I’ve been surprised during the life of this blog how many readers keep up somewhat with the “inside baseball” of the news industry. I had a question in one husband-wife-signed email about a big flap in Chicago caused by new-ish Tribune Company owner Sam Zell. Zell and his COO, Randy Michaels, recently announced plans to dramatically reduce space in Tribune-owned newspapers.
Michaels went further by suggesting he had measured the productivity of reporters at the various papers the company owns and found significant gaps. He thought this would allow the company to eliminate jobs at some papers but not reduce the number of stories – presumably by requiring remaining reporters to increase story output.
The question sent to me was whether we have similar formulas at The Eagle. We don’t. In fact, people within Michaels’ company seem confused by the formula he cited. There’s no doubt that reporters at very small newspapers write many, many more stories than reporters at very large papers. If you’ve read a small daily newspaper and The New York Times, I would assume you would see that the gap in productivity also allows a gap in quality of the resulting stories.
Within individual newsrooms, from time to time we see gaps in how many stories individual reporters are writing. On occasion that turns into grumbling among co-workers and frustration from editors. It’s the same in just about any business. If you’re reading this and you work in a company where no one believes they work harder than others, congratulations. Don’t ever leave that job!
We take into account how complicated the stories are that a reporter is working on, and have general expectations that reporters work here because we expect them to find stories and write them. But we haven’t developed formulas or quotas, which I think would tend to value only quantity and disregard quality.
One reader asked what I thought about the announcement earlier this week that the Los Angeles Times was turning over its magazine to the newspaper’s business side, and would no longer produce it in the newsroom.
Last year we published a story noting that California was one of the top 10 states from which people were moving to Wichita. I’m assuming this question came from a displaced Californian who hasn’t been weaned from the news from home. I haven’t read many details about the magazine change, but the reason cited is familiar to every newsroom of every size in the country – in an era of tightening resources in newsrooms, what is the best and most effective way to deploy your staff and carry out your core mission, however you define it?
In our newsroom, that’s covering local news and providing better watchdog reporting of institutions and authority. Granted, the L.A. Times has a mammoth staff compared to ours, but nevertheless, the decisions have to seem just as difficult. What do you give up to do better at what’s most important? Newsrooms today have to be clear about how they define their core mission. Most can no longer do everything – so what is most important?
I see the magazine move as a case of doing just that. I can run through news industry Web sites and in 15 minutes cite dozens of examples of media redirecting resources – either people or technology or ink/paper (the biggest expense for print media next to people). And I include magazines in that, not just newspapers and broadcast media.
We are truly living in a media revolution. People use media in ways that have changed dramatically and continue to do so at a stunning pace. The options for the media navigating the seas of change are to figure out how to adapt or get left behind. Incidentally, Howard Weaver, VP for News at our parent company, pontificated on this recently on his blog.
I’ve finally caught up on email and phone calls after vacation, and a couple calls and letters caught my attention. A few readers were mightily angry that the newspaper June 6 had nary a story noting the 64th anniversary of D-Day.
Frankly, I’m wrestling with what I think about that. Did we commit a foul, or is unreasonable to expect that every year (until when?) the newspaper will run a story reminding readers of the Normandy invasion. I’m fascinated by World War II history and have studied the war in depth. So I’m not coming from a place of ambivalence about the war – the opposite is true.
Is it news every year? Some years, it’s easy to make a case that a historical event is newsworthy – the 50th anniversary, the 75th. Is every year noteworthy? Maybe it truly is an expectation of a majority of readers that every year the newspaper takes note of the historic event. We get similar angry calls on the few occasions we’ve failed to publish a story about the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Which historical events qualify for unending annual coverage? Do readers expect us to be as much historical mile marker as we are a journal of the immediate day’s news?
For now, I don’t have the answers. Just pondering the questions, and the intensity of the anger accompanying the complaints.