In one of the most graphic examples of how the mainstream print news media has fallen on hard times partially due to the 21st century trends of people getting more news online and younger people often ignoring newspapers altogether, the venerable San Francisco Chronicle is going to axe 25 percent of its newsroom jobs.
Coming on the heels of steep job cuts at the Los Angeles Times, and the sale of the Times, plus the sale of the legendary Knight-Ridder chain, this spells yet more b-a-d n-e-w-s for the print media. The paper itself reports:
To cut costs and try to adapt to a changing media marketplace, The Chronicle will trim 25 percent of its newsroom staff by the end of the summer.
“This is one of the biggest one-time hits we’ve heard about anywhere in the country,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, in Washington.
Eighty reporters, photographers, copy editors and others, as well as 20 employees in management positions are expected to be laid off by end of the summer. Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega said Friday that voluntary buyouts are likely to be offered.
Vega declined to say whether the paper is continuing to lose $1 million a week, as Hearst attorney Daniel Wall stated in court in November during a hearing on an antitrust suit filed by San Francisco businessman Clint Reilly.
“We’re not getting into any specifics at this point,” Vega said. “It’s fairly common knowledge that we have had a tough financial row here for several years. As we continue to evaluate our situation, unfortunately continued belt-tightening is necessary.”
In this case, this is seems to be less belt-tightening than dropping down several pants or dress sizes…which had become smaller already:
Some of The Chronicle’s production and other non-news departments have been reduced during the past few years, but until now the newsroom has been spared deep cuts.
Analysts predicted the reductions at The Chronicle could have repercussions for readers. While an increasing number of people get news from online aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo, those stories are most often originally reported by print journalists.
“That’s not just trimming fat, that’s an amputation. That’s losing a limb,” said Rosenstiel, who grew up in the Bay Area.
Local coverage is still what causes many readers to buy local newspapers, not just packaged AP or McClatchy Newspaper reports, newspaper columnists (who now already seem a bit Fred Flintstone-ish in this age of opinion-based weblogs and screechingly, perpetually-outraged talk radio and cable news talking heads news shows) and editorials. Many newspapers have also seen classified ads shrink in recent years as well. MORE:
He said the effect, even for people who don’t read the paper, “is that 25 percent of what goes on in the Bay Area won’t be covered. It will happen in the dark. … Our research shows that there is a lot of information that appears in a daily newspaper that doesn’t get covered by TV stations or citizen journalists or bloggers when a newspaper’s staff is cut.”
With all the free online places to find information, analysts say, it’s a great time to be a consumer of news, but a lousy time to be selling a print publication.
Another reason for the paper’s crisis, the story claims, is its location. PERHAPS. And the argument is made convincingly:
While The Chronicle isn’t subject to the same quarterly profit pressures from Wall Street investors as publicly held publications — the paper is owned by the privately held Hearst Corp. — it is on the precipice of changes in the news business, largely because of its location.
“We’re here in the birthplace of (the free online classified site) Craigslist and in the cradle of Silicon Valley, where everyone is wired,” said Peter Appert, a media analyst at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco.
Historically, Rosenstiel said, the paper has been hurt by its inability to penetrate its marketplace as much as other major metropolitan papers.
Until Hearst bought The Chronicle in 2000, readers may have been turned off by the paper, Rosenstiel said. “It was underserving its marketplace. That’s changed, and it’s a lot better now,” he said. “But Hearst bought it in 2000, which was a very difficult time to buy a newspaper.”
Vega said the layoffs have nothing to do with the cost of Hearst’s purchase of The Chronicle seven years ago, nor has the paper felt any impact from the recent purchase of the San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times by MediaNews, which gave the Denver corporation control of most other large daily papers in the Bay Area.
It isn’t so much the local market as the larger trends that’s giving the Chronicle a sharp kick in the you-know-whats…
As any news junkie, journalist, media critic or journalism school grad can tell you, evening newspapers were largely destroyed by the advent of the American habit of watching evening broadcast newscasts, which truly came into their own in the early 1960s. Print habits then began to weaken due to the immediacy of TV news at 6 that was more up-to-date than news delivered on paper at 6. Many papers eventually merged or shut evening newspapers totally.
I worked on the Wichita Eagle in Kansas from 1980-1982. About a year into my job there, Knight-Ridder announced that it was going to “merge” the Eagle into the evening Wichita Beacon and create the finest merged newspaper anywhere, a synthesis of both staffs that would carry on the Beacon within the Eagle. In reality, the corporation killed the Beacon, offered a transition so it wouldn’t lose any former Beacon readers. But in the end it amounted to Knight Ridder killing the Beacon and putting its name on the Eagle.
Here in San Diego, I worked on the San Diego Union from 1982-1990. Before I left I predicted Copley Newspapers would kill the evening Tribune. “Helen Copley [the since deceased publisher] would never do that while Neil Morgan [then the Tribune’s editor] was alive,” an editor told me. About a year after I left the paper it was announced that the two newspapers would merge — although in San Diego there seems to be a truer merger of the two with today’s San Diego Union-Tribune seeming to be a blend between the two formerly separate newspaper entities (whose two separate staffs actually, truly competed).
Fast-foward to the 21st century.
How many young people do readers of this site (or readers of this site who are young people) know who are into the newspaper reading habit?
The cable news cycles and blogs have turned news cycles into almost milli-seconds; newspapers are day-old history publications by the time people even get to them. The downsizing is evident. Zoned reporting is a sliver of what it once was on many newspapers as you cross the country. Some newspapers have downsized or eliminated book reviews. The Los Angeles Times used to have a great Sunday opinion section and a great book review section and now have merged the two…with notably less space for content.
And the style has changed: the strong challenge to daily print from the supermarket tabloids some years ago caused a shift in news values and style. And now the big challenge is the fact that some Americans don’t want fact-based reporting at all, but only want to read things they already agree with. There are Americans who get their news from Rush, Air America and only weblogs.
In the end, newspapers will likely be around in 20 or 30 years (it’s hard to sit on The Throne in the bathroom or on a subway reading news on a laptop computer). But they’ll have to adapt.
Now we see staff reductions as a form of adaptation.
There needs to be more. So what’s the next step? Stay tuned.
PS: The Moderate Voice regrets having hurt the newspaper business by taking so many readers away from the print media and causing so many job layoffs.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.