Media
What will the future of journalism look like in this town?
That’s a question a lot of people would like to know the
answer to, but probably few more so than the editorial staffers at the region’s
biggest news outlet.
Writers at the Democrat and Chronicle marked 14 years
without a contract two weeks ago with a rally in front of the Blue Cross Arena,
across from the papers’ building. The Newspaper Guild of Rochester, the union
representing newsroom employees, has been in negotiations with the paper’s management
(plus a lawyer from Gannett’s corporate headquarters), but haven’t managed to
reach an agreement. In the past, they’ve accused the company of negotiating in
bad faith. Earlier this year, the paper abruptly reversed course and allowed a
federal mediator to attend the negotiations. Newsroom union reps say they view
that as a positive step, even though it has resulted in few tangible changes
for them so far.
Perhaps the biggest sticking point is over a 401(k) plan.
The paper won’t offer that popular retirement arrangement (where employers
match employee savings) to anyone represented by the Guild, even though just
about everyone else in the building receives it.
The rally — put on by the Guild — attracted a broader
labor union representation than in years past.
Among the speakers was Jim Bertolone, who heads the local
chapter of the AFL-CIO. Bertolone vowed to take the fight to the doorstep of
some of the state’s most powerful political candidates, Attorney General and
gubernatorial favorite Eliot Spitzer and Senator Hillary Clinton.
“I’m going to work with them to boycott this editorial board
this season,” he told the rallying workers.
Last year, all four major-party candidates for mayor
boycotted the D&C’s editorial-board interviews, but the editorial page
still made endorsements (Bob Duffy, in the both the Democratic primary and
general election).
Some other local politicians are also on board with the
Guild.
Republican State Senator Joe Robach and Democratic
Assemblymember (and Assembly Labor committee chair) Susan John both gave brief
speeches at the rally.
There’s no real reason for the state legislature to get
involved in the dispute, and neither legislator promised any particular action.
Their presence was more for moral support than anything else. Both railed
against the stalled negotiations and singled out the 401(k) issue in
particular.
“It’s not like they’re asking for something different,” said
Robach. “They’re asking for parity. That’s fair. This contract should be
resolved.”
John focused on the length of the time the reporters had
gone without a contract.
“Fourteen years: that’s a pretty bad statement,” she said.
“When any employer disrespects its workers, it’s a disrespect to all of us who
work in this community.”
The Democrat and Chronicle’s management, contacted the day
of the rally, declined to talk for this story. An employee in the office of
Publisher Mike Kane’s office who identified himself only by his first name,
Dan, read the paper’s statement, which he attributed to the paper’s
spokesperson and director of marketing services, Tom O’Connor: “There’s no
reason to comment on that at this point.”
While union rallies like this one are great at focusing attention on immediate disputes, they can also
obscure the deeper issues behind them.
The newspaper business, indeed the whole journalistic
establishment, is changing faster than at any time in its history. Circulation
and advertising revenue, the two cornerstones of large metropolitan dailies, have
been shrinking.
The big papers are still generally profitable, but they’re
not growing, and for big publicly traded media companies (including Gannett,
but also the New York Times Company and McClatchy, just to name two others),
that spells trouble on Wall Street.
In an attempt to stem this tide, papers are frantically
branching out, expanding their presence into niche markets and on the internet.
For the local Gannett operation, that translates into things like Big Auto
Book, Insider, Rochester Magazine, and a Finger Lakes
wine website. In Rochester, the
company’s products combined represent one of the highest levels of market
penetration in the nation. And yet it’s still not enough. In August the paper
unveiled yet another niche publication: her, a women’s magazine.
But those steps were
already happening a year and a half ago when Guild members embarked on an
advertising campaign to publicize their cause and got the attention of
Rochester media outlets, including this one (See “Dollars or Sense?” May 4,
2005).
So what’s changed?
“The pattern’s been broken. That’s what’s changed,” says
Steve Orr, an investigative reporter at the D&C and the Guild’s president.
The pattern he’s talking about is the one where profitable chains slowly make
deeper and deeper cuts, which appeases company shareholders. It was never an
arrangement that made anybody — newsrooms, boardrooms, shareholders, or the
public — terribly happy, but it seemed to work.
What changed that was a little-known Florida-based investor
named Bruce Sherman. Sherman’s firm
Private Capital management was the largest shareholder in Knight Ridder, which
was the second-largest newspaper chain in the nation (behind Gannett).
Last fall, Sherman,
dissatisfied with the company’s stock performance and believing its management
hadn’t made sufficiently deep cuts, led a shareholder revolt. At Sherman’s
urging, Knight Ridder ultimately sold itself to the McClatchy Company, which
auctioned off a few of the larger, less profitable properties, including both
dailies in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia
papers were bought by a private group put together by local PR man Brian
Tierney.
Recently a slew of articles in outlets that cover media,
including a cover story in the Columbia Journalism Review, have advocated
private, local ownership as the savior of the embattled metro daily. Rochester
reporters are watching what happens in Philly with interest, but also with a
healthy dose of skepticism. What if a local millionaire owned the D&C
rather than Gannett?
“It’s hard to know what’s better,” says Orr. For a primer on
what can go wrong when a wealthy private owner buys a newspaper, type “Wendy
McCaw” and “Santa Barbara News-Press” into Google News.
Now the cycle may be repeating itself at the Chicago-based
Tribune Company. Tribune is busy fending off a stockholder revolt from its
largest shareholder, the Chandler
family, on one hand and a revolt inside its largest newsroom on the other. LA
Times Editor Dean Baquet said in the pages of his own newspaper that he
wouldn’t make the latest round of cuts ordered by the company. His publisher is
backing him up. A handful of Los Angeles
billionaires are waiting in the wings with offers to buy the (profitable) paper
from Tribune.
What’s so troubling about all of this to most journalists is
not that newspapers have become unprofitable. Just the opposite: they’re
failing on Wall Street despite their profitability.
“It’s not like you’re talking Bethlehem Steel, which was
bankrupt,” says Orr.
So far, Gannett doesn’t seem to be in quite the same
situation as Knight Ridder or Tribune. One reason may be control. At the time
when he forced the Knight Ridder sale, Sherman
owned about 19 percent of the company’s stock. The Chandler
family controls 12 percent of Tribune’s stock and three seats on its board. No
single institutional shareholder holds anywhere near that much control of
Gannett.
But Gannett is also sheltered from market upheaval for now
in part because it’s already cut more deeply than Knight Ridder or Tribune had,
says its newsroom union.
Locally, bureaus are a thing of the past; the last one, in
Canandaigua, closed late last year. The number of metro beats has shrunk from
about 20 down to just a half dozen or so, according to the union, as more
reporters are shifted to covering the suburbs. One busy reporter, Joe Spector,
even has responsibility for two full-time beats: politics and MonroeCounty government.
Fewer plum assignments mean fewer incentives for talented
writers to stay. In recent months there’s been a small exodus of editorial
staffers from prominent slots, including classical-music writer John Pitcher,
environment reporter Misty Edgecomb, features writer Maeleeke Lavan, business
reporter Nishad Majmudar, and photographer Heather Charles.
In an internal newsletter announcing some of the departures,
Managing Editor Neill Borowski wrote: “We are working diligently to fill openings.”
The Guild doesn’t contradict that, but it notes that so far,
at least, many of those openings have gone unfilled.
“Every week the slot’s not filled, you save money,” says
Orr.
If there’s a bright
spot in the newsroom on Exchange Boulevard,
it’s the paper’s online efforts.
“They’ve actually added staff,” says Orr, and then, with a
trace of awe (or maybe just jealousy), adds: “They have a capital budget.”
According to sources, general assignment reporter Jeffrey
Blackwell is about to become the paper’s first fulltime online reporter. He’ll
be trained to put his journalistic skills to work across a variety of platforms
including photos, videos, and, of course, text.
That kind of arrangement is a taste of what the future of
journalism will look like, and the union is cautiously optimistic about the
paper’s newfound interest using the web that way. And that focus on the web is
already spilling over into the print newsroom.
“There’s more and more emphasis for all of us to take a
new-media approach to what we do,” says Orr. He and Guild Vice President Gary
Craig joke that the best way to get attention and funding for a project is to
pitch it with a strong multimedia component.
But the Guild is worried that by changing the medium in
which reporters are working, there’s a danger of changing the way the news
value of an event is judged. Once the D&C starts running a steady stream of
videos, will car chases and fires become more important news events?
And the guild fears that with a depleted staff, online
extras like podcasts, video, blogs, and rolling updates will wind up simply
meaning more work for a staff already stretched too thin.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2006.
