Being a fellow of modest dreams some days all I want to be is the Readers’ Representative for a big city newspaper, like the Star Tribune. If my dream came true I’d write something like this:
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Hi, everyone. By now you’ve probably heard of big changes at this paper you’re reading.
It is all true. There will be a lot more lay-offs, and they follow the firing of some very pleasant ladies at our switchboard who have lived in the Twin Cities for decades and knew everyone in the building and provided a nice human touch to our customers’ first interaction with the paper. In the newsroom people will be getting switched from beats they’ve worked and studied for years and know very well to beats they don’t know much if anything about. And that’s THIS YEAR. Next year we’ll have to duke out a new contract, and I’m telling now that that’ll be bloody.
Then there is our publisher, the one who is being sued for plotting his switch from our major competitor across the river to this paper while he was still in a position to do significant competitive damage to the paper over there. (And yes, to put a point on it, that very same fellow is currently charged with assessing the return-on-investment needs of HIS employers here and if that means depriving 150 middle class Minnesota families of a very large portion of their livelihood in order assure those investors that they will not have to find cheaper dockage for their yachts in Naples this coming season.)
Obviously I won’t being saying anything about our publisher’s problems, ever. Nor will I comment on the propriety of someone under such a cloud inflicting the kind of financial and emotional damage he is on Minnesota working families. Why? Well, because that would be pretty incautious and imprudent of me, wouldn’t it? A lot of us in newspapers are just trying to run out the clock to the reasonable, modest retirement we had planned for ourselves before our new owners decided our retirement incomes would look better in their pockets.
But that said … the way I look at a Readers’ Rep’s job is this: My job is to observe and analyze the performance of all levels of this newspaper without fear or favor. If the influence of newspapers depends on our reputation for being reliable truth-seekers and truth-tellers, my job is to be transparently candid as to whether my colleagues and superiors are living up to what is, let’s face it, a critical social responsibility. I mean, look around, we seem to be living in a time when every other news source except maybe Bill Moyers is playing back and at half speed to avoid taking the kind of criticism that is supposed to come with the territory.
One criteria for being a really good newspaper is the desire and ability to go after stories that effect the largest number of citizens. That’s why it is extremely important that we always follow the money. When lots of money starts piling up in one corner of the city or another you have to be able to depend on us to snoop around and ask the kind of annoying questions that always make really rich people speed dial the publisher and complain about our impertinence and threaten to pull advertising if we don’t knock it off.
We sure screwed up on UnitedHealth in all those years leading up to Bill McGuire’s back-dated stock option scandal didn’t we? It was pretty embarrassing to watch the Wall Street Journal dig that story out of our backyard, start a national reexamination of executive pay “techniques” and win a Pulitzer Prize for it, no less.
But, to be honest, we can’t get into that kind of thing.
I’d like to be able to promise you that we learned a lesson on the UnitedHealth story. But the fact is we’re playing a much different game than the half-dozen or so real newspapers left in the country — the Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times and — well, maybe there aren’t a half dozen anymore. Papers like that still see the whole country and the world as part of their beat and they still assign their own people to cover it. A paper like we are today, with investors demanding pre-internet levels of profit — through attrition, not growth — all we can do is pick up what they write a day or so later. Sure, most of you who are really interested in that kind of reporting have already read it on line or in the paper edition the Journal and the Times deliver to your door at the same time as ours. But, I’m trying to be honest here, that’s just where we’re at. We can’t play with the big boys anymore. The best we can do is pretend.
Just as we gave up on reporting from overseas years ago, and just as we have now pretty much given up on reporting on anything national … other than sporting events, which of course doesn’t make any sense since only Paris Hilton’s breast augmentation and suspended driver license gets more coverage than big sporting events … we are now pretty much getting out of the kind of “enterprise” reporting that might upset very influential local companies and people.
It’s been years since we had enough people for that kind of thing, and after our investors take this latest round of cuts, we’re going to have even less for the kind of stories that take longer than a day or two to report, because we’re reassigning a 100 or so reporters to the suburbs.
Some of you keep asking, “What’s with this suburbs deal? Who cares what’s going on in the Bloomington school district. Don’t they have their own Sun newspapers to cover that stuff.” Well, of course they do, and those Sun papers do a fine job. But, with Macy’s and other advertisers starting to slide dollars over to the internet, the fact is we need to poach the Sun papers’ advertisers more than ever.
We need the mom and pop stores in Bloomington and Eagan and Woodbury and Blaine, and in order to get them we’re sending reporters out to write stuff about class sizes in Bloomington, etc. and the stars of the Bloomington Jefferson track team and the Blaine tennis program, etc. Nothing too critical, you understand, because then we’d just have a smaller version of the same problem we get into with the UnitedHealths of the world. But, still something we can call “coverage”, you know. By that I mean, “facts”. How many votes for. How many votes against. No snarky “analysis”.
We’re also getting rid of our TV critic and our architecture critic. Because, well, we can get stories about TV shows from the Associated Press or a hundred other places, and we know they’ll be timely and positive and fun and that the people who wrote them won’t go howling to the copy desk when we cut them from 30 inches to 6 to fit around a really cute picture of Lindsay Lohan fresh out of treatment and promoting her new movie.
We will continue “coverage” of local media. But again, the snarky tone you read on websites and blogs is nothing but a real pain in the tuckus when you have to make small talk with radio and TV people at luncheons and seminars. They don’t like us telling our readers they screwed up. Who would? Not us. So we’re going to just stick with “reporting” who got hired and the latest ratings. We don’t think you’re interested in anything more than that.
Again, I’m just being honest with you, here. I could say something like how all our reporters are looking forward to the “challenge” of “covering” the Shakopee Planning Commission meeting and that research shows a tremendous hunger among readers to find out if Shakopee really is going to approve that 48-unit Skunk Guano development … but who’d believe something as transparently false as that?
Oh yeah, the architecture critic? Well, again, we know you’re interested in what’s going on with big building projects you see all the time. But frankly, like a lot of this stuff, we’re betting you won’t complain about what is not in the newspaper, and after a while you’ll stop caring it’s gone. Besides, we need one more reporter to cover the Lakeville gymnastics team.
Finally, it is true we haven’t even explained to our own reporters who exactly owns us and what they intend to do with this newspaper. We should be covering the hell out of it, since it’s another “follow the money” story with relevance to hundreds of thousands of local citizens, but we won’t. And I’m not going to demand it. It’s just too risky. I mean, people are getting laid off left and right.
We are however hoping the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times sends some reporters out here and finds out what in the hell is going on. Once they do, we might run a heavily-edited version of their story. That is if there’s any room left in the news hole after the update on re-paving Hwy. 101 through Minnetonka.
I repeat though, I’m just trying to be honest here.
Your Readers’ Rep-for-a-Day.
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