Guillotining the press
posted 12-4-2008 - 10:50 pm

 
[Editor's note: this item was written just days before the Tribune Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (reorganization, not liquidation; but given Mr. Zell's ineptitude, it could yet convert to the latter; one hopes for the sake of the employees and readers that it doesn't). Moreover, Conde Nast's Portfolio magazine, cited below, is now itself in a financial bind and may only survive as an online-only publication.]

So today we read about yet another round of firings — what else can you call them? Not layoffs, because those laid off are presumably rehired in time — at the Chicago Tribune. I ran across this bit of news while simultaneously looking at something else on Huffington Post and perusing my e-mail. The mail included the daily post from Gorkana.com, which lets journalists know where their colleagues have taken new positions. We use it to keep tabs on each other; but lately, it's become less a source of information than an exercise in envy and permanently diminished expectations for what David Brooks recently called "The Formerly Middle Class."

So many journalists are now in that category, the one with radically altered prospects, and there will be more before this recession is over. Assuming it doesn't slide into an actual depression. That's why reading those notices of promotions in the daily Gorkana post stings. Instead of being at a high point in our careers, looking toward advancement, some of us have had our futures dynamited before our eyes. The Romenesko column at Poynter.org reads like a morgue attendant's log with all its items about newspapers that are failing or for sale, broadcast staffs being reduced (this time, CNN's cut its science, technology and environment news staff, and the Rocky Mountain News is only one of several papers up for sale; what next?).

I'm glad Gorkana's providing the information on our colleagues; it might be useful some day for networking. But in this economy and in a town where the Chicago Tribune just cut another 11 reporters in its third round of cuts and the Sun-Times already cut staff three times in the last year, having daily updates about the more fortunate among us changing jobs just reads like rubbing salt in the wound. So I unsubscribed from that daily bit of masochism and hoped it would help unstuff my mailbox.

But the essential problem remains. We have a glut of mid-career out-of-work journalists, here and elsewhere, broadcast as well as print, and most of them won't be rehired if/when the economy improves. I see my profession imploding, and it hurts. And I see no ripple of concern among the citizenry. Democracy requires an accurately informed public, which you won't get from blogs alone, but that marketplace of ideas keeps steadily shrinking even as there are more voices shrieking on the 'net. Never mind that the quality of reporting in Chicago is plummeting for lack of adequate personnel; Sam Zell cares not for Pulitzer prizes as indicators of good reporting, as he snidely told Portfolio.com last week. One wouldn't think he'd pay all that money for a newspaper just to rip it apart bit by bit, yet that's what he's doing. Perhaps he needed a tax write-off. Or perhaps he's just an undertaker who doesn't know what he's doing. Too bad the Trib needed a good surgeon instead.

An extra tidbit of insult: on the very page where the online Tribune today reported its job cuts, what should be running next to that story but an ad for luxury home sales? Really; I'm reading this, and I'm supposed to be impressed that there are luxury homes going begging when more of my colleagues have been unceremoniously dumped into the street? Three weeks before Christmas?? Who on earth would think that a good ad placement? (Oh wait, that must be Sam Zell thinking he could combine the job at which he made his millions with the one he knows nothing about ...) No doubt the ad was put there because all those people with permanently diminished expectations in this economy still have seven figures to throw around on overpriced real estate. Yeah, right.

If you suspect this is an unhappy town for those in the media, you don't know the half of it. And it will get worse.

Here's an interesting question for you: where do all you people who turn to the Internet for your news and want to get it for free think it comes from? It comes from print and broadcast operations, folks — and those outlets have to pay reporters and editors to do the work. Take those operations away, and you have no means to pay for putting the news on the Internet. Nobody's figured out yet how to make money from online news alone.

Nothing but demagoguery comes free. If you want good journalism, you have to be willing to pay good reporters a decent wage to do it. Of course, you can stop looking for it at the Trib because Sam Zell doesn't give a damn about the fourth estate or much else. Hmmmmmmm, that sounds an awful lot like that felon Conrad Black and those twerps who still survive to run the Sun-Times into the ground ...

There are plenty of excellent reporters and editors in Chicago, but most of the experienced ones are being or have already been pushed out of their jobs. We could have the Chicago equivalent of the New York Times, but we've not had any publishers in the last 40 years who want to produce so high quality a paper, in print or online. Now, everyone who's left in the newsrooms is looking over his or her shoulder, wondering when the axe will come for them.

If you think things are bad now, just wait. Perhaps Sam Zell will try to bring back Wingo Bingo or the like, even though that failed for Rupert Murdoch when the latter bought the Sun-Times (after all, Zell seems unable to come up with any ideas of his own). Then again, not even Murdoch managed to last here: there are levels of quality low enough that not even Chicagoans will accept. But what's left of Chicago print and broadcast media after management is done lopping off heads could very well devolve into infotainment. Easily.

You want decent news reporting? Start being willing to support it. Channel 11 and PBS can't do everything, wonderful as those folks are. We still need reliable mainstream print/online news here, but heaven only knows when we'll get a publisher willing to do what it takes for us to have that, on the Internet or otherwise. Not likely in this economy. And we still don't have a good advertising model for online news that would provide enough financial support to maintain an online equivalent of a big-city newspaper, so that investigative and analytical reporting didn't become extinct. That would be an unforgiveable loss.

Publishers who come to newspapers from other industries just don't seem to do journalism or journalists any good ...

Still, it makes you wish that we had us a Ted-Turner-like moneybags with a good attitude who thought it important to do a really good job at just reporting the news, now doesn't it? One can still dream ...