“I
go to work angry every day, and I go home angry every day.”
That’s
how one Democrat and Chronicle reporter — speaking on condition of anonymity — described what it’s like
working inside Rochester’s largest
news outlet.
That
might be an extreme description, but among rank and file newsroom staffers,
confidence in the paper and its leadership is apparently in short supply and is
dwindling. A poll conducted in February by the Newspaper Guild of Rochester,
the newsroom union, indicates that growing number of newsroom employees think
the paper’s quality and the quality of news judgment are declining.
This
takes place against the backdrop of the Guild’s contract dispute with the Democrat and Chronicle. The Guild is
entering its 13th year without a contract, and its leaders say this is the
longest-running labor dispute in Rochester.
Major
sticking points are benefits like health insurance and pensions and what the
Guild says are some of the lowest contractual minimum salaries among unionized
newsrooms. An especially sore point: The D&C
excludes Guild members from the 401(k) plan it offers to its other
employees.
“It’s a daily, continual
insult,” says one reporter.
But
this story isn’t just about a labor dispute or some workers unhappy with their
boss. It’s about the state of newspapers in this nation and the future of
journalism in this town.
The bursting of the media bubble
When
the Guild launched its latest campaign earlier this year, it ran ads in publications
like City Newspaper and on billboards
around Rochester.
The
ads did more than cite complaints about pay and benefits. They charged that D&C management has cut its newsroom
staff, and that those cuts are not just bad for journalists, they’re “unfair to
readers.”
The
slow shrinking of the newsroom, the Guild says, has occurred despite Gannett’s
healthy profits. And that, says the Guild’s website, is a “symptom” of the
company’s “willingness to shortchange its customers, to meet the profit goal.”
Says
one reporter: “You
would think that a business that depends on experience — general and beat
experience — and on institutional memory would value its employees more. What
is a newspaper without good reporters and line editors?”
A 13-year
labor dispute may be unique to the D&C,
but combined financial and journalistic pressures are not. Look at Romenesko, Editor and
Publisher, and other online sites devoted to the news about the news, and
you’ll be privy to an ongoing discussion about the future of the daily
newspaper in the United States. Most dailies
have been losing circulation for several years, making them less attractive to
advertisers. The loss is especially acute in the younger demographics that
advertisers crave.
Earlier
this week, the Audit Bureau of Circulationsreported the latest bad news: Dailies throughout the country lost
circulation in the past year. There were a few exceptions — the New York Times, for example, grew by
about 3500 — but on average, the circulation of dailies dropped by about 2
percent on weekdays, and more than that on Sundays.
The
Democrat and Chronicle has been part
of that trend. Since 2002, its average weekday circulation has declined by 2.5
percent, according to statistics released Monday by the Audit Bureau of
Circulations. (The figures are based on the D&C’s own reports. ABC’s
audited reports will be released later.)
And
the drop would have been larger if the D&C
hadn’t done what many dailies have been doing: boosting what are known as
“third-party sales.” Dailies often sell bulk copies to hotels and restaurants
to provide to customers, and to school districts for classroom use.
Between
2002 and 2005, the D&C increased
the number of its third-party-sale copies by 5757, according to the ABC report.
Add
to that loss the sustained explosion of new media outlets competing for
readers’ and advertisers’ attention — cable, internet news sites, blogs — and daily newspapers are fighting for, if not
their lives, at least their existence in their present form.
It’s
not a fight everyone expects the dailies to win. The New York Observer’s Richard Brookhiser
predicts that new incarnations of the Wall
Street Journal, the New York Times,
and the Washington Post “will be
interesting and useful, but they won’t be what they were.”
“Other
newspapers will dwindle to sheets of shopping coupons,” writes Brookhiser, “with notices of weddings and school-board
meetings.” Brookhiser is among the most pessimistic
of the media critics, but editors aren’t having a good laugh at his expense
just yet, either.
An
industry-wide business downturn is just part of the picture. To consider the
Guild’s claim, we need to look at two more pieces of the puzzle. Here’s the
first: Journalism is more than just a way to connect advertisers with readers
and make a buck in the process. It’s also “a vital public service in a
democracy where citizens rely on information to vote and to form and freely
express opinions,” as veteran media critic Ken Auletta
puts it in the introduction to his book Backstory.
Like
all companies, newspapers have to make tough business decisions. But
newspapers’ status as a public trust gives those decisions far-reaching
implications. When Kodak contracted from 60,000 to about 16,000 employees
locally, Rochester suffered as a
community from the economic ripple effects of money going into the pockets of
fewer local workers. But we didn’t suffer as a community from a shortage of
cameras or a spike in their cost.
On
the other hand, if the D&C makes
decisions — on the basis of business needs — that affect its employees’
ability to gather and disseminate the news, we all lose. The Guild says that’s
what has begun to happen at the daily.
Another factor worth
scrutiny: the D&C’s relationship to its corporate parent.
Though
the paper’s top managers says they enjoy a high degree of autonomy, the D&C is part of Gannett Company,
Inc., which owns more than 100 daily newspapers in the United
States and the United
Kingdom, including USA Today. Gannett also owns 21 television stations, specialty
publications such as Army Times and
Nursing Spectrum, and Clipper, a
direct-mail coupon publication. As the D&C’s president
and publisher David Hunke puts it: “We’re an
operating unit of a large multi-national corporation.”
Since
Gannett is a publicly traded corporation, its first obligation is to its
shareholders. For its stock to remain attractive to investors, Gannett needs to
keep growing its profits and the business as a whole.
So
while all newspapers are being squeezed between the poles of profit and public
service, newspapers owned by publicly held companies like Gannett are being
squeezed the hardest. The Guild quotes a Merrill Lynch report putting Gannett
Company Inc.’s profit at 25 percent. Hunke won’t say
exactly what the D&C earns, but,
he says, Gannett doesn’t set profit quotas for its individual newspapers.
“It’s
a process of us agreeing first of all on our top-line revenues projections, our
advertising and circulation strategies, and then the cost structure we’re going
to need to deliver that,” he says.
A
Guild member insists that Gannett does dictate the profit expectations. “What
they do,” says that reporter, “is they’ll set a profit target for each unit,
each newspaper, each TV station, and then, by god, if you don’t meet it the
shit hits the fan.”
The
profit target “may have come down a few pegs because of the local economy,”
says the Guild member, “but it’s high; it’s scandalously high.”
Several
years ago, a reporter at Nashville’s alternative
newsweekly, the Nashville Scene, got
hold of internal Gannett documents showing each title’s pretax profit margin.
The Democrat and Chronicle clocked in
at 34.4 percent for 1996 and 34.6 for 1997. (That put the D&C well into the “above average” category, though it was by no
means Gannett’s most profitable paper. Papers in Binghamton and Utica scored much
higher in 1997, at 44.8 percent and 43.6 percent, respectively.)
Although
the numbers may have decreased a bit since then, the line in 1996-1997 between
above-average and below average was within a percentage point or two of
Gannett’s profit level today.
Such profit
levels are well above what Washington Post Editor Leonard Downie Jr. says newspapers need to
make. Addressing a meeting of the Association of Newspaper Editors in early
April, Downie said a 15 percent return ought to be
sufficient, Editor and Publisher magazine
reported. “That is much better than supermarkets or some other businesses,” Downie said. “Most of the public is shocked when you tell
them what the average profit margin is.”
The
E&P article went on to describe Downie’s criticism of owners whose papers were shrinking
because they had cut resources “to maximize profit in the stock market.” He
didn’t single out Gannett or any other chain as an example, but he did cite
privately-held companies as those who still consistently perform good
journalism.
‘More
like a weekly’
Journalists,
writes Ken Auletta, need to understand how important
it is to make a profit in the news business: That’s not only what pays the
bills, but it’s what funds more staff, more experienced staff, expensive
investigations, and bureaus in outlying areas or in state capitals and Washington. But
journalists also need to be able to argue against high profit margins, Auletta says.
“They
need to show how a 20 percent profit margin (versus, say, 15 percent) may mean
cutting bone, not fat,” he writes. “Shareholders want a 20 percent profit
margin — but not if in the long run it means they own a diminished asset.”
That’s
the argument the reporters, photographers, and copy editors at the Democrat and Chronicle are trying to
make. The picture painted by sources in the D&C newsroom is of a paper that has largely abandoned its drive to be a
comprehensive metropolitan daily in the years since the afternoon daily the Times-Union was shuttered, and its staff
was folded into the D&C. (None of
those sources, all non-management employees from the paper’s editorial side,
would speak on the record.)
“I
was convinced this was a big-city newspaper,” says one reporter. “We considered
ourselves a metro paper. Today, we read more like a weekly, and that’s the
direction that editor Karen Magnuson is taking the paper.”
The staffers
also complain about the small size of the staff and the lack of time and
resources to develop stories and go after context and depth.
“Staffing
is laughable,” says another reporter. “There are two people working nightside in the newsroom — a police reporter and an
editor.” That’s down from two reporters, two editors, and two editorial clerks
who regularly worked the evening shift a few years ago, the reporter says.
Steve
Orr, who spoke to City only in his
capacity as union president, agrees with that description.
“The
biggest problem is just people,” he says. “There just aren’t enough people.”
Through attrition, the company has slowly but steadily diminished the number of
reporters, Orr says.
“They
only fill a small fraction of the jobs that come vacant through people leaving
or retiring,” he says. “We’re at the point now where we are clearly
short-staffed. Management indicates this openly in meetings, that we’re
hurting, and it’s plainly evident to all of us that work there.”
Another
beef: travel. The Guild’s new website, www.rochesterguild.org, says that newsroom
staffers no longer bother asking to travel outside the immediate Rochester area to cover
news “because they know they’re not likely to get it.”
“Travel
expenses are unheard of,” says one reporter, “unless you report on football.”
Former
D&C reporter Jay Tokasz recently returned from Rome, where he
covered the funeral of Pope John Paul II and the election and installation of
Pope Benedict XVI for The Buffalo News. That irked the Rochester newsroom
staffers, who watched their own paper rely on wire-service feeds for the event.
“We
no longer think big, and that bothers me a great deal,” one reporter says. “I
think we shortchange readers by not providing enough context and perspective.
You’ve got to get out of your world to understand it.”
The Guild has
tried to document its charge that the quality of the D&C’s news coverage has deteriorated — to the extent that it’s
possible. The staff that the Guild represents is down about 40 percent, Guild
officers say, from about 160 in 1992 when the staffs of the D&C and the T-U were merged, to just about 100 today. The Guild has also
documented a decline in the paper’s beats and news bureaus.
Consider
this from Guild officials:
“Here
is a partial listing of full-time beats that no longer are filled: agriculture;
editorial cartoonist; three editorial writer slots; at least seven
general-assignment reporting slots; theater; social trends, and women’s issues;
Rochester society; television and media; at least four editorial-assistant
slots; minority affairs; transportation; nine graphic-artist slots; social
services; at least two photographer slots; city living-urban affairs;
demographics; one high-school and one college sports reporting slot; personal
fitness; federal courts, and at least three metro columnist slots. We also have
lost two or three suburban reporting slots, and four or five reporting slots in
Our Towns, the zoned weekly section.”
The
Guild also points to the closure of bureaus in Batavia, Geneva, Victor, and Livingston and WayneCounties.
“If
you go back 20 years or so, we also had bureaus in Penn Yan,
YatesCounty; Seneca Falls, SenecaCounty; Bath, SteubenCounty, and in OrleansCounty,” say Guild
officials. “At present, we have only one reporter stationed outside of Rochester, in
Canandaigua.”
That
doesn’t mean that the D&C never
covers those areas, the Guild acknowledges; reporters are assigned to keep tabs
on happenings in outlying towns and counties.
“But
they do so on a very limited basis,” the Guild contends. “Instead of knowing
their subject well, they do their best to keep up with major developments, but
that might be all they have time to do. We have reporters who ‘cover’ each of
those outlying counties. But they each also cover several Monroe County towns, too,
and have no time to keep abreast of anything but the biggest and most obvious
stories in the outlying counties.”
Some of the
Guild’s concerns are impossible to document in numbers. One is the size of the “newshole,” an industry term for the amount of space set
aside for news. You might think that’d be a simple matter of counting inches,
but since the paper keeps repackaging itself, the newshole
is a moving target.
“We
cannot document the shrinking newshole in any numerical
way,” say Guild officials. “We’ve tried, and it’s devilishly hard to do well.
Obviously, if you go back a decade or so where there were two daily papers
here, the newshole is radically smaller. But to
compare today’s D&C to one from
five years ago, that’s harder, because new elements appear and old ones
disappear. The paper just added space, for instance, to the Sunday features
section. Did it come from elsewhere in the newspaper? There’s no easy way for
us to tell.”
“Our
perception is that newshole devoted to local news,
business, and national and international news is less, though,” says the Guild.
“That is counterbalanced, of course, by the appearance of occasional ‘extra
sections’ such as health or business-related tabs or last year’s Fighting for Rochester’s Future
sections.”
Filling
the newshole
Whether
the newshole has shrunk also depends on your
definition of the newshole, which depends in turn
upon your perspective.
By
Democrat and Chronicle Publisher
David Hunke’s reckoning, the newshole
hasn’t shrunk at all. “The number of gross news columns that we publish at this
newspaper isn’t significantly less than it was when we merged the two
newspapers,” he says.
Hunke admits that
he has cut things like two stock pages. (“That was a business-driven decision,
and one you don’t like to make,” he says.) And he doesn’t deny trimming in
other areas as well.
Part
of that reflects shifts in the way people get information. The online versions
of journalistic powerhouses like The New
York Times or BBC provide faster
— and sometimes deeper — reports of breaking national and international
events than readers can get from a wire-service article in the next day’s
paper.
“That
information is available almost in any form you want,” says Hunke,
“and I don’t know that people turn to newspapers for that first and foremost.”
But
he dismisses the notion that the paper is shrinking.
“I
don’t blame people for being unhappy when they see those things,” Hunke says. “The problem I have with the Guild’s ad
campaign statement is it doesn’t take into account a lot of reinvestment we’ve
made in newshole in special sections, special
projects, which we do many more today than we’ve done in the past. We’ve
doubled the arts coverage — beginning in January — of our Living section,
and that almost brings [the newshole] back to where
it was before we cut the stock pages. But it does come back in clusters and in
projects, as opposed to just laid out seven days a week the way I think it
might have been seen in the past.”
This
propensity to continually repackage the paper has its roots in a deep-seated fear: that
readers don’t care about the news anymore. The number of Americans reading a
daily newspaper has dropped from more than 80 percent in the mid 1960s to just
over 50 percent today. And those readers are an aging bunch.
Even
worse, a growing body of studies suggests that not only are younger generations
not reading newspapers, they aren’t getting news from the internet or anywhere
else, either. They’re ignoring it. Columbia Journalism Review Publisher Evan Cornog,
in an article on the subject of reader apathy titled “Let’s Blame the Readers,”
cited this statistic from a UCLA survey: While 60 percent of college freshmen
in 1966 believed it was important to keep up with political news, by 2003 only
34 percent did.
“Younger
Americans know plenty about the things that interest them — they just don’t
follow the news very closely,” wrote Cornog. “Given
the close correlation researchers have found between newspaper reading and
active citizenship, the figures are worrisome for both the industry and the
nation.”
That’s
a concern Hunke shares.
“I’m
worried about people’s disengagement and lack of interest, and people who think
they don’t really need to know or hear things,” he says.
The
future of the newspaper, says Hunke, is not a
technology issue.
“I
think it’s a sociology issue,” he says. “When people quit defining their
community as Rochester or Brighton or Hilton, and they define their community
through some other technological means that can take them into groups, clusters
— or their world is delivered to them [through] fiber optics or satellite or
something else, and they don’t know the pharmacist at the end of the sidewalk
at the little store, and they don’t go to PTA meetings — that’s the threat to
newspapers.”
The Democrat and Chronicle under the
leadership of Hunke and Magnuson has reacted to this
problem in two different ways.
First,
it has pushed the idea of repackaging the paper to the next logical step: With
separate publications like Insider, The
Big Auto Book, and the forthcoming Rochester
Magazine (an upscale lifestyle mag due out in
June), the paper’s trying to make an end run around waning interest in news by
providing niche content to target audiences. Those target audiences also happen
to be target markets, and the D&C’s move is
calculated to offset circulation losses at the daily by offering advertisers
more options.
The
push to fragment Rochester into a series
of niche markets isn’t unique to the D&C or even the Gannett chain. Like spurned lovers, newspapers everywhere are
trying just about anything they or their marketing consultants can think of to
get readers back. It’s arguable whether replacing “hard news” with the niche
content that dominates these spin-offs is a good trade-off for the communities
these newspapers serve. But don’t expect it to stop anytime soon.
“We’re
going to rapidly expand our product lines,” says Hunke.
“I look forward to a couple more projects that are in the pipeline and about to
come out.”
A second step the D&C has taken to stem the loss of
readers is to try to figure out what those readers want and give it to them.
“We
are creating sections that are serving the needs of readers based on talking
with readers and also on scientific readership research,” says Magnuson.
Armed
with focus groups, “scientific readership studies,” layers of readership
panels, and plain old informal interaction with readers, the D&C is doing its best to be all
things to all readers.
“We
feel it’s really important to be talking to readers all the time about what is
important to them,” says Magnuson, “so we have several reader panels that are
set up throughout the newsroom. Every department has at least one, where they
meet with readers on a pretty regular basis, sometimes once a month, sometimes
every other month, to talk about the readers’ perceptions about what’s going on
out in the community.”
“That
way,” she says, “we can make sure that we are covering stories that are most
meaningful to the readers we serve, as well as the regular stories that we
would be covering anyway.”
To
fully appreciate how important pleasing readers is in Magnuson’s newsroom,
consider that fully three of the five changes she says she’s proudest of during
her tenure revolve around catering to reader response. (The other two are the
paper’s online reporting and its role as a watchdog for the community.)
First:
“I’m most proud of what we’ve been able to do to connect with readers, because
I think that in the days of old, newspaper editors didn’t pay as much attention
to that. They made all of their decisions based on their gut instinct, and
today I think editors are better listeners. And the editors in my newsroom have
become very good listeners when it comes to the readers in Rochester.”
Then:
“I’m also very pleased with this newsroom’s ability to be nimble and change to
meet the evolving needs of readers.”
And
finally: “I am very proud of how this newsroom has changed its thinking to make
sure that journalism is more relevant to readers’ daily lives. We can produce
all of the journalism in the world, but if it’s not relevant enough for readers
to read it and be engaged, then it really doesn’t achieve its goal.”
But
not all of the newsroom is on the same page as
Magnuson when it comes to the value and use of reader input. One newsroom
staffer offered this analogy to describe the way the paper operates: “Imagine a
football game where all the plays are called by the people in the stands, one
by one.”
Being
responsive to readers is an admirable trait, and a time-honored tradition in newspapering. But turning the reins over to a focus group
to set the newsroom agenda might compromise some of Magnuson’s other goals,
like being a government watchdog on behalf of the community.
Low staffing
levels also pose a potential problem for the paper’s ability to fulfill what Magnuson
describes as its watchdog responsibility. Magnuson points with pride to Steve
Orr’s reporting on the problems with CSX and its railway crossings after the
death of a Rochester-area couple.
“What
you do is hire really talented people who know a good story when they see it
and then ask their editor for time to drill down and cover the hell out of it,”
she says. “There’s not a
reporter in our newsroom that couldn’t come to their editor or me or the
managing editor, Jane Sutter, and say: ‘I’ve got a great story here; here’s how
much time I need to go after it, and this is how I’m going to do it. Can I go
for it?’ And we’re going to say, Yes.”
Both
Magnuson and Hunke say they are every bit as
concerned with the public-service element of journalism as the profits. And
they point to the paper’s “Fighting for Rochester’s Future”
project, an extensive study of the challenges facing Rochester.
“That’s a perfect
example; that had nothing to do with money,” says Hunke.
“That cost us money to do that.” The payoff, they both say, is in the dialogue
it sparked within the community.
And
Magnuson says the paper is working with the Investigative Reporters and Editors
organization to train the D&C staff
“so that even our less experienced reporters have the skills to dig deeper.”
But
unless it increases its staff, for consistent investigative efforts the paper
will have to rely on reporters who say they are already overworked covering
their day-to-day, breaking-news responsibilities.
A mile wide, an inch deep?
Frank
Gannett first got into the newspaper business here in our neck of the woods. He
bought an interest in an Elmira paper in 1906
(its descendent the Star-Gazette is
still owned by the chain). In 1918 he entered the Rochester market with
the Times-Union, and in 1923
incorporated the company that would bear his name. The company showed up on
Wall Street by the end of the 1960s, but its corporate headquarters stayed in Rochester until 1986.
Perhaps
because of Gannett’s roots in Rochester, the Guild’s
concern about putting profits before service to the community rings doubly true
for many Rochesterians.
Says
Guild President Steve Orr: “We like the paper, but the problem we have, and I
think the problem that a lot of people in the community have, is that it is not
all that it can be — that it’s not as big,
to put it bluntly, as it used to be or as it should be in terms of the amount
of news that it has room to publish, the amount of information it can convey,
the diversity of opinion that it has the ability to communicate. We think it
can be better.”
The
problem, says Orr, is that the paper’s ability to “be better” is limited “by
the approach that the Gannett company takes in Rochester.” That
approach: “To maximize the amount of money that it makes here to no particular
local benefit, but — as happens with many companies and industries all over
the country — to feed the beast, to go back into the corporate coffers.”
Those
coffers “23 or 24 years ago were on the upper floor of the LincolnTower,” Orr reminds
us. “And I think we’ve become not the flagship paper of the company anymore but
just another cash cow, and a pretty substantial cash cow.”
At the same
time that Frank Gannett was assembling his empire, another type of nation-wide
business empire was crumbling. Today that empire has become a handy metaphor
for print journalism. In a recent article on the website of the Association of
Alternative Newsweeklies, Jed Morey, publisher of the alternative weekly Long Island Press discussed his own
paper’s effort to redefine what it does:
“We
had a very honest discussion last year and said, ‘Let’s make sure we don’t wind
up like the railroads at the turn of the century, thinking that we’re in the
railroad business and not the transportation business.'”
Newspapers
are now faced with the tough problem of defining the essence of their business.
That’s a discussion the Guild and the newsroom rank and file it represents want
to be a part of. If they were, there’s little doubt they’d push to redefine the
paper in the direction of their counterparts in larger cities — as a
comprehensive, news-heavy daily.
One
reporter, taking aim at the readership-response method, has this prescription
for the paper: “I would get back to the core business, which is reporting the
news. Now the core business is responding to reader groups.”
How
Gannett and its local management define the core business of the Democrat and Chronicle may be a bit
murkier. Responding to readers may be one definition. Magnuson’s discussion
about the importance of satisfying readers could have come directly from
corporate literature describing Gannett’s “Real Life, Real News” initiative.
Among other objectives, the initiative seeks to further incorporate reader
satisfaction into the way papers like the D&C measure their own success. Here’s the way one corporate exec summed it up: “We
must deliver what readers want, where they want it, when they want it, and how
they want it.”
Other
initiatives designed to broaden the paper’s appeal may not come from corporate headquarters
in Virginia, but they
have the same effect. They divert time and energy from newsgathering, and they can
make the paper’s content shallower in the process. One example is the D&C’s strict guidelines calling for more mugshots and more quotes from minorities, women, and young
people.
One
reporter relates this experience: After completing an article, “I was told at
the last minute that I had to have a minority quoted in the story, and I had to
have a minority’s photo appear with the story. I was told to just go out on the
street and ask an African American what they thought and take a picture. Then,
‘just squeeze it into the story.’ What message does that send to reporters?”
“Overall,
these are positive changes,” the reporter says, “but we’ve gone off the deep
end.”
On the Gannett
website, the company bills itself as “The Information Company.” But what does that mean?
A page on the website hyping “young reader publications” (of which the D&C’s Insider is one), says that twenty- and
thirty-somethings “view advertising as content.” If
that’s the case, perhaps Gannett’s core business (and that of the D&C, by extension) is providing an
advertising vehicle.
That
possibility crossed the minds of local journalists after the company selected
current CEO Doug McCorkindale, “the first CEO
Gannett’s ever had who has never been a journalist,” says Orr. “To us, it was
kind of a symbolic letdown that probably says something about the directions of
the company.
Mining
for profits
“The
thing that we’re trying to do in this campaign, which I think is both honest
and helpful, is to draw parallels between our labor dispute and the larger
state of the newspaper and of journalism in Rochester,” says Orr.
“We don’t think it’s a bad newspaper. We like the newspaper. And we choose to
work here. The people in the union work really hard, I mean, harder than ever
in a lot of ways, probably, to do as good a job as we can. And there are a lot
of things about the D&C that I
like.”
Orr
isn’t alone. Other D&C journalists with whom City spoke said
substantially the same thing: “We care about the paper and want to see it get
better,” sums up one reporter. The Guild is convinced that Gannett is trying to
break the union. And by doing that, the Guild says, the company and local
management seem to be ignoring, or worse, stifling good ideas that could come
from the people who report the news day in and day out.
“Human
capital just means nothing in a business where you think it would mean
everything,” one reporter says. For Guild members, the 12 years without a
contract seem like just another calculated business decision on the part of a
company they see as increasingly valuing profit more than quality.
“I
think it’s inescapable that any newspaper that is mined as extensively as ours
is for profits and managed with an eye toward profits is not going to offer its
home community what the community deserves,” says Orr. “And it’s frustrating to
us, because we want the newspaper to be able to do more. And we can’t do more.
We do new things, but every new thing we do means doing less of a job on
something else that we were doing before.”
“It
makes the newspaper less than Rochester deserves,”
Orr says. “There’s this incessant debate now about newspapers and where they’re
going. And the way I look at it is that for all of the warts and all of the
criticism — so much of which is valid — that people direct toward the Democrat and Chronicle or toward any
newspaper, it still is an essential part of the fabric of this community.”
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Next week: Columnist
Laurence Britt on the news in the D&C.
This article appears in May 4-10, 2005.
