Posted on 08/11/2007 11:40:46 AM PDT by abb
Industry, Corporate and Local Moves Leave Paper, Community Suffering
As workplace environments go The State newspaper would seem to offer a certain appeal, at least as far as its external atmosphere is concerned, and at least to those who enjoy the quiet and nature of a place somewhat removed and somewhat green.
Granted, situated at 1401 Shop Road, conveniently just outside the border of Columbia so as not to be subject to city property taxes, The State publishes day in and day out among the steely operations of a strong industrial presence encircling the paper.
And of late, the noise factor around the area has ratcheted up amid a residential construction boom, with developers throwing up condominiums and other housing nearby like The Gates at Williams-Brice.
But in and of itself, the all-important sense of place at the paper differs from its surrounding environment.
The grounds of The State form something of a campus, covering perhaps a couple of acres, and stillness blankets it. Straight into a parking lot off Shop Road in front of a large building housing the paper, past a sign bearing its name next to three Palmetto trees, sandbags stacked two or three high line the right side of the entrance access way. In a low-lying area the sandbags do their job against a large grassy spot on the opposite side with a culvert and shrubbery and lots of other greenery.
Seems like a great place to have lunch, or, between phone calls or whatever else, take a short walking break and just commune with nature a little.
At the public entrance to the building — whitish stone with bright green trim and dark tinted windows — employees file in and out past tall poles flying U.S. and S.C. flags and six less-tall trees. A male security guard reading something behind a counter inside the entrance can’t say for sure which type of trees they are, and seems disinterested in doing so. Apparently he just works here.
A close inspection reveals that those trees are Palmettos also.
In the front parking lot a dragonfly is busy buzzing ‘round, a solo act as if it weren’t often found.
The place is quiet and peaceful.
What lies beneath that tranquility, however, is very different.
Indeed, to say all is not well at The State would be quite an understatement. For, South Carolina’s largest newspaper, the Palmetto State’s paper of record, its flagship daily, faces difficult times on the industry, corporate and local levels. The situation finds The State suffering in myriad ways, one of which — a diminished role in guarding the public interest — leaves the community hurting as well.
The pain stems from a media industry in flux, with a new generation of mostly Internet-based outlets challenging the old dogs and big boys. It also trickles down from a corporate level, with a new owner squeezing The State for a bigger return on its investment. Lastly the distress magnifies on the local level, with a handful of decisions by the paper’s management — in a striking case, killing its most acclaimed section — sending turnover to on high and morale into subzero territory.
“It was very bad,” says 39-year-old Christina Knauss, an employee in The State newsroom from November 1999 until leaving on her own volition in June.
The combination of factors notwithstanding, The State’s troubles all boil down to one word — money, by way of a newspaper’s lifeblood readership-equals-advertising-revenue dynamic.
Industry Trends
It’s a proverbial domino effect, whereby fewer readers leads to lower circulation leads to a reduced pool of advertising dollars leads to a smaller amount of resources dedicated to local news coverage.
“We were dealing with a lot of budget cuts,” says Knauss, who now earns a living writing for religious publications across South Carolina. “Managers were focusing entirely on the bottom line and what they thought readers wanted, not what reporters were telling them.”
Not surprisingly, the highest of the higher ups at The State offers a different take on things — a downright upbeat, optimistic take.
Initially, the paper’s publisher, Henry Haitz, agreed to a sit-down interview. Then his assistant said “something has come up” and the Q and A was not possible. Efforts to reschedule, or talk by phone, were unsuccessful.
But Haitz did answer questions by email.
“Our strongest readership and circulation area is right here in the Columbia area,” he says in his responses.
“Currently we reach 70 percent of adults in the two-county [Richland-Lexington] area and we gain another 5 percent through our web site. Within the past year International Demographics Media Audit placed us in the top 10 in U.S. metropolitan areas for overall audience reach through our newspaper and web site www.thestate.com. We have a powerful and unequaled voice in the community, which is something we are very proud of and a role we take seriously.”
Not disputing that last point, Haitz’s numbers for the audit, which is the accepted standard for the media industry, need a bit of a qualifier.
The figure he quotes for The State’s readership refers to the number of adults who said they read the paper at least once on the weekend over a four-week period between April and June 2006. And while it totals 71 percent, broken down by age group the number drops to 60.2 percent for 18- to 24-year-olds, climbing steadily by seniority and topping out at 83.8 percent among readers ages 75 and older.
It’s the kind of industry trend that finds big dailies struggling nationwide, as elder readers pass on and new generations of news consumers who came up in the age of Internet look to it for their information.
“You have to look at The State in the larger context of what’s happening at newspapers in America,” says Chris Roberts, an assistant professor in the USC School of Journalism and Mass Communications who worked in The State newsroom from 1998 to 2005, finishing as a business editor.
Generally speaking, what’s happening, especially at large dailies, is readership, circulation and advertising revenue are declining and have been for several years.
The downward spiral has triggered layoffs and other forms of upheaval at papers across the country.
Announced within the past year: the departure of 24 employees from the newsroom of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune; 25 reporters laid off from the Philadelphia Inquirer; about 27 positions axed at the San Jose, Calif., Mercury News.
That’s just a smattering.
Closer to home, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently underwent a restructuring in which a combined 70 reporters and editors reportedly were either bid farewell or said, “See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.”
Layoffs, at least on a large-scale basis, have not occurred at The State, although several sources interviewed for this story say a number of reporting positions at the paper are being left to “churn,” industry parlance for unfilled.
Regardless, Haitz says the local picture is brighter than the national outlook. “Nationally, newspaper advertising revenues have been down, but our newspaper has outperformed industry averages,” he says. “We have a vibrant marketplace as you know, but we do face the same changing landscape as everyone.”
And change, Haitz notes, is difficult.
In late May, The State published a story saying it would cease its delivery and newsstand sales in 18 counties along the coast and in the Upstate region of South Carolina. “Our world is changing at a rapid pace, and new technology is affecting everything we do,” Haitz said in a written statement quoted in the dispatch.
In that way, The State is getting hit with the kind of Darwinian changes confronting all traditional outlets in the media industry.
Those convulsions emanate from a relatively recent rise of new media, largely online in such forms as blogs, ‘zines and political web sites like Daily Kos. Alternative publications like Free Times also are making a run at the established media, which, while maybe not threatened with dinosaur-like extinction, nonetheless must adapt or continue to be less and less relevant.
“They are no different from most metro daily papers in America,” Roberts says of The State. “They are under tremendous pressure as advertising goes away, particularly classified. People are saying to themselves, why buy a newspaper when everything’s online for free.”
With regard to classified newspaper advertising, Craigslist is the most lethal online competitor.
Yet even social networking web sites like MySpace and Facebook pose a challenge to papers.
Citing a World Association of Newspapers study, USC journalism instructor Doug Fisher wrote in mid-June that the inquiry found that the importance of such sites as disseminators of news and information is increasing.
The source of the posting by Fisher, whose career includes 18 years with The Associated Press, half of that time as the AP news editor in Columbia: his blog, Common Sense Journalism (http://commonsensej.blogspot.com).
McClatchy Sack
Meanwhile, The State also is getting squeezed at a corporate level.
Based in Sacramento, Calif., the McClatchy Co. bought The State and several other papers from another chain newspaper company headquartered in California, Knight Ridder, in 2006.
Since then McClatchy has put the heat on The State to amp up the bottom line.
The paper was always one of Knight Ridder’s most profitable, according to Roberts, the assistant professor and former business editor. And, he says, “They’re still being counted on to deliver profits back to California.”
A reporter at The State confirms the point. “Our circulation is down, but we’re asked to increase profits,” says the scribe, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
When it comes to interviewing people vested in even the slightest way in The State, there’s a lot of reluctance to be quoted by name going around. The reasons for the hesitation vary.
Some sources fear for their jobs. Others say they don’t want to hurt the people at the paper who are trying to make it work. Still more worry about repercussions against their family members and businesses.
In any case, in just one example of how McClatchy has gotten all hatchety hack for the sake of more money, The State reported only days ago that McClatchy is closing a subscriber service center the company operates in Columbia.
Some 114 employees will be “affected,” the story said. McClatchy hopes to place some of them in different jobs and others will be offered severance packages. “The bottom line is that competitive pressures are affecting the way we do business,” company treasurer Elaine Lintecum says in the write-up.
What with many of the nation’s largest corporations sending phone-based customer service jobs overseas to places like India, the move provides a segue to another potential cost cut at The State. It too could provoke visceral reactions like those certainly being experienced by the locals at the center who will lose their jobs.
Rumors are flying that an untold quantity of ad production work at the paper will be outsourced to another land, perhaps that same India. Several sources interviewed for this story say they’ve heard the scuttlebutt. The number of positions depends on who’s talking.
“And the last I heard it’s not happening until closer to Christmas,” says Michele Hardeman, who worked in the paper’s advertising department for more than five years before resigning in late June to pursue freelance writing and copy editing. “It just floored everybody.”
Haitz says it isn’t so — for now anyway.
“We have not determined if any jobs at our company will be outsourced to India,” he says.
What about going forward?
“It’s as much of an option as any other alternative that provides an efficient and effective use of resources to meet our customers’ needs,” Haitz says. “These changes, and others where we can reduce costs and improve quality, enable us to provide resources in areas that produce public service journalism in an increasingly challenging environment.”
For McClatchy, outsourcing is the order of the day. In California the company’s Fresno Bee newspaper recently announced that it will outsource some of its ad design labor to India, putting seven people out of work unless the Bee can find new assignments for them.
“I knew McClatchy was experimenting with it in other areas,” says Bill Rogers, director of the South Carolina Press Association. Among other places, McClatchy has done so at the Fort Mill Times in the Upstate, Rogers says.
Adds former APer Fisher, “It’s been one of the things that’s going around.” For his part, Fisher doesn’t take much issue with it, unless the trend veers into newsgathering merely for the sake of a few dollars more. “Then I think you’re definitely starting to cut your own throat,” he says.
As it happens, that almost happened, again in the Golden State, when the Pasadena Now news web site advertised on Craigslist a few months ago seeking someone in India to cover local government in the Los Angeles suburb via televised meetings.
The solicitation provoked a lot of puzzlement and blowback in the industry and ended up not coming to pass.
McClatchy hasn’t gone so far as to hire foreign correspondents to cover local news, but what outsourcing the company has done, coupled with its other budget cutting, seems to be achieving the desired goal. “The company benefited from strong cost reduction efforts in the 2007 quarter,” says a July 19 McClatchy news release detailing the company’s earnings in the second quarter of this year.
Such corporate machinations are precisely the opposite of what many employees at The State expected when McClatchy purchased the paper, according to the anonymous reporter.
Quite to the contrary, there was a presumption around the office that the company would rejuvenate the paper after months of uncertainty that preceded the sale, the scribe says. “And that hasn’t really happened.” No less, one of McClatchy’s first directives to The State was to cut its budget by $500,000, the journalist says.
Peter Tira, McClatchy’s communications director at the company’s headquarters, said he was not a spokesman and would not comment for the record. Tira referred questions to Lynn Dickerson, McClatchy’s regional vice president for the Southeast. Dickerson was unavailable because of a death in her immediate family.
As to decisions about local news coverage, McClatchy says in its 2006 annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, “Each of the company’s newspapers is largely autonomous in its business and editorial decisions so as to meet most effectively the needs of the communities it serves.”
Haitz affirms the relationship. “Our parent company has a longstanding philosophy that newspapers operate locally and autonomously,” he says. “They don’t dictate news coverage or editorial decisions.”
Butch Thompson, 50, picks up a copy of The State and the Charleston Post and Courier on Aug. 6 at Capitol City News & Maps on Main Street in Columbia. Thompson says he enjoys reading a newspaper for the "tactile experience" of turning the pages and loves the written word.
Making Matters Worse
Be that as it may, The State’s management team apparently has only been making matters worse.
The starkest example of that reality probably can be found in the nixing last fall of the paper’s Sunday “Impact” section, an award-winning, hard-hitting feature that provided in-depth analytical and investigative journalism.
The death of Impact exemplifies how The State’s roles as a news provider and government and institutional watchdog have diminished, thereby hurting the community too.
“I mean it’s not only the largest newspaper in the state but it’s the capital city newspaper,” says a former reporter, whose comments were conditioned upon being anonymous. “Politics and local politics has always been its bread and butter. And to get rid of that Impact section I think spoke volumes. It was a very highly regarded, very good section.”
The ex-journalist says Impact was a home of interesting stories that transcended the garden-variety fare of daily reporting. “Now, it’s not that they’re just ending up elsewhere. They’re just not getting written, because there’s no place for them. So that’s the real tragedy.”
The current and former reporters sourced in this story say important content in the paper also has suffered in other ways, including less space allocated to news and reduced coverage of religion and education.
Lisa Michals, who covered education for The State prior to taking a position in June as public information officer for the state school readiness agency S.C. First Steps, says the paper had an education team that went by the wayside during a reshuffling of the newsroom.
“I was disappointed when the reorganization resulted in the disappearance of the education team,” Michals says, adding that her departure was grounded in where she wanted to steer her life rather than any kind of disgruntlement.
Despite her disappointment, Michals says, “We still worked together and our coverage was not significantly affected.”
To hear former newsroom employee and current religion writer Knauss tell it, the same cannot be said for The State’s local news coverage. “The Metro section is almost nonexistent now,” she says. “The paper’s been gutted basically.”
As it follows, turnover has spiked. “We’ve had a lot of executives leave,” says the anonymous reporter.
Likewise for rank and file employees, a turnstile witnessed in the recent exodus of Knauss, Michals and a roster of other staff members.
At the same time morale has gone the other way. “I think there are a lot of people who are dissatisfied,” the unnamed scribe says.
Haitz says he is “not at liberty to discuss personnel situations.” And he disagrees with the morale assertion. “I don’t think that’s true,” he says, “but I do know that there has been so much written about our industry that it can be exhausting reading about it all the time. Add to it the transition we’re going through with changes in consumer behavior and media habits and it’s a formidable topic of discussion. But journalists are resilient and incredibly smart folks. Most have chosen their profession because they’re doing something of incredible value and they don’t want to see it diminished in any way. They care deeply about our role in the community and that commitment is a major reason we will continue to be successful into the future.”
Knauss lays the blame for the ugly mix of cost cutting, escalating turnover and plunging morale squarely at the feet of both the paper’s local management and its corporate masters, who she says favor the interests of their shareholders over the concerns of the community.
Of the former, Knauss holds forth not at all haltingly, “I’m sorry, but [USC football coach] Steve Spurrier’s press conference should not be on the front page of the newspaper every day.”
Of the latter, she says, “It was demoralizing.”
There’s little doubt, especially to the reporters at The State who bust their butts working long hours in the trenches for not enough pay, striving upstream to uphold the ideals of a free press. “There’s still a lot of good people there,” Knauss says.
Welcome to the desert of the real. It’s a long, long way from journalism school and the values espoused in a passage inscribed on a monument in front of The State’s office.
The words are taken from an editorial in the first edition of the paper, penned in 1891 by one of its founders, N.G. Gonzales, commemorating the launch of it and laying out the calling of its writers and such. In a noblesque language of yesteryear the passage says in part, “Theirs is a venturous voyage, no doubt, and one upon which timid spirits would not embark; but it is a mission of duty, and honor, and right, and there is no coward in the crew.”
Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame once said, “A good newspaper is never good enough, but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.”
In that sense, bashing The State is as old as the paper itself, a pile-on practice not unlike that visited upon hometown journals across the nation. But on the road ahead, given an aging readership, online competition and other realities of the changing media industry, The State might not have forever to be less than what the community expects.
ping
Related.
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/topofthetimes/entertainment/la-et-rutten11aug11,1,4631510.story
From the Los Angeles Times
Tim Rutten
Newspapers are changing to suit readers’ tastes
By TIM RUTTEN
REGARDING MEDIA
August 11, 2007
SOONER rather than later, the newspaper you’re holding in your hands will be very different than it is today.
A couple of fascinating new studies out this week suggest just how profound — and potentially troubling — some of those differences may be.
One of those surveys comes from Britain, where the media research firm Nielsen/NetRatings reports that the online editions of Britain’s two largest “quality” newspapers — the Guardian and the Times of London — now have more American than British readers. The Independent, a smaller serious daily, already has twice as many readers in the U.S. as it does in Britain, and, if the current trend holds, even the very Tory Daily Telegraph’s online edition shortly will have more readers in the U.S. than in the Home Counties.
What’s up?
You can’t, of course, entirely exclude the snob factor. It’s the same impulse that drives otherwise intelligent people to spend their evenings watching mediocre detective dramas on public television just because they’re set in London. It’s what drives American men of a certain age and inclination to buy English dress shirts, even though they have no breast pocket.
Still, given the kinds of numbers Nielsen turned up, something else is at work. The quality British papers, particularly in their online editions, are much farther down the road toward what looks like the future of newspaper journalism, one that places a much higher premium on analysis and opinion than do serious American newspapers. When Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair complained in one of his farewell addresses that the British broadsheets had transformed themselves from newspapers to “viewspapers,” Tony O’Reilly, the Irish magnate who owns the Independent newspaper group, proudly agreed, saying it’s what his readers want.
Then there’s a new survey by the reliably nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: Roughly a quarter of Americans now use the Internet as their primary news source. Pew’s study finds that the Web crowd is younger and better educated than most Americans and far more dissatisfied with their country’s news media. It’s fair to assume that a substantial number of them are among the British papers’ U.S. readers, people who want a “viewspaper.”
There’s something else about their reading habits worth considering. As Joseph Epstein, a commentator of generally conservative predilections, points out in a forthcoming essay on the future of newspapers: “Not only are we acquiring our information from new places but we are taking it pretty much on our own terms. The magazine Wired recently defined the word ‘egocasting’ as ‘the consumption of on-demand music, movies, television and other media that cater to individual and not mass-market tastes.’ The news, too, is now getting to be on-demand.”
Pew has been polling on public attitudes toward the news media since 1985, when it was the Times Mirror Center, so its surveys are among the most useful for charting trends in this area. Although Pew’s most recent study finds the percentage of Americans who think the press is inaccurate or biased has grown over the last 20 years, the younger, better-educated, Internet-reliant readers have a view more skeptical than most. That’s one of Pew’s interesting findings; the other is this:
“Opinions about the news media have grown much more partisan, particularly over the past decade. Far more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats say news organizations are too critical of America (63% vs. 23%). There is virtually no measure of press performance on which there is not a substantial gap in the views of political partisans. . .
snip
Such a long article and no mention of liberal bias.
I guess if you spend a couple of generations supporting a government monopoly education/”free” daycare system for children and adolescents which promotes illiteracy, at some point your readership will shrink.
De-Ni-Al.
}:-)4
Newspapers can distinguish themselves from the current undifferentiated cacophony of substantial and frivolous opinion on the Internet -- and best serve their readers -- by insisting that their analysis and commentary conform to the discernible facts.
Cacophonous blogs offer discernible facts while mass media's gatekeepers mostly wallow in fictional storytelling.
Anyone know if the State is a decent paper? The Bee papers are mostly leftwing fishwraps with an occasional readable piece.
what it boils down to is this, people view the tv news as a freebie for the most part and there is an alternative to the big three and CNN. We simply flip over to Fox for a view on the news more consistant with our own. What the papers don’t seem to grasp is that no one feels like having more liberal nonsense shoved down our throats and suffering the insult of having to pay for it. It’s the content driving away subscribers and no matter how many corners they cut and pennies they pinch, they aren’t going to recoup their readership until that changes.
}:-)4
Perfectly summed: “It’s the content driving away subscribers and no matter how many corners they cut and pennies they pinch, they aren’t going to recoup their readership until that changes”
The State is a great example of the stupidity of the Lefty news sheets, fortunately they are so blinded by their excruciating liberal bias they will not admit what is happening to all of them...goodbye to bad trash.
My take on the editorial group:
Brad Warthen - nanny statist do gooder who will attack anyone who questions the results of public school systems. OTOH, he supports the Iraq war effort and the WOT and big supporter of Lindsay Graham and McCain.
Cindi Ross Scoppee - tax queen who cant find a tax she doesnt like but she hates the lottery as a tax on the poor. Also hates the governor.
Warren Bolton - a ray of hope in this group as a black who promotes black responsibility for self improvement and rejection of the hip hop culture.
All the rest - too boring to even mention
Yep. Lee Bandy is a first rate ass.
Do any of you know if it’s true that Lee Bandy is a graduate of Bob Jones University? I seem to remember reading that somewhere.
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