Despite The Horrific Toll, It's Live Free Or Die
By Donald R. Winslow
© 2009 News Photographer magazine
SEATTLE, WA (March 11, 2009) – As the journalism world and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's readers and fans sit watching what everyone has concluded are the newspaper's last days as a printed product, there's unfortunately plenty of time in this crowded virtual waiting room to reflect on the number of American newspaper jobs lost in the last year.
A good place to start this meditation might be with Erica Smith, a graphic designer and multimedia producer for a newspaper in the heartland who – by her own admission – is "obsessed" with keeping track of the layoffs and buyouts at newspapers in the United States.
"The 2008 total is 15,633, although in reality it's really higher than that," she told News Photographer magazine today. "Some newspapers never report how many people were laid off, so my list has several 'unknowns' in it."
But her numbers for this year are pretty accurate, she says.
"4,311 this year. I know I need to add the Miami Herald [175 jobs lost today], but karma being what it is I'll have to wait to do that until I'm off work. Thanks to the furloughs [at her paper], I have the next five days to catch up. If McClatchy's 1,600 number is true, then the total will be above 5,000 when all of those layoffs are released."
That's 4,311 newspaper jobs in just the last 10 weeks!
Smith's Web site "Paper Cuts" is the grim reaper of the newsroom.
"Beaufort Gazette: 9 employees laid off, 8 open positions eliminated. Salaries will be cut for all remaining employees."
"Closed Newspapers: The Algonquin Countryside. The American Fork Citizen. Lehi Free Press. Lone Peak Press. Orem Times. The Pleasant Grove Review. Arlington Heights Post. Elk Grove Times. Baltimore Examiner. Bloomfield Free Press. (One has to pause to scroll, the list is longer than the page). The Lakota Journal. The Maricopa Tribune. (Scroll, scroll). The Rocky Mountain News.
The list goes on and on.
Smith's figures also don't include the folks in Seattle. Not yet.
Earlier this week Time, a magazine that hasn't been looking all that well itself lately and which this year has lost quite a few pages as well as employees of its own, cheered readers with a list by Douglas A. McIntyre of 10 of "The Most Endangered Newspapers in America."
Two of the newspapers on that list, in a response reminiscent of the infamous Monty Python "Bring Out Your Dead" movie scene, today replied in essence, "We're not dead yet, we're getting better now." They told McIntyre and Time that the allegations were "baseless."
Cleveland Plain Dealer publisher Terrance Egger said his newspaper shouldn't have been on the list, that they "made money" last year and are "committed to producing the Plain Dealer in both print and online."
Managers at the New York Daily News, also on the death watch list, said they didn't belong there either and that McIntyre's inclusion of the Daily News was "irresponsible and unfounded."
Well, I guess we'll see.
On Buzz Log this week it said that "much of the newspaper biz may be headed the way of the cave painting," which is where "the first news ever reported was drawn on the inside of a cave 25,000 years ago." Claudine Zap wrote there that three options for newspapers of the future include "Let professors run the presses, Go Non-profit (Most Already Are), and 'Go Goop' (a blog)."
Meanwhile – and this analogy of a dark tar pit future for newspapers may be my favorite one yet – The Korea Herald, that bastion of journalism tradition, wrote in an Editorial today that newspapers are an endangered species on par with "the lumbering dinosaur ... Cumbersome newsprint is making way to the more nimble genus and lithe platforms of new media ... the fate of [American newspapers] is akin to that of the 40-ton Brachiosaurus. The global financial crisis is an extinction level event for traditional media in the same way that climactic changes obliterated the Mesozoic era."
As strange a beginning as that may be to an Editorial, their conclusion was at least thought provoking. The Korea Herald believes that the biggest concern for American newspaper editors is not that they're a dying species but that they might be faced with becoming a "protected species" through a government financial bailout, like in France and India where the governments talk about propping up dying papers.
Quoting Mathias Dopfner, the publisher of the newspaper Bild in Germany, The Korean Herald's Editorial concludes:
"That would be a dark day [in America] for press freedom. A bankrupt media company is better than a government-funded one."
I wonder if what Dopfner says is anything like what the 170 people are feeling today at the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Being a pretty independent and outspoken bunch of journalists out there in the wooded great Northwest, I'd guess it's probably pretty close.
But that doesn't make it any easier to watch for anyone who loves newspapers, and the people who dedicated their lives to producing them.
If ever there was an appropriate time for Dan Rather to come back on the air and say "Courage," I think this might be it.
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