Earlier this year, I was awarded a scholarship to attend the Wesleyan University Writers Conference. My editor was pleased for me, but he said the budget for training and workshops had recently been frozen. I paid my own way, grumbling for most of the flight from Washington state to Connecticut.
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Jim Hagengruber
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My mood was still sour during the welcome reception. I didn’t get any sympathy from the other journalists I met, though—I was one of the few in attendance who still had a newspaper job. The conference seemed to be crawling that week with disgruntled, laid off journalists from Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and many points between.
I returned to work with an appreciation for what I had: a job in a unionized newsroom at a family-owned newspaper. From my office, I could see the Rocky Mountains and a stable future. The tornado that was ravaging newsrooms everywhere else was nowhere in sight.
Near the end of summer, The Spokesman-Review’s top editor, Steve Smith, issued a warning that job cuts were coming. Fewer businesses were advertising with the paper. Craigslist had been sucking away the newspaper’s classified advertising gravy. The circulation numbers continued their decade-long slide. But because the newsroom is unionized and I had considerable seniority within my department, I never imagined the cuts would hit me.
| Cutting journalists to save a newspaper seems to me about as smart as keeping your house warm by burning your furniture. |
Do you see where this is going? On Nov. 1, I was one of 14 journalists laid off from The Spokesman-Review. Instead of the cuts being distributed throughout the newsroom’s various departments, as others and I had expected, the editor cut my entire department and shrank the newspaper to a single edition. In the days that followed, another half-dozen journalists quit, including my colleague and fellow Burns alumnus, Benjamin Shors.
I’m typing this from my home office. My only colleague—my dog, Ollie—is sleeping at my feet and my beard is three weeks thick. I’m now one of them: an unemployed newspaper reporter. The management decisions that led up to the lay offs seem short-sighted. Many of the newspaper’s core writers and photographers are now gone while top managers remain in their jobs. Cutting journalists to save a newspaper seems to me about as smart as keeping your house warm by burning your furniture.
The Boise Weekly recently published a story about the cuts and quoted my former editor, Smith, who said he was pessimistic about the fate of daily newspapers, but expected the Internet would soon be here to save the profession. “I’ve never been more optimistic about the future of journalism,” Smith said.
I have a different opinion. A cursory glance of the newspaper’s recent history seems to back me up. In 2000, The Spokesman-Review employed about 160 people in its newsroom and published a paper with a subscription of 126,000. Today, a newsroom of about 120 publish a paper read by 92,000. The newspaper also publishes nearly 40 blogs, many of which are produced by editors and are focused not on reporting, but on the reprocessing of news. The last time I checked, only a handful of the blogs had attracted comments from readers. Meanwhile, The Spokesman-Review reportedly continues to earn a profit in the 15 percent range, which would be high for most any other business, but is considered relatively low for a daily newspaper in the United States. The profit margin, however, is said to be slipping. A former colleague of mine wrote in his blog: “Makes you wonder if there’s any connection.”
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Jim Hagengruber paddling with his dog on Priest Lake, Idaho
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I share these facts because it makes it easier to leave behind a job in a newspaper that seems to be going nowhere. And in all honesty, I’ve been thinking for a while now that it’s time for me to move on to something else. It’s the something else that scares the hell out of me. I can’t imagine not working at a newspaper, but I’m not sure I have the heart to spend the rest of my career playing this perverted game of survivor.
And what about the readers? As newspapers become thinner and thinner, should we be surprised that fewer Americans read them? What will this country be like with fewer serious journalists? I found a possible answer in a recent column by Hal Crowther, a columnist from The Independent Weekly of North Carolina (I found the excerpt in a recent column by James F. Vesely, editorial page editor of The Seattle Times).
“While the newspaper is expendable, the tradition it represents and the information it supplies are not,” Crowther wrote. “As newspapers are eviscerated, marginalized and abandoned, they leave a vacuum that nothing and no one is prepared to fill — a crisis on its way to becoming a tragedy. When railroads and riverboats began to go the way of the passenger pigeon, no one was harmed except the work force and a few big investors who had failed to diversify. If professional journalism vanishes along with the newspapers, this thing we call a constitutional democracy becomes a banana republic.”
I’m not sure what I’ll be doing in the long term. I’ve considered everything from teaching to carpentry. For the next few months, though, I’ll be hanging out in republics where bananas are grown. It was supposed to be a sabbatical—I bought the tickets the night before I was laid off. But without a job, I suppose I should just call it time on the beach. I should also tell you that I have stacks of clips on my desk that I plan to send to editors at other newspapers. Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but I can’t imagine not working in journalism. Regardless of what happens, I suppose I should count myself lucky—my spouse works in a profession that’s booming. She’s a nurse.