WHIPLASH
What High Margins Mean in the Trenches
BY
ARIEL HART
Knight Ridder isn't alone in taking measures against a current
and expected revenue crunch, but it garnered headlines with aggressive
profit goals and drama at the top. And as the media world ponders
profits and public trust in the wake of the Jay Harris resignation,
journalists from the chain are feeling the pain. Here are some
voices from the other end of a sharp pencil:
Mike
Jacobs, editor of the Grand Forks Herald, led the North
Dakota daily's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the 1997 floods
that wiped out his city. During the four months after the flood,
Knight Ridder sent in sixty loaners from other papers, and didn't
blink at rebuilding the Herald's newsroom, which had burned
down. This March, though, it demanded a revenue margin high enough
to require cuts. To achieve that margin, Jacobs froze three open
positions and laid off three veteran journalists from an editorial
staff of thirty-nine. "It is extremely difficult to sit down next
to someone you know and tell them . . . ." His voice fades. "We
miss them. They are our friends."
It
takes time, meanwhile, to learn to work with fewer resources.
When key census data came out midweek early in April, for example,
the Herald was all over it. But no one picked up the slack
elsewhere. "You get here and your weekend budget is full of holes,"
says Jacobs. "It hurts when you have a staff that for many years
has put together surprisingly good coverage seven days a week,
and now you have to make compromises you wouldn't have made earlier."
Jacobs,
who calls himself "a Knight Ridder loyalist," says the paper will
pull through. "I pride myself in being a good editor. I'm trying
to be a good businessman."
*
* *
Last
summer, the Grand Forks Herald asked Jaime DeLage to return
to its reporting staff. His job installing solar electric systems
wasn't paying the bills, so he was happy to take up his notebook
again. "At the time it felt like, boy, there's opportunities everywhere,"
he says. "Shortly after that we heard whispers of impending layoffs."
The
Herald is not a guild paper, so everyone's job was on the
table. DeLage covers the legislature solo from Bismarck, and he
knows that position is vulnerable. The anxiety lingers, and he
and his colleagues take care to be productive. "It was certainly
an incentive to produce bylines if nothing else," he says. But
that precludes taking the time to sniff out larger projects. "Trolling
is hard to do," he says, "when you're pumping out stories every
day."
*
* *
Rick
Tulsky is relatively new to the San Jose Mercury News --
he got there in August -- but he isn't new to the tension that
comes with cost cuts. The investigative reporter was at The
Philadelphia Inquirer when profit pressures hit in the early
1990s. "It made it, in the end, not the special place it had been,"
he says. Tulsky's time at the Los Angeles Times coincided
with Mark Willes's tumultuous reign as the Cereal Killer. From
Tulsky's perspective, the low morale spawned by cuts is tough
to shake. "It takes until the next really great story," he says.
The only problem is that the budget that makes a newsroom need
that story also makes the story harder to get. "To the degree
those corners are cut," Tulsky says, "we'll never know what stories
we didn't find."
*
* *
Although
the Akron Beacon Journal cut eight newsroom people, its
Sunday magazine, and opinion page, Bob Dyer, a feature writer
at the paper, says that his plate is full of work he likes. He
is still free to pursue good stories. But Dyer isn't pitching
them all. Three of his top twelve ideas would now be too expensive,
he says. So he sits on them, hoping sources will come to Ohio,
or that the pinch will pass and the stories will still be worth
writing. A project like "A Question of Color," for which the Beacon
Journal funded focus groups, a poll, and multiple reporters
-- and which won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1994
-- would be "a tougher sell" today.
"For
a long time I thought it was a major advantage to work for a public
company," he says. "But now I'm having serious second thoughts."
*
* *
After
being laid off from the Beacon Journal in March, Mark Schlueb
gained brief Internet fame (or notoriety) for a profane letter
to Anthony Ridder. "You faceless corporate hacks take a break
from your golf game long enough to scream that circulation must
stay up, but then you order arbitrary budget cuts that force the
elimination of entire sections of the Sunday paper," he wrote.
Schlueb, now at the Orlando Sentinel, regrets how his outburst
was received. "I just wish people would pay more attention to
what Knight Ridder's doing than to the dirty words that I put
in my letter," he says.
Schlueb,
who left the last family-owned daily in Florida -- the News-Journal
in Daytona Beach -- to go to Akron, says the strong emotions that
the layoffs sparked affected reporting at the paper. "You threaten
people's jobs and instead of worrying about getting a story done
they start worrying about feeding their families," he says. "All
the reporters I talked with found themselves much less productive."
In
his ten months in Akron, Schlueb uncovered scandals that precipitated
a state ethics investigation and helped defeat an incumbent sheriff.
He thinks the Beacon-Journal has the tools to do great
stories, but he's not so sure about its future. "It will be harder
for them to attract the quality of journalists they have become
accustomed to," he says.
*
* *
Mike
McGraw of The Kansas City Star is trying to see both sides
of the current crisis. Travel will be limited this year, and a
colleague's recent request for a new database was denied. On the
other hand, like many Knight Ridder journalists, McGraw owns a
chunk of company stock and is not indifferent to its fortunes.
"Do I want my stocks to tank and my portfolio to go to hell?"
he says. "Of course not." But he doesn't think spectacular stock
value is the only way to survive, either. "I would much rather
this paper remain a good paper," he says, "than to see my stock
perform well."
*
* *
Thrity
Umrigar left her job as the Akron Beacon Journal's health
writer in 1999 for a fellowship. The paper helped with the costs
of a Nieman on class, gender, and race, then assigned her to its
Sunday magazine last August. Umrigar put her training to work
on profiles that explored social divides, like the different ways
that racism had affected three generations of a local black family.
"They finally were really making use of me," she says.
By
January, though, the magazine was gone, the victim of a series
of cuts, and Umrigar was sent back to her health beat. She imagines
she'll be pulled from time to time to cover for some of the eight
newsroom staff members who were asked to leave in April. "It's
paradoxical," she says. "Here I was at Nieman and they had this
great series of speakers, three times a week people would come
talk about the nobility of journalism. It was so disillusioning
to come back to this."
Ariel
Hart is a writer in Atlanta.
