'Star-Tribune' Newsroom Shuffle May Affect 100 Beats [reporters are sobbing, literally]

As many as 100 newsroom staffers at the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis may be taken off their current beats and forced to apply for new assignments when a week-long shake-up is finished, according to a guild official who called the overhaul "the worst ever" situation for employees in her 19 years there.

"I've never seen anything as sad as this," said Pam Miller, secretary of the local Newspaper Guild, and the paper's religion writer. "It is being handled without attention to individuals or their talents. People are coming out sobbing."

Editors have been calling in those affected to inform them since Tuesday, Miller said. "They are being told 'what you do now, you won't be able to do anymore'," Miller said. "Either the beat is going away, or they won't be doing it."

She said the changes are expected to affect between 90 and 100 staffers in the 340-person newsroom. These changes come as the paper offers a companywide buyout that is expected to cut 145 jobs, including 50 in the newsroom. That is on top of 24 buyouts that occurred in March.

"It is quite unbelievable," said Doug Smith, a 20-year Star-Tribune employee who has been an outdoor writer for 11 years, but was told his beat had been dropped. "The job was basically eliminated. I will have the chance to apply for other reporting or editing jobs, but it is not real pleasant."

Editor Nancy Barnes and Managing Editor Scott Gillespie could not immediately be reached for comment Friday. In a conversation on Minnesota Public Radio earlier this week, Gillespie said, "We're in a business and the business model that we came to know and be comfortable with in the 90s changed dramatically."

The Star-Tribune, which had been owned by McClatchy, was purchased earlier his year by local investors, Avista Capital Partners. Since then, the job cuts and beat changes have sparked ongoing concern among staffers. But Miller says the cutbacks are not as bad as what she considers "arbitrary" assignment changes.

"I think they just want people to leave by making it discouraging enough that they will do it," she said. "It is not just the dead wood or those with poor performance. They are just shaking up longtime beats, and some prize-winners here."

In addition to the outdoors beat, Miller said the paper also is losing its architecture and travel writer posts, as well as two of the four metro columnists. A sports finance beat is being eliminated, while the paper's Duluth bureau is closing, she said.

When asked how these shake-ups compare to the recent sale of the paper and the other cutbacks, Miller said "this is the most traumatic thing and the most confusing thing."

A journalist's post-modern lament looks like a stream-of-stream-of-consciousness monologue.Robert Rector: Newspapers in decline, but it's a brave new world A Dead Sea Scroll. A Grecian urn. Lincoln's Hat. That's because circulation figures for newspapers nationwide continue to decline at such a rapid rate that it resembles nothing less than water circling a drain. Here's the box score locally: Los Angeles Times, down 4.2 percent from last year. The San Diego Union-Tribune, down 6.6 percent. The Orange County Register, down by 5.1 percent. The Riverside Press Enterprise, down by 6.7 percent. The Los Angeles Daily News, down 7.3 percent. The Santa Barbara News Press, which is not so much a newspaper as a soap opera, down 9.5 percent. Nationwide, circulation was off 2.1 percent daily, and 3.1 percent Sunday, according to the Newspaper Association of America. A vicious cycle ensues. Circulation declines lead to decreases in advertising revenue. Which leads to layoffs. Which leads to a decline in the product. So what does this death spiral, that has continued since the 1990s, portend for the newspaper industry? One expert put it this way: "By my calculations, the last daily reader will disappear in September 2043." Other analysts predict the demise will be sooner. But before we all throw in the towel and journalists turn to the aluminum siding sales, there is a flicker of light at the end of this dark tunnel. That's because use of newspaper Web sites for the same period increased 5.3 percent, compared with the same period a year ago, also a trend. According to the Newspaper Association of America, 59 million readers visited newspaper Web sites in the first quarter of the year. And that means there is still an audience for quality journalism. It's appearing on a screen near you. Does that mean that the future looks rosy? Well, not entirely. It seems that when the Internet loomed like a dark and foreboding thunderstorm over the serene fields of mainstream journalism, newspapers responded by throwing all their resources onto new Web sites. Great idea. Except what they ended up doing was giving away their product. For free. No strings attached. So, naturally, the number of hits on their Web sites soared and circulation dropped because their readers were no fools. Why pay for something when you can get it for free? Adding to this mess was the fact that the American news- paper industry, which owns the Associated Press, allowed the AP to sell its stories to news aggregators like Yahoo and Google. That allowed the news to appear on sites other than those operated by newspapers. Courtesy of the American newspaper industry. Here's how Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, saw it: "With local radio and television stations also creating Web sites and posting their news for free, newspapers soon realized that much of the news on the broadcast Web sites had been created by the local newspaper. So, whereas before the newspapers were selling print ads while radio and TV were selling air time, now they were all selling the same medium: their Web sites. Since newspapers share their content with Associated Press so other members can use it, radio and TV members are using much of that content to compete against the newspapers that created it." Against this backdrop, newspapers are struggling to find a way to make their Web sites profitable. It's nothing less than a battle for survival. The News York Times Web site has recently moved from the red to the black. So have a few other newspapers, but I suspect their profits don't come close to paying the overhead. Clearly, advances in technology will make Web advertising sales more viable. The first guy who invents an alternative to the pop-up ad should win the Nobel prize. Many large newspapers in England are starting to sell some of their content. Not the news, mind you. Too much competition, especially from TV and the Internet, to allow that. But comics, crossword puzzles, blogs, archives, fantasy sports leagues, many areas that give a particular newspaper a unique character, are carrying a price tag. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal charges for all its content and at last count had 931,000 paying subscribers. That's more than the circulation of all but three U.S. newspapers. Some of these steps will help Web sites pay. But it won't be the end of the tech- nological revolution for the newspaper business. Soon, content will be downloadable to PDAs, Ipods, cell phones. And some even think that content can be tailored to specific readers. But the bottom line is that the newspaper which makes the successful transition from print to the electronic medium will be the one that continues to provide high-quality journalism, understands the need for strong local content, knows that entertainment and feature coverage attracts younger readers, integrates sound and video into their coverage and is cutting edge. For guys like me, who started out on a Linotype machine, it's a brave new world. robert.rector@sgvn.com Robert Rector is a former editor with the Pasadena Star-News and

Los Angeles Times.

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