There are at least two predominant schools of thought about the Times-Dispatch -- the first being that it is part of a doomed tribe of dinosaurs being run to the ground by a changing business landscape, and the second being that it is staffed by a management team of corporate mercenaries with an obsession with the bottom line. And while there are kernels of truth in both notions, today's news (delivered by the city's weekly publication, Style) that more than two dozen 50 TD staffers have been let go in the latest round of job cuts may not be the last steps in what can only be described as a painful transition for the once-powerful daily paper. (The TD itself reported on its layoffs as I was writing this post.)
Here's a bit of the back story, courtesy of Style's Jason Roop and Chris Dovi:
Possibly more than 20 reporters, editors, copy desk editors, layout and design artists, and other support staff -- among them some of the paper’s top winners at the Virginia Press Association awards banquet in Norfolk two weeks ago -- were told yesterday that they were scheduled for a meeting with Proctor today...
So sweeping are the layoffs in areas such as layout that one former staffer speculated that there will no longer be enough artists to cover the hours needed to produce a daily newspaper. By eliminating Santos, Farmer, Geroux and Bowman, the paper also eliminates most of the remaining veteran reporting staff.
Sources also say the newsroom was recently informed of changes that largely do away with the food section and real estate pages...
...This round of layoffs marks the latest in a series, the most recent of which occurred near the Christmas holiday and saw the departure of five newsroom staffers. During the past three or more years, readers of the paper have watched the departure -- either through attrition or layoff -- of such high-profile writers and columnists as Mark Holmberg, Randy Fitzgerald, Douglas Durden, Ray McAllister and Betty Booker.
The reality (my reality, I should say, since it is how I see it) is that the Times-Dispatch -- like every print publication on the market -- is fueled by a depleted resource (advertising) to deliver a newly commodified product (information). It is owned by a parent company which is driven by external investers and quarterly earnings, and by a strategy which puts online and broadcast strategies first in line before print. And it has allowed itself to become staffed over the years in ways that are utterly peripheral to the business of delivering news -- top heavy with editors, lifestyle writers and (at one time) columnists.
The bottom line of a paper operating on a budget that is increasingly analyzed, parsed and trimmed can't survive a staff that consumes far more than it produces. And the external environment is sending some pretty clear messages to newspapers across the country. Here are a few of them:
- Increase Mileage: The TD, like many of its peers, has been paying reporters, columnists and editors huge salaries over the years to produce one, two, three pieces a week. Factoring in salaries, benefits, overhead and production costs, I'd figure that the average cost per article in a daily newspaper runs close to $800 -- per article, column or story. Like it or not, successful papers are going to be ones who find writers -- younger, or dumber, or more desperate -- who will write more with less editorial support and for fewer dollars a year. (This is not, by the way, a shift unique to newspapers -- just ask all of the peripheral HR, marketing and IT overhead that just got dumped from every major corporation in the country.)
- Better Delivery: Online, all the time. This will continue to be a work in progress for a lot of reasons -- the biggest one for the Times-Dispatch being that it has some very expensive printing presses operating in Hanover County that it is probably still paying for. But as it trims its physical, printed vehicle -- first by number of papers, and at some point by the number of days its circulated -- it had better find a way to generate some revenue off those presses, and continue to build its online presence. Targeted delivery -- getting a different physical publication into the hands of Mr. Smith than Mrs. Jones receives -- is one method of moving in this direction.
- Think Globally, Act Locally: The only thing that Times-Dispatch should be doing better than anyone else in the world (Yes, the whole world.) is covering the news and culture of the greater Richmond region. And 60% of its editorial staff should be focused exclusively on that work -- the rest should be editing, taking photos and laying out pages to deliver that work to readers.
- Dump the Extra Weight: It's time to strip newspapers down to the core business of delivering news. If you can find it somewhere else -- recipes, stock market data, weather forecasts, music reviews -- it doesn't belong in your newspaper. This echoes the previous bullet, but takes it much farther than most readers will say they are comfortable going. There are other people doing a much better job of writing about food, music, movies, the stock market -- aggregating their content (by RSS or by writing a syndicate a check) is much cheaper than paying someone locally. Throw it online, and save even more money.
The bottom line for the Times-Dispatch is that it has no choice but to play fast and play hard in what feels like a frantic game of reinvention. And while I know that smarter minds than mine are engaged throughout the newspaper industry at sorting all of this out, I also know that the local impact of this change are large, disruptive and difficult -- especially for the employees (former and current) of the Times-Dispatch, but also for the paper's readers and for the people and organizations across the region who have important stories that need to be told.
The short view is a messy one -- it involves people whose lives have just been turned upside down, and people whose jobs have just gotten twice as hard in an environment that feels twice as hostile.
The longer view -- for the region and for the news industry -- is not likely to be less messy, or painful. Banks, automobiles and newspapers are the first victims of what seems to be shaping up as a fundamental restructuring of how we work, what we produce, and how value goods and services.
We'd be fools not to either cross our fingers and hope the Times-Dispatch figures itself out, or to cross our fingers and hope that another publication emerges that can deliver the news and information that our community requires in order to stay engaged and connected.
