round of cuts. This while the paper is reporting that its operating profit margin was 20 percent.
The problem with this is that the economic bottom line completely misses the key reason for these institutions existence – the news. The business of newspapers is to keep advertising up so the company keeps making money. The heavy personnel cost of the newsroom looks like a ripe place for cuts when you want to keep the shareholders happy.
And it is. The 111 FTE (full-time equivalents) who were pulled off the books on Thursday will save the company about $9.9 million annually. (The Press Enterprise acted with their usual sense of class - laying off the librarian who has worked at the paper for more than four decades while soliciting ex-DMNers for other openings). While that’s a good start for the short term issue, the long term effect could be disastrous.
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It took more than a decade but that strategy paid off as the DMN became one of the best papers in the US. It had a top ten circulation and a reputation as a solid paper news-wise. It played a major role in exposing the savings and loan scandals in the 1980’s and the staff won no less than seven Pulitzers during that period.
Written as a week in the world of the DMN newsroom there is an ugly undertone to the book as the final chapters deal with the death of the cross-town Dallas Times Herald – a paper DMN Publisher Burl Osborn swore to make a parking lot and did. With the demise of that publication, Dallas became a one-newspaper town.
Many trace the descent of the paper and Belo to that event but, although it was certainly prophetic, I’m not so sure it contained the cause. One part of the book that echoes prophetically is how Gelsanliter showed the Morning News’ strategy of siphoning away big name talent from The Times Herald was a key part of the latter’s demise. Now the DMN is doing the same thing to itself.
With these buyouts (not to mention the previous two rounds of layoffs) The DMN is losing some of the best talent that it had the good fortune to have behind a keyboard. Two strong examples are TV critic Ed Bark and Investigative Reporter Pete Slover.
Bark was, by far, one of the most incisive and intelligent critics in the country. He is the rare journalist who treats the medium with the respect it deserves when it lives up to its potential and the scorn it invites when it doesn’t. I cannot see him languishing long without finding someone interested in his work.
Slover, who is leaving to pursue his long-neglected law career, was one of the most dogged journalists working anywhere and it is difficult to think anyone else will be able to unearth the type of stories he had a knack for tracking down.
That's just what the loss of those two will mean. Now think about the fact there are literally dozens of folks of that caliber walking out the door.
I think back on my days working on the Metro Desk of the DMN and I don’t really remember all the brutal deadlines and the typical temper tantrums, I remember a great group of people I loved to go to work just to see what might happen when they all got together in the same room.
I remember reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Craig Flournoy singing, “We build the news on the Rock of Truth! Do Da! Do Da!” at the top of his lungs. I remember Columnist Larry Powell playing “Kung Fu Fighting” on the intercom system one afternoon. I remember fellow clerk (and now Wall Street Journal reporter) Pat Barta’s friends calling and leaving messages for him with bogus names like "Harry Paratestes" just to hear the secretary yell it across the newsroom.
And I remember learning journalism by watching some of the best people in the business do their stuff, day in and day out. (I also vividly remember a rash of corrections I incurred and almost lost my job over; a lesson I would rather have not have had to learn.)
It was these people that made the DMN a great paper. And it is these people that are now leaving it.
Being laid off, as tough as it was for me back then, really was the best thing for my sanity and for my career. I don’t fit well in a newsroom environment and I don’t do very well under shoddy leadership. I was pampered working for the best in Dallas, it was a bit of a shock to learn that the paper was an exception in the industry.
I like being a foreign journalist. I like the freedom it gives me to follow the stories I find interesting. I like the opportunity it presents to work with journalism professionals who know their business.
It is my greatest hope that the folks who walk away from the paper with this buyout have as much luck in their own endeavors. (And it seems Ed Bark already has taken things into his own hands, starting a website Uncle Barkey's Bytes. If you are interested in the recent events at the DMN I highly suggest you read his essay on the subject, Why I'm Here.)
In the end, I have to say that I am in agreement with the comment of Mr. Sunshine, a blogger whose site, News Buyout, has popped up to chronicle the recent events and their impact.
"The point is simply this: With our industry in the state it's in, now is the time to be using our heads about our futures. Think about it. Somebody out there needs you, whether they know it or not right now."
I just wish someone had been there to tell me that on that grey October day five years ago.
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