Three minutes before the big staff meeting Thursday where they broke the news to us that this newspaper was going out of business, an editor named Frank Keegan called me into his office. He’d just hung a huge photograph on his wall, a shot of Barack Obama talking to the big War Memorial Plaza crowd here last weekend. The photograph was meant to hang there as a reminder of history coming to Baltimore no matter what the future holds.
Keegan’s the top guy in The Examiner newsroom, and he didn’t find out exactly what was coming until the night before, and he promised confidentiality, a promise every journalist keeps no matter what rank. He decided to drag the picture in and hang it anyway.
Next door to his office was Timothy Maier, the No. 2 guy in the newsroom, talking to Sports Editor Jon Gallo. Maier thought the meeting was about a new magazine. Gallo had no idea, but he was sure it wasn’t anything earthshaking.
Then, when everybody gathered in the newsroom a moment later and heard the announcement, there was this weird disconnect: Wait a minute, how could this be happening when nobody had a clue?
And then: How could we not know? What happened, in that instant Thursday when death was declared, was a variation on a chillingly familiar theme across America. Newspapers are gasping for air. They’re slicing newsroom staffs to the bone, and then issuing these empty platitudes about “learning to do more with less,” which fools no one, and cutting their news holes, and redesigning pages to cover the emptiness of content, and then wondering why readers are turning away.
In its brief life span, this newspaper was different. Three years ago, when the economy was better but newspapers were already in big trouble, this fellow Philip Anschutz who owns The Examiner decides he’s going to buck the tide. He adds the Baltimore paper to his operations in San Francisco and Washington. The audaciousness alone is stunning. Who starts up brand-new newspapers in the computer age?
Maybe, in some other atmosphere, he might have made a go of it. But the economy’s a wreck, and advertising’s down everywhere, and this is a paper that makes its money strictly on ads. Anschutz has a lot of money, but nobody’s pockets are deep enough for today’s newspaper troubles.
Here’s how bad the situation is: In the new issue of the American Journalism Review, there’s a piece about a woman at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who’s been keeping tabs on all the jobs lost at American newspapers in 2008. She shows her research on a Web site called “paper cuts.”
The latest count was 15,554 — about half of which are newsroom jobs.
As the magazine reports, it means that the newsroom population of American papers shrank by about 15 percent last year, down from 52,000 at the start of the year. But the losses might be higher, since some newspapers don’t announce layoffs, and additional jobs have been lost through attrition.
But those are just numbers.
Newspapers are special places because they aren’t just jobs. You work for a newspaper, you feel like you’re involved in the life of your community. You’re telling your neighbors the important business of the day. You’re explaining why things are going well, or not so well. You’re bringing them insights into the cops and crooks, telling stories about the town’s characters, explaining why their taxes are going up or their neighborhood school’s falling apart.
When Michael Beatty, The Examiner’s publisher, tried to say a few words at Thursday’s newsroom gathering, he couldn’t get them out. His emotions kept getting in the way. It was that way with a lot of people. They’ve spent the last three years working hard, working late, working on a staff smaller than most big-city papers.
And now everybody wondered: Where do we go from here?
In the American Journalism Review story, there are no answers. Of those who have been laid off, only 6 percent have found other newspaper jobs. “The rest,” says the magazine, “are doing everything from public relations to driving a bus and clerking in a liquor store. … The midpoint salary range for their old jobs was $50,000 to $59,000. Those who listed salaries for the new jobs were a full salary band lower — $40,000 to $49,000.”
At that awful meeting in the newsroom Thursday, some people wept openly. Some of it was for themselves, and their worry over money and health care and such. A lot of these reporters and editors are young people with children and new mortgages.
But some of the weeping was about the very reason people get into this game. We want to feel we’re doing something important in the life of our community. This is a job that’s measured beyond the size of a paycheck. We think the work matters. We think the country suffers in ways it’s just beginning to imagine every time a newspaper has to stop the presses forever.
