People who
are more spiritually fit than I am will often say that one way to maintain
contact with God is to write up a gratitude list. If I were doing one today, I
know what would be at the top of it. I am profoundly grateful I no longer work
for a newspaper in this country.
The news
from the newspaper world has been so bad for so long that no sane person would
need a specific reason for feeling that way. But mine was an article that
appeared a few weeks ago, about the Salinas Californian’s attempt to create a
“newsroom of the future.” For those not familiar with the business, that’s a
euphemism for doing more work with fewer people.
The article
contained more gruesome details than the average Jo Nesbo novel. Among them was
the fact that the Californian would be laying off all news personnel and asking
them to reapply for jobs such as “journalist-marketer” and “content coach.”
Enough to Make You Weep
When I
worked at the newspaper, we didn’t have content coaches. We had editors. One of
the best was Ward Bushee, who hired me. I can’t even imagine what Ward would
have done to any corporate type who tried to change his title from managing
editor to content coach. All I can say is, it wouldn’t have been pretty, and no
jury would have convicted.
I understand,
of course, that every business goes through changes. Nevertheless, journalism,
like the Catholic Church, has a fundamental creed from which it departs at its
peril. The creed defines who and what you are, and in journalism, editorial
independence is a bedrock part of it. Take that away, and you might still have a newspaper, but you don’t have
journalism.
The mere
existence of a job title like “journalist-marketer” is an acknowledgement that
there is no more editorial independence. Once a reporter starts thinking about
selling something instead of simply getting the story, he’s not a reporter any
more. He’s something else, and I don’t know what.
Removing the Home Town Feeling
Beyond the
job titles, the article also mentioned that the Salinas paper’s copy editing
had been done in Visalia, a couple of hundred miles southeast, and that its
page design was done in Phoenix, AZ. That’s more cost-effective, I’m sure, but
the hidden cost is the loss of any sense of there being a home-town paper.
An editor
in Visalia, reading a Salinas story, has no real context and no real knowledge
of the community. If the story says a criminal incident occurred at the
intersection of two streets, how would the editor in Visalia know if those two
streets do, indeed intersect? I suppose the editor could look at a street map,
but if it were done in every instance, speed and efficiency would be lost. A
locally based editor, on the other hand, would simply know.
I cut my
teeth in the business having editors only a few feet away, who would shout out
questions and call me over to point out how they were editing my copy. That’s
how I learned to get better. They also pointed out local details, such as how
people referred to a place and which local businesses had quirky spellings.
Less of that would happen if you simply moved the editors into the next room.
Move them two hundred miles away, and none of it happens. It’s yet another step
taken down a road that’s leading us to newspapers from nowhere.
