Despite what is expected to be an unseasonably sunny few days, at least one hundred Seattleites will have lousy weekends. By Monday, 131 soon-to-be former employees of the Seattle Times Company, the owner of Washington State’s largest daily, will have to decide whether they want to be bought out or laid off.
In a decision made public on Monday, the Times said it’ll “slice its flagship newspaper's staff by nearly 200 and make other cuts aimed at saving $15 million.” That casualty list will include circulation, advertising and newsroom personnel, a spokesperson for the company said.
Vice President Alayne Fardella said in an e-mail to employees that up to 45 circulation workers, 30 newsroom employees and 24 advertising staff could be laid off. The exact number will depend on how many employees choose to accept buyouts and leave voluntarily, she said.
On the other coast, if The New York Times and Variety are to be believed (a suspension of disbelief chasm too wide for many to fjord, I know), then The Seattle Times’ journalistic brethren at CBS News should prepare for a similar agonizing future weekend of weighing the buy-out versus laid-off option. If rumors and a news report in the Old Grey Lady prove true, then CBS brass is giving serious consideration to subcontracting its “newsgathering operations to CNN.” (Read: The reporting, off-air producing, etc., that fills the 30 minute news hole between America’s affiliate coverage and the network’s weekly evening sitcoms.) Although Variety reports that the sharp-penned MBAs at CNN and CBS are discounting the rumor, another unnamed insider said they “would eventually resume the discussion about a merger or alliance.”
Huh. Two examples. Two different media. One week. It’s a tough time to be in or supporting “the business,” as journalists like to refer to the profession. And regardless of one’s view of the amorphous yet seemingly omniscient mainstream media, the reasons for and consequences of a slow but steady death of the Fourth Estate in America – at least what has become the conventional understanding of the mainstream press – is worth at least a few seconds of thought.
Fuel Shortage. At one point, owning a newspaper was basically a license to print money. Not anymore. As readership and circulation numbers have declined at a precipitous rate, the advertisers (the self-proclaimed fuel of a free press) have gone elsewhere. (See: Online.) You don’t need a complex market segmentation analysis to understand that it just doesn’t make as much sense to allocate money to space in newsprint when fewer and fewer people are going to see it. Without the advertising dollars, newspapers can’t hit the margins needed to keep employees (front office, back office, circulation, reporters, editors and the copy desk) on the payroll. That’s sad and short-sighted. And it’s in part what’s happening to the 131 soon-to-be unemployed Seattle Times’ staffers.
Mis-Modeled. In the age of the Internet, citizen journalism and online aggregators, many people’s concept of the “news” just ain’t what it once was. A story from one of the wires isn’t worth as much over morning coffee if you read it the night before on your laptop while sipping your nightcap. There have always been two great differentiators with the news – speed and veracity. But in a world where the speed of the Internet makes the procedure of the “daily miracle” appear glacial, and when the veil of journalistic objectivity and accuracy have had more than their share of pummeling by high-profile cases, anything other than “traditional” or “mainstream” media is the new black. The old stuff? A vague, faded, grayish hue. Again, sad and unfortunate.
This Matters. I never like to hear about someone losing a job. And I really don’t like to see good journalists and support staff being asked to walk because of corporate cutbacks. But, regrettably, none of this is surprising; the business end of journalism – the accountants, executive editors and management – haven’t figured out how to balance the market with their accounting ledgers. Journalism suffers. And what ultimately matters, and what Americans should care about, is how the business will recalibrate and what effect that might have on the flow of information. Blogs are great. Citizen journalism has its purity. But, even for those who cry “bias” with regard to the mainstream media (and I’m among that crowd at times), newspapers and the mainstream media serve a function critical to democracy: Ideally leveraging reporting and writing talent to cover events, stories, people and places in a timely, reliable fashion with the goal (paraphrasing one of my professors at Missouri's journalism school) of reaching the closest verifiable approximation of the truth under deadline. Yes, reporters sometimes miss the mark. But it’s much better than having no mark at all.
It’s said that no medium ever fully replaces another. And although the hit business self-help book, “Who Moved My Cheese,” keeps coming to mind, some sort of symbiotic coexistence instead of replacement will probably be the eventual case with the Fourth Estate. The mainstream media won’t be replaced entirely by blogs, camera phone reports from citizens, and online news sources not connected to a “mainstream” source. And I’d say that’s a very good thing for the Republic. It’s nice to have an adult in the room.
Good journalists aren’t made overnight and the more who are forced out (or never enter the business in the first place) will make it that much harder for the information pendulum to swing back to equilibrium. So let’s hope that someone, somewhere is figuring this out. Who knows, maybe the new black will meet the faded, grayish hue halfway. Then we might end up with something useful and maybe even better – something that hits the mark of TRVTH that the mainstream media says serves as its touchstone, and the market demand to support it.