To cut costs, newspapers cut days of print publication

This post was published in the Wilson Times Nov. 23, 2019.

If you like a good newspaper to linger over on a Saturday morning breakfast table, you might have to rearrange your table soon. McClatchy, which owns the Raleigh News & Observer, the Charlotte Observer, the Durham Morning Herald, and a total of 29 daily newspapers in 14 states, has announced it will stop publishing a Saturday print edition in the next few months.

For lovers of ink-on-paper news delivered to your door, this is the topper to a quarter-century trend of newspapers abandoning daily printed papers and putting profit-and-loss spreadsheets ahead of newspapers’ solemn duty to inform the public by reporting the news without bias or prejudgment. (Wilson readers are blessed to have a local daily that is not owned by a giant corporation that sees newspapers not as a solemn duty but as a potential profit stream.)

McClatchy Corporation has financial reason to drop days of publication, cut employment and trim investment in news reporting. On Oct. 8, the company reported a drop in stock price from $2.73 at close to 49 cents a week later.

McClatchy has been a train wreck for a long time. McClatchy, publisher of the Sacramento Bee since 1906, bought Knight Ridder, publisher of some of the most respected newspapers in the United States, including the Miami Herald and the aforementioned N.C. dailies. In March 2006, McClatchy paid $4.5 billion for Knight Ridder, which was known as one of the best newspaper chains, one that saw journalistic principles as an obligation. You’d be hard pressed to find a journalist on McClatchy’s corporate board.

Another worrisome newspaper development last week was the merger of Gannett with Gatehouse Media. Gannett, best known for USA Today, will be part of a conglomerate owning 250 newspapers. This degree of consolidation in news media once would have brought out anti-trust concerns, but now it’s just a routine business transaction.

On the cusp of the Great Recession, McClatchy overpaid for Knight Ridder and is still burdened with debt from that transaction. The once-powerful and profitable properties bought from Knight Ridder became unsellable in the depressed market and its sharp drop in newspaper advertising. The corporate office ordered layoffs and job consolidation to cut costs.

Just as in other newspapers, news employees were jettisoned to save money, making the newspapers less valuable to investors and readers as news coverage shrank. McClatchy consolidated jobs, such as publisher, which used to be a local position, a spokesman and business leader for each newspaper. McClatchy has already consolidated publisher and editorial positions in its North and South Carolina properties. Even these cuts and veering from traditional staffing were not enough to cover the rising debt.

So McClatchy has made the decision to “transition to digital,” meaning eliminating more costly print editions altogether. A number of major newspapers across the country have cut back on publication days. Dropping the Saturday print edition is a less drastic cut than some papers have taken. But the cuts are not over. It is apparent to my household, subscribers to the N&O for nearly 40 years, that print subscribers are expendable. When we went to renew our subscription, we found the three-month subscription cost about quadruple what an annual subscription cost a few years ago.

When I called to object to the price jump, I was expertly steered to a part-digital subscription. I now get the print edition Friday, Saturday and Sunday and have digital access all seven days. This hybrid plan for one year costs what print-only costs for three months.

The crisis in the newspaper business goes far beyond the “forget print” perspective at the N&O. Newspapers around the country are folding, leaving residents with no neutral resource about local government, crime, nonprofits, churches, jobs, industries, elections. The crisis in the loss of newspaper advertising is also a crisis in American traditions of vigorous public debate, informed voters and access to the ballot.

We are losing more than a day of print publication.

Old newspaper clippings provide reminders

This post was first published in the Wilson Times July 27, 2019.

My wife and I have been going through boxes and throwing away things that we once thought we’d like to keep forever, or at least a year. Among these boxes are several boxes I brought home from my career as a newspaper editor, going back to 1975. In 34 years as a newspaper editor, I wrote something like 1,700 columns and close to 9,000 editorials.

These are not exact numbers, just approximations of the number of editions the newspapers I edited had published and my usual writing schedule. I’m sure I took some days off (but I often wrote editorials and columns in advance so as not to burden someone else with having to do my work while I was away).

My wife suggested that I should save the columns and other items that dealt with our children and our home life, so that our children might recall their younger days. Two of our children were born while I worked for newspapers. Our youngest child was 29, the oldest 37, when my newspaper career ended. My wife thought compiling these personal memories in some printed form, such as a book, would be an excellent gift to our children.

So I’ve been pulling musty clippings of columns from dusty file folders and deciding whether my topics were anything our children would care about. The jury is still out on that question. Whether anyone else ever reads these articles, my tedious exercise in separating wheat from chaff has been eye-opening to me.

I discovered I wrote a good number of columns of a personal matter, such as the surprising joy of seeing our children learn to read, learn to drive a car (scary!), welcoming children into “adult” conversations, seeing children move out of the house and become independent (sort of), and so on. I tried to write columns that were not strictly personal but would find an audience with people who could identify with my experiences. Comments from friends and strangers indicate that some of those columns resonated with other families.

In my review process, I discovered that I often used my columns to explain newspaper issues to our readers. As editor, I was the final arbiter of what news went into the paper. I wrote about how we made news decisions (a daily meeting of editors discussed the importance of our available news articles). I wrote about anonymous callers and letter writers who would criticize or threaten me and the newspaper, often because they didn’t understand what we were trying to do, and sometimes because they just had their facts flat wrong.

Good example: An angry woman called to say I was a racist because we didn’t run an appropriate photo of the new Miss America because she was black. I told her I was sure no racial discrimination was involved in Miss America coverage, but she insisted that we ran a large photo of white Miss America on the front page in color but ran a small, black and white photo of the black Miss America a year later. I told her I honestly couldn’t remember how we ran the previous year’s photo but I would check. I flipped through the bound volume of newspapers and found out the caller had it all wrong. We had run a two-column photo of the black Miss America, the same size as the white Miss America got. Both photos were in color.

She wouldn’t give me her name or phone number, so I couldn’t prove to her that she was wrong. I had to settle for writing a polite column, which she probably didn’t read. But I got it off my chest.

When the newspaper changed its policy and began endorsing political candidates, I wrote many columns explaining the decision and reminding readers that an endorsement is just one entity’s opinion. Other opinions are valid and can be published in the paper as guest columns or letters to the editor.

I’ve also gone through about 30 years of calendars I had kept as editor and as a nonprofit manager. They brought back a few memories, but mostly they proved that I couldn’t read my own scribbling done while hurriedly writing down an event or appointment. No point in keeping any of those calendars. At first, I was disappointed that I had made no notation when my parents died, my siblings died, my children married, and other life events occurred.

Then I realized these were calendars — appointment reminders — not diaries. No need to keep any old calendars.

Newspaper careers crumble, but public needs news

It has been 10 years since I was employed by a newspaper (this once weekly writing gig does not qualify as “employed”). But I cannot help but listen to the crumbling of the industry where I spent 33 years of my life.

The latest crash I heard came in the form of a blog post by David Menconi announcing his layoff from the Raleigh News & Observer. In that post, Menconi, who had covered the music scene for the N&O for 28 years, cited the largest percentage destruction of a newsroom I had ever heard about, an 84 percent cut in newsroom staff: “More than a decade of layoffs, buyouts and attrition whittled our once-mighty newsroom staff of 250 down to around 40 survivors.”

It’s more common to read of newsroom cuts of 25 or 50 percent as newspapers slash costs to compensate for drastically reduced advertising revenue. Newspaper advertising revenue had been declining nationwide for 20 years, but the 2008 Great Recession, combined with the whiplash-inducing switch from print to digital advertising (Google and other online amalgamaters are making billions while newspapers, which do most of the reporting work, are laying off the reporters who expose the news).

Nearly all of the newspaper employees I worked with or knew through conferences, training meetings and associations are no longer in the business. Print-only news reporters are dinosaurs as remaining newspapers try to shift their focus to online readers and the almighty millennials. A recent column in the N&O (which we’ve subscribed to for nearly 40 years) infuriated my wife, as she read between the lines that the newspaper doesn’t care about any readers over age 40 or anyone who prefers a print publication to digital. The columnist seemed to be saying, “You old folks are going to die soon, anyway, so we don’t care about you.”

I worry about my former colleagues and peers who gave their lives to reporting the news in print and now are cut loose to drown in the sea of online advertising and video news, but I also worry about what this means to American democracy. The framers of the Constitution established freedom of the press as a fundamental right for one simple reason: Voters who don’t read the news can’t make wise decisions on election day. Without thorough reporting by professional journalists, the public cannot keep watch on government officials and government activities. Democracy is based on an informed electorate. As the Washington Post’s new slogan puts it, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

On a trip to Wilmington last weekend, I picked up a copy of the Wilmington StarNews. Among the other news in the Saturday edition was a report on the retirement of Si Cantwell, an editor and reporter with the StarNews for nearly 40 years. In his final column, he reminisced about his life in the newspaper business, then made this plea to readers: “I don’t worry about print readership diminishing. I worry about apathy. I worry about citizenry no longer interested in keeping tabs on elected officials, who don’t care about school redistricting or tax rates or film incentives. We still care about those things at the StarNews, along with restaurant openings and local sports scores, and I believe we provide the best coverage of that.”

I never crossed paths with Cantwell during my newspaper career, but we are singing from the same hymnal.

Ten years after being laid off

Ten years ago this week, my three-decade career as a newspaper editor came to an abrupt halt. My boss, the publisher, came into my office and told me he had to "let you go." My layoff was one of dozens at that newspaper and one of many thousands nationwide as newspapers across the country, shaken by steep drops in advertising revenue and falling circulation, shed workers en masse.

My immediate reaction was, "I'll lose my house," which we had moved into just five years before. I had been determined to pay off the 15-year mortgage in 12 years so that I could plan to retire debt-free. That now seemed impossible.

My second thought was, "I will not be bitter." It was a financial decision — one that could have been handled differently but it was out of my control. Getting angry or holding a grudge would only hurt me, not those who were casting me adrift after 29 years at the paper.

My immediate concern was surviving until I could find another job. It was obvious that I would need to change careers or move to another city — or both. My wife and I quickly decided that it made no sense for both of us to seek new jobs in an unfamiliar city. She had a good job that she enjoyed with a company that treated her well. It would be unfair to make her change jobs because I was laid off. I searched for jobs related to journalism — teaching, public relations, writing/editing services — as well as jobs unrelated to the work I had done before. I considered commuting to jobs in Raleigh and Clayton. I was flexible in my goals. I searched diligently for work while collecting a few months' severance pay followed by unemployment insurance. But finding a new job when you're 59 years old is nearly impossible. Age discrimination in hiring is illegal, but try to prove you were discriminated against. I was told that I had a good claim that my layoff resulted from age discrimination (I was replaced by a younger man), but I was also advised to be prepared for devoting my life to the discrimination lawsuit for at least 10 years. 

No thanks. I kept job hunting. I remained unemployed for a year and became deeply depressed at times and frustrated. I finally landed a job managing a nonprofit's Wilson office, at about half my newspaper salary.

In the past 10 years, I have settled into a new career, changed jobs to manage a second nonprofit and quit thinking about ideas for news stories, how to cover public issues and how to redesign newspapers' business strategy to make newspapers profitable again. I am still a voracious reader of news and follower of political issues. I'm only a spectator now, and that is fine. I rarely see or think about the friends I knew in newspapers across the state. I've closed that door behind me. A year ago, I retired, began collecting Social Security and signed up for Medicare.

I read; I write a little; I work at maintaining our house, which we didn't lose after all (the state's unemployment insurance provided just enough to pay the mortgage, and my wife's salary covered our other expenses). I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get to close out my newspaper career on my own terms, but nothing in life is guaranteed. I'm happy where I am now, and I am grateful every day for the way things have turned out. 

Guns in newsrooms

In my more than an 33 years in newsrooms, I encountered an angry visitor with a gun only twice, and I survived both scares. Today's tragic murders of five people in the offices of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, brought back memories of my experiences years ago.

News personnel are particularly vulnerable to angry, aggrieved people who don't like what you wrote or don't like what you didn't write. Newspapers have to be part of the community. Most smaller newspapers have little in the way of security, and members of the public can stroll in with a news tip, a tidbit of information or a complaint that can turn into a news story. Too much security can stifle news coverage. Jerry Bledsoe, who wrote a column for the Greensboro News & Record and has published several true-crime books, resigned at the Greensboro paper when it moved into a fancy new building with professional guards and other security. Bledsoe had relied on people to walk in off the street and tell him about wild and crazy things that he could write a column or a long news story about. The new security cut off his best news sources, so he resigned and went to work for the Charlotte Observer for a while.

Back in the 1980s, two young men barged into the Lumberton Robesonian newsroom and took the staff hostage. They demanded an investigation of alleged corruption in the Robeson County sheriff's office. Staff members, including at least one I knew, were held for hours and hours at gunpoint before the gunmen were persuaded to give up.

When I was editor of the weekly newspaper in Hamlet more than 40 years ago, I scheduled interviews with all of the candidates in a hotly contested city council election. In order to show that the paper was accurately reporting candidates' positions, I tape recorded all the interviews and printed the questions and responses verbatim. One candidate declined to be interviewed. I told him I was treating everyone the same, so either he would sit for an interview or we would not run an article about him. A few days later, the candidate walked into the newsroom with a lever-action rifle, the kind you've seen in Old West movies. He handed me several pages of paper with his responses to the questions I had asked the other candidates. (Note to self: Next time, complete all the interviews before publishing the questions.) I told him that letting him prepare responses at his leisure instead of responding on-the-spot in a live interview was not fair to the other candidates. He was angry but did not use the rifle he was carrying. Looking back on the incident, I'm amazed that I wasn't more frazzled than I was.

My next armed encounter was in Wilson. An obviously upset young man came into the newsroom and said he wanted to see me. I overheard the exchange and came out of my office, introduced myself to him and offered a handshake. "I ain't shaking your hand," he said, his face red with anger. I asked him what he wanted, and he gave me a prepared announcement saying that the newspaper was wrong when it published a brief item in the court news saying his case (I believe the charge was assault) had been dismissed with leave. He said his attorney had promised him it wouldn't be in the paper if he agreed to the plea. He demanded that we publish his announcement without editing. I explained that we ran all the court news, no exceptions, but the item about him simply said the case was dismissed. That just made him angrier. He stomped out, shouting, "You haven't heard the last from me!"

His anger and what looked like a pistol in his pocket worried me. I tried to keep an eye on the visitor to make sure he left the building and was not lying in wait or attacking someone else. I saw him circle the outside of the building ominously, but he left without further incident. I called the sheriff, who was quite familiar with the man. The sheriff said he'd ask the man's lawyer to explain to him that he got his case dismissed, as promised, but the outcome of the case is still a public document and can be reported by the newspaper.

The next time the man was in the newspaper, it was because his father had shot and killed him in an argument. It was ruled self defense.

Local newspapers are still indispensable

For the first time in several years, I am subscribing to the local newspaper. When that newspaper laid me off after 29 years, I saw no reason to contribute to the revenues of a company that had, in my view, mistreated me and dozens of other employees who were laid off as the Great Recession and changing media erased print newspapers' business model.

I continued to take a regional daily newspaper and to read other newspapers online. My interest in public affairs, politics and world events was as strong as ever. I just didn't feel a need to purchase a local newspaper.

As this week's election approached and I saw some campaign signs around town, I realized that my thorough knowledge of city/county politics and elected officials had lapsed. Without a local newspaper, I did not know who was up for election and who the challengers were. I didn't miss late nights waiting for results to come in, which was my practice through more than 30 years as a newspaper editor. I did miss getting to know local and state officials and digging into local/state issues.

As I looked at the newspapers tossed into my driveway, I realized I had missed a few other things, such as local entertainment events, festivals, local obituaries, local art and culture reports. Yes, Facebook posts often include such matters, and I knew about many local events from social media, emails, personal contacts. Likewise, the city government posted news on social media that was sometimes helpful but always giving the government's perspective. I was still missing things, which I hope to be kept aware of if the local paper does its job.

Decades ago, when I was in the midst of my newspaper career, I could not understand how some neighbors and friends never subscribed to the local paper. "How can you get along without it?" I would wonder. Reading a local newspaper was integral to my daily life. The paper provided important news of local politics, governmental actions, criminal activity, life events (weddings, etc.), obituaries, business activity, road closures and improvements, sales at department stores and supermarkets, job opportunities, houses, cars and other items for sale, and legal notifications, such as foreclosures and estate settlements.

Alas, many of these news items are now available more promptly and conveniently than traditional print newspapers can provide them. Want ads used to provide newspapers with a steady cash flow, but nearly all of that business has shifted to internet job sites, the same for personal for sale items. That is a large reason why so many newspapers have collapsed. Another reason is many people's unwillingness to read instead of listening to broadcasts or watching videos for information.

Despite the drastic changes in the newspaper business, I am happy to renew my love of local newspapering and to feel its indispensable nature again.

Reader analytics fail to fulfill role of the press

During my 33 years as a newspaper editor, I grew increasingly concerned that the press was not living up to its responsibility to inform the public. Marginalized by radio and television, and then by online news sources, anguished publishers and editors tried to make news more interesting, more exciting, more appealing, more entertaining.

CBS, once the trusted leader in television news during the heyday of Walter Cronkite, put its news division under the direction of the entertainment division. Newspapers aimed to become more entertaining, too. Consultants advised against too much governmental coverage, international coverage, political coverage, Washington coverage or science coverage.

The one place newspapers could beat the competition, the consultants assured us, was in local coverage. So front pages that once carried the latest in national and international events shifted their sights to the new supermarket or the lost puppy.

A few days ago, John Drescher, editor of the News & Observer of Raleigh, explained a new strategy at the newspaper I read every day. There will be more coverage of what they want to read, he told readers. N&O editors know what readers want to read because they have analytics that show what digital readers are actually reading — something they could only guess at when the N&O was a print-only publication. So if the data show that readers are reading more articles about area restaurants, the N&O will focus its coverage more on area restaurants, even if it means omitting an article on sea level rise or court challenges to new state laws.

Knowing what people are clicking on has worked great for Facebook and Google, so you can hardly blame the N&O and other newspapers for following their lead. But here's the problem: the Founding Fathers created the First Amendment to protect freedom of the press because they knew an independent, free press was the best defender of democracy owing to its ability to inform the public on the key issues of the day.

The United States has relatively lenient libel laws and strong public records laws based, in part on the First Amendment. But advocates of repealing or modifying the First Amendment have grown more aggressive recently, and President Trump has called for revisions to libel laws to make it easier for individuals, even celebrities and politicians, to win defamation cases.

When the news media come to the defense of the First Amendment, their argument about the importance of informing the electorate and being an essential, independent voice had better have more to back it up than newspapers full of entertaining stories about restaurants, puppies and recipes.

Unless the press is fulfilling its obligation to inform the public about important national issues, there is little reason for constitutional protection, and First Amendment opponents will have an easier argument.

1960s visions of the future of newspapers

When I was a student in the School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina, professors and textbooks talked about the future of newspapers with wildly futuristic visions. Some sources proposed newspapers that would be delivered to your house via telephone wires or broadcast frequencies and printed out in your home on some sort of personal printing press. Others envisioned a newspaper that would appear on your television, and you would be able to read the newspaper by sitting in front of the TV.

All these fantasies were widely dismissed by students and professors alike. The public would not want to give up the printed newspaper that had been part of American life for 200 years. How would you divide up the sections of these news platforms with each family members getting to read a section at the time? That home printing press would be expensive and would fill an entire room. Current technologies couldn't possibly handle the abundance of information contained in newspapers to squeeze that info onto a home printing press or a TV screen. The broadcast or wire transmission of this volume of news would clog the air waves and phone lines and make them collapse from the volume.

The traditional printed newspaper, available for hundreds of years, should be good enough for another few hundred years, most everyone thought, perhaps until messages can be transmitted directly to the brain by brain waves or thoughts transmission.

Earlier this week, I decided not to trudge through the rain to the end of the driveway to pick up my copy of the Raleigh newspaper. Instead, I sat comfortably inside, drank my coffee and read the News and Observer online version on my antiquated, first-generation, hand-me-down iPad.

This technology, far superior to anything the textbooks and professors of the 1960s ever dreamed of, is satisfying and near-perfectly replicates the print version of the newspaper. I see each page as it appears in print. I click on a story I want to read, and it enlarges to a comfortable reading size. I tap to turn the pages. I get to see every story that's in the print edition but without getting soaked while walking to the end of the driveway.

This technology and its cousins have given us a parallel means, arguably a better means, of reading the morning newspaper. At the same time, technology has destroyed the business model of traditional newspapers. Classified advertising, which once consumed a dozen or more pages of high-dollar income for newspapers every day, has now retreated to specialty websites that are searchable and cheaper than anything print newspapers could offer.

As a member of the last generation raised on print newspapers, I am often shocked that young people don't feel a need to read a newspaper, in whatever form. Television and the internet, including news sites on that phone in your pocket (I have one of those, too), have made information more accessible but, often, less enlightening and less reliable than traditional newspapers. Younger generations seem less connected to local, national and world events because their exposure to "news" is selective and often slanted.

Journalism professors of the 1960s were wrong about the future of newspapers. The great cataclysm came sooner than expected and in a way no one could have imagined 50 years ago. Many thousands of newspaper jobs, including one I held, have disappeared. No home printing press, no TV newspaper but a different medium has disrupted newspapers, which are still trying to find a means of providing information to the public in a profitable, reliable way.

From all the most dishonest people

Since I spent 33 years in the newspaper business, I'm thinking that Donald Trump includes me in his complaint that members of the news media are "the most dishonest human beings on the earth." Even though I have been out of the business nine years, I take offense at the president's insult.

Throughout my career, I had one goal in mind: to provide honest, accurate reports to readers of information they needed to know to be good citizens, good neighbors and knowledgeable voters. I repeatedly emphasized this to the reporters who worked for me. In an age when a few reporters "went undercover" to ferret out scandal and corruption, I warned the reporters who worked for me that they must always be honest about what they were doing. They couldn't pretend to be a survey-taker or a municipal official to get information they wanted. I did not require that they identify themselves as reporters upon greeting someone (though that is usually the best practice), but if asked what they were doing or who they were working for, they had to reply honestly. The only reporters I recall firing during my career were fired for lying to me about what they were doing or had done.

So I have good reason to be offended by Trump's attack on a profession that I believe is honorable as well as essential for a working democracy. Long ago, the press earned the nickname "the Fourth Estate." The name came from the French, who saw the church, the nobility and the common people as the three estates with the press tagged as the fourth. Although the press and government officials have often been at odds, never in American history has a president (even Nixon) been as hostile to the press as Trump is.

Trump speaks of "the media" and other politicians refer to the "mainstream media" as a monolithic organization with centralized management and orders issued from all-powerful and secret managers. As anyone who has spent any time in journalism knows, nothing could be further from the truth. The news media (a plural word — medium is the singular) comprise many thousands of news outlets, including newspapers, TV stations, broadcast networks, cable channels, radio stations and networks, magazines, and online news reports. No single hierarchy could control all these disparate and widely dispersed organizations, and no one would want to.

Yes, the Associated Press distributes news to news outlets around the world, but so do Reuters, New York Times News Service, and others. My experience with the AP was that it was exceedingly careful about making sure the facts were right.And most larger papers rely on their own remote bureaus for national and international news.

It is true that some news sources lean to the left or to the right, but the vast majority of news organizations, from the small-town weekly newspaper to the New York Times, aims to report fairly and completely all the news that their audiences want or need. The president likes to pick fights with people who threaten his self-image, so he condemns the news media for reporting facts that differ from his "alternative facts" (facts are facts, not alternatives).

The news media have gone through a lot in the last 10 or 20 years. Advertising sales, which pay for the news coverage you receive, have fallen off the cliff. Classified advertising, once the cash cow of newspapers, has gone nearly 100% to online sites. Hundreds of thousands of news personnel (including me) have been laid off. Newsrooms are hollowed out, yet newspapers and other outlets keep trying to keep their readers informed about the important events of the day. For that, they deserve the thanks of everyone who thinks an informed public is essential to democracy.

Revered editor would be aghast at today's newspaper

While reading a book about the 1960s civil rights movement, I came across the name of Claude Sitton, who earned his reputation as an unsurpassed reporter while covering civil rights in the South during that era and went on to be the legendary editor of the Raleigh News & Observer. The mention made me wonder what Sitton would think of the current N&O.

Sitton, whom I met but can't say I knew, had a reputation as a very serious, unstoppable pursuer of truth in the form of news. (Sitton died earlier this year.) His N&O scoured state government for scandal and wrongdoing, and his front pages were deadly serious. There were few examples of feel-good, touchy-feely, cute-kittens kinds of stories in the N&O of those days, and there was minimal coverage of routine crime of the sort many television newscasts emphasized — "if it bleeds, it leads." He was a champion of a free press, and his leadership showed why a free press was both a necessity and a rationale for constitutional protections for the news media.

Unfortunately, the N&O has veered from Sitton's example since he retired 25 years ago. The newspaper business has changed. The entire business model that served newspapers for two centuries — selling print advertising to support news reporting — has collapsed. Thousands of newspaper employees have been laid off. Just as damaging as the revenue loss has been a change in focus for many newspapers, including the N&O. Facing an inability to compete with broadcast and online news for immediacy and urgency, newspapers have shifted their focus to "softer" news — heart-tugging or whimsical stories that are not "big" news, but they're local, and they're not all over the Internet before they can get into print. A legion of newspaper consultants has insisted that soft, hyper-local news is the print newspaper's only hope for survival.

The N&O's latest redesign, which emphasizes color, subheads, and large, smiling pictures of the reporters, is an extension of this trend.

Sitton, I'm convinced, would have none of it. He wouldn't bury the infighting over the state budget or the refugee tragedy in eastern Europe deep inside the paper. He wouldn't make a cute story about a cemetery tour or a store covered in coffee mugs the dominant story on 1A. Call him a curmudgeon, but he knew why the Founding Fathers wanted to protect press freedom. It wasn't to make America safe for cute cat videos.

Like any newspaper editor, Sitton defended the First Amendment, which is under assault from the left (the influence of money in politics) and right (alleged liberal bias of the "mainstream media"). If all today's newspapers are going to do with their precious press freedom is to publish cute, hyper-local stories while ignoring their "watchdog" role in keeping local, state and federal government, as well as other powerful entities, such as corporations, universities, unions and the military honest, why have a First Amendment at all?

If repeal of the First Amendment were to come before Congress (and the states), would today's newspapers be able to defend freedom of the press by citing what a free press is doing to protect democracy and inform voters? I cringe at the thought.

Newspaper design aims at wrong audience

It seems fitting that this one-thousandth post to this blog should be about newspapers. After all, this blog grew out of a newspapering career. I began writing a blog at the urging of one of the many consultants who worked their way through the newspaper I edited. After being laid off, blog and all, by the newspaper, I began blogging on my own.

The newspaper I read every day, the News & Observer of Raleigh, has redesigned itself, and my initial reaction was, "please don't." Although the N&O had famed newspaper designer Mario Garcia create the redesign, it includes most of the flaws I complained about each time in my 33-year newspaper career that we went through a redesign. My complaint with newspaper designers is that they are more concerned with creating a pretty design than with communicating information to readers. Although it's nice to impress readers with the beauty of your design, what readers want is information. If they want art, they can go to a museum. Great photos used well attract readers and can tell a story visually. Many of the great news events of our history are remembered in photos — Neil Armstrong standing on the moon; Jackie Kennedy reaching back to pull a Secret Service agent aboard as the presidential limousine rushed a fatally wounded president to a Dallas hospital; the World Trade Center collapsing into rubbish — but a newspaper is both visual and linguistic.

The bright colors on section fronts serve no useful purpose while wasting space. The full-column photos of columnists also waste space. For generations, newspapers have relied on half-column mugs to identify columnists (and newsmakers). The N&O redesign changes the standard "head and shoulders shot" to a "head and elbows shot."

The bigger pictures and bright colors, along with multiple subheads and pull-outs, are aimed at attracting the youngest audience, the millennials, who every survey shows are not readers and won't be readers of print. As one of the first newspapers to get aboard the digital bandwagon, the N&O has succeeded in building a digital audience, and I use the web edition of the N&O when I'm out of town or the paper is late. I like the digital edition. Trying to make the print edition more like the web I don't like.

An earlier redesign of the N&O also turned me off. Instead of a standard four sections per day — front (main news section), Triangle/State, Sports, and Feature — the N&O merged the local section with the main news section, with the result that some clearly second-tier news made the front page. For subscribers who don't live in the Triangle but depend on the N&O for state and national news, this is distressing. It also leaves just three sections to the paper, and the section size is widely skewed. The Features section is now barely large enough to carry the comics. What is at stake here is not some effort to better serve readers; it's a simple means of saving costs, regardless of the readers' preferences.

I expect to be a newspaper reader until I die, but it appears I'll have to settle for newspapers designed for generations other than my own, despite the fact that the 65+ demographic is the fasted growing segment of the population.

Newspapers are selling off their real estate

Sometimes newspapers make the news, not just report it. So it was this morning when the News & Observer reported that its owners were accepting proposals to sell the N&O's landmark building in downtown Raleigh.

Other tidbits could be found in the story: The N&O now employs about half the number of people in the downtown building as it did in 2008. The Charlotte Observer is also considering selling its downtown offices.

All of this reminds us of the sad state of American newspapers. All — or nearly all — have sharply curtailed staffing. News isn't being reported. The newspapers' heft is a fraction of what it once was. Classified advertising is almost completely gone. Fat newspaper profits ("a license to print money," it was said) have dwindled. Esteemed newspapers have found their real estate more valuable than their business. The Washington Post has sold its iconic headquarters, lovingly reproduced in the movie "All the President's Men." Now North Carolina's largest papers are looking for real estate developers to give them an infusion of cash they can no longer get from advertisers.

I've been in the N&O building in downtown Raleigh a couple of times, never able to figure out the labyrinthine layout. I'm more familiar with the Charlotte Observer building. In 1970, the summer I interned at the Observer, the big, modernist building was half built. The production department and presses had moved into the new facility. News was holed up across the street in offices that had housed a fraternal organization. One of my jobs, as the lowest on the department's totem pole, was to run "copy" — the typewritten paper news articles — across the street, where each letter would be typeset in lead for the gargantuan presses.

Later, after I had resigned as editor of the Danville Register, I talked to the city editor and editor in the expansive newsroom one Saturday morning about possibly working for the Observer. Nothing came of the interview, but I saw the newspaper office completed nine years after I had couriered paper into the building, which had become a downtown landmark.

The sad state of American newspapers has been recognized since the sudden collapse began about 10 years ago, but the sale of newspaper real estate clarifies just how low once-great newspapers have sunk. Downtown real estate is the seed corn of journalism, the monuments to once-powerful empires now up for sale like an empty Kmart.

We refugees from journalism

During a round of introductions at a meeting yesterday, I described myself as "recovering from a 33-year in journalism." In retrospect, I think a better description might be as a refugee from a 33-year career in journalism.

Like residents uprooted from their homes by war or famine, I have been uprooted from the career I chose, enjoyed and thrived in (at least to some degree). Like war refugees, I find myself somewhere else, a place I'd never been before, unable to return to the place — the career — I had known for so long. Like any refugee, I cherish the memories of the good times and try to put aside the pain of the final days of my former life. Despite their longing, refugees have to put the past behind them and channel their energies toward new and different goals, never looking back at what might have been.

Across America, there are many thousands of refugees like me, journalists who worked hard, held responsible positions and enjoyed the adrenaline rush of breaking news and time-absorbing investigations. In the past 10 years, great newspapers have become hollow shells, their newsrooms depopulated as if by a neutron bomb (remember that proposal — it was in the news?) that killed off the workers and left the walls and desks and files behind. During that time, the gradual transition away from printed classified ads and print advertising in general became a waterfall as the advertising revenue base collapsed. At the same time, consumers became so inundated with information that the news in print seemed redundant. Readership and circulation fell.

Publishers, many in a panic, slashed newsroom jobs to compensate for the loss of ad revenue. Eliminating news coverage just turned off the remaining loyal readers who still liked to sit down with a print newspaper and absorb the variety of information included. In some cases, even those newsroom cuts were not enough, and daily newspapers dropped back to semi-weekly publication status or closed their doors entirely.

Thousands of us refugees are among the unemployed and under-employed. Many of us are in our fifth, sixth or seventh decade, when getting hired in a new job is about as likely as getting pregnant. The skills learned in a lifetime in a newsroom are not easily transferable to the few jobs that are in demand in a still-struggling economic environment.

But like a war refugee, I'm not going to harp on "the good old days" that will never come again. We refugees make the best of what we can find.

The downsizing of the morning newspaper

My morning paper is downsizing. That's the clearest way of describing it, but News & Observer editor John Drescher took a different angle in his column in Tuesday's edition. He couched the changes as a means of emphasizing local reporting, but there's no getting around the fact that the paper is going to be smaller and, for me, at least, less well organized.

The N&O is eliminating the Triangle section, where they played most of the local and state news that was not worthy of front-page treatment. Drescher says the local/state news will appear in the A section henceforth, but that important news does not get its own section any more, and it will be disconcerting to see articles about the General Assembly mixed in with stories about Iraq and ISIS and typhoons in Japan.

I suspect the N&O had little choice but to cut the number of newsprint pages in each edition. After personnel, newsprint has traditionally been the largest expenditure for daily newspapers. I've been out of the business for six years and haven't kept up with newsprint prices, but I'd wager that newsprint costs are still a major concern for American newspapers.

In the past 10 years, we've witnessed the collapse of the newspaper business. Once one of the most profitable businesses in the country ("a license to print money," some called it), the news business now is tough. Thousands of newspaper veterans have been laid off, and many newspapers have ceased publication. Those that remain have had to make cuts wherever they can.

The heart of their problem is the shift of advertising from print to digital. I can well remember when the Sunday classified section of the N&O ran into dozens of pages — job listings, automobile ads, individual for-sale, services, etc., all neatly "classified" by type. The Washington Post, which was once my morning paper delivered to my doorstep, was so thick and heavy on Sunday, it was a workout just to carry it into the house. But that gold mine of classifieds was doomed. Digital ads made it possible to search through hundreds of thousands of pages for one particular make and model of car or a specific job specialty in a particular place. Print could not match that convenience, and both job listings and other classifieds have nearly disappeared, along with billions of dollars in ad revenue for newspapers.

Alan D. Mutter has followed these issues more closely than I, and he is brutal in his estimate of just how bad a fix print newspapers are in.

For those of us who enjoy a print newspaper (and there still are many of us), this is a sad time. Many newspapers have cut so deeply that news coverage has  suffered badly. Whole categories of news, once covered thoroughly by major newspapers, are largely ignored in this new reality.

I will continue to subscribe because I still find newspapers to be the most effective means of keeping up with what's going on in the area, in the state, in the nation and in the world. Digital searches can find specific items, but turning a newspaper's page can lead you to places you'd never thought of and make you think of things you'd never thought of. 

I have made one concession to the digital news world. When I am out of town and far away from my newspaper lying in my driveway, I can read the newspaper — the actual printed page — using a mobile app. But for as long as I can get my hands on the print edition, I will prefer it, even as it shrinks before my eyes.

A small newspaper bites the dust

After I was laid off after 33 years as a newspaper editor, I kept my eye open for newspaper jobs within a reasonable commute from Wilson, where my wife and I were settled and loved our home and neighborhood and friends. There were few newspaper jobs anywhere that didn't require relocating, but one sort of promising opportunity cropped up several months after my layoff.

The Daily Southerner in Tarboro, about 25 miles away, had an opening for a publisher. I had never been a publisher, but I had edited papers larger and smaller than the Daily Southerner and thought the business end of the news business couldn't be too difficult to learn. I had been exposed to a fair amount of the business end in a couple of my stops along the career ladder. So I applied and got an interview with a man who was a regional supervisor for the conglomerate that owned the paper.

I was not too keen on the job, partly because I thought the commute would grow old fast. And while there were things I liked about Tarboro, I thought it a little too clannish and small. It seemed like a town frozen in time, as more than a few small towns in eastern North Carolina are.

After a nice talk at his hotel and a tour of the newspaper's facilities (which were more comparable to the weekly papers where I had worked than to the small dailies) and a ride around Tarboro, we bade farewell and I drove home, thinking that if I were offered the job, I'd have to take it, despite seeing all the frustrations I'd surely face. Among the revelations in the interview was the fact that the Daily Southerner was almost entirely dependent upon a printing contract with a regional supermarket. That contract provided most of the paper's revenue.

I was not upset when the regional corporate guy called and said they'd offered the publisher job to an applicant with more business experience than I had.

The news last week that the Daily Southerner is folding reminded me of my brush with a dead end, and I was glad once again that my last shot at a newspaper job had gone out the window five years ago. Not long thereafter, I took a job with a nonprofit and put newspapering behind me.

But this news saddened me because the Daily Southerner was not a bad little paper. It was underfunded with a lack of advertising and a slender news hole with few stories that were not about the routine or the mundane. With stronger editing and more resources, it could have survived in a town as small and poor as Tarboro.

This is not an unusual event. Small newspapers are closing all over the country. Advertising is migrating to the web, and the promises and reassurances newspaper ad salesmen and publishers have offered for years are no longer trusted. The public is turning away from traditional news about local government, crime, education and business and toward entertainment as news or obsessions as news. Small dailies can't compete against CNN's obsession with the Malaysian airliner or Justin Bieber's latest misbehavior. Public interest in issues that used to define "the public interest" has waned, and with it has waned readership about local issues. And even less-sophisticated advertisers know the potential of web advertising targeting individuals based on their interests revealed in web searches, demographics and other data.

When small papers die, it's almost always a financial problem that strangled the enterprise, but the real tragedy is the vacuum left for discussion of local issues and the reporting of important issues in the community. Some enterprising website might arise to cover Tarboro's news, but these websites have not been able to make enough money to stay afloat for long. Tarboro will be one more news desert, where things happen, but nobody knows, and no one lifts the curtain to see what's going on out of public view.

A snow day that I can enjoy

I'm enjoying a snow day. I slept in, had a leisurely breakfast, read the N&O online, cleared a path across the deck and the side and front steps, and made a little snow cream. If I had to, I could get to the office, but there's nothing to do there, so I'll play it safe and not risk a useless skid into a ditch.

For 33 years in the newspaper business, "snow days" did not mean a day off. They meant a day or night of hazards and rushed work. Like police officers, firefighters, utility crews and a few others, newspaper folks had to work on days when no one wanted to. One cold morning after a huge overnight snowfall, I couldn't get my car out of the driveway, so I set out on foot for the newspaper office, about two miles away downtown. As the wind-driven snow whipped my exposed face, someone in a pickup gave me a lift after about a half mile, and I got to the office, got the paper out and went home. The next few days, I reported to work every morning, even though few others in town worked, and mail was not delivered. Unafraid of driving in the snow, I ferried co-workers to and from work. I kept a shovel in my trunk in case I had to dig out of a drift, which I did a couple of times.

When I was working for a morning paper (one that goes to press at night) in Danville, Va., a sudden storm blew in early in the evening, and we rushed to get the paper to press early. By the time the press cranked up, the snow was about 8 inches deep, and I couldn't really see the road. I realized I had to cross the Dan River to get home. I fell in behind an 18-wheeler and followed his tracks across the high bridge and up a long hill that I wasn't sure we were going be able to reach the top, where my road turned off.

Many more early mornings with the ground turned white greeted me during my years at the afternoon paper. Snow meant we had to get in early, gather the news, write it, edit it, send it to production, and then hope the newspaper carriers would show up and would complete their routes. Most of them did, most of the time. I took my wife to work and brought her home a few times, driving my car with a manual transmission because I thought it gave me better control. I still skidded frighteningly when I tapped my breaks on an icy sheet on a side street late one afternoon.

So being in a line of work that does not turn snowfall into a mandatory, harried, sometimes scary workday is a nice relief. I'll get to the office tomorrow, even if I have to walk.

Good editing requires continual practice

A former colleague asked me to do a little editing on a college student's project, and I readily agreed to do a favor. Other than editing my own writing and occasionally pulling out a pen to mark mistakes in the newspaper, I have done very little editing in the past five years.

Like all learned responses, editing skills get rusty after a spell of inactivity. Sitting before a computer monitor and looking for misspellings, subject-verb disagreements, verb tense errors and so forth is something you have to do continually to be good at it. Early in my newspaper career, I was not a very good editor. As a college student, I liked to quote Ernest Hemingway, who once defended his errors by saying, "Anybody can hire an editor." I was a writer, not an editor. But my career demanded that I become an editor, and so I did, with the help of some good grammar seminars and my striving to explain to reporters why my corrections were based on good grammar and syntax.

Editing is a thankless job. If you get it right, no one notices. If you miss one word — or even one letter — used in error, everyone thinks you must be an idiot. I've had the embarrassing experience of seeing errors once an article was in print, but I had missed that very error when I saw it on the computer screen — before it was too late. When I look back at old posts in this blog, I find simple errors I had overlooked before.

Newspaper readers frequently complain that no one proofreads any more, and that's true in the strict sense of the word. In the old days, when everything in the newspaper was typed into lead type on a Linotype machine, proofreaders would sit and compare the reporter's typewritten copy to the "proof" sheet from the Linotype. Typographical errors would be corrected.

With the advent of "cold type" — computer-generated copy on paper or in digital form — proofreaders were eliminated, as were Linotype operators. All of the burden of getting a story right fell on editors. And editors are as fallible as anyone. That's why I insisted on having what we called a "second read." After one editor finished editing story, he or she would hand it off to another editor for a second look in an effort to catch any oversights. It was not a fail-safe system, but it was better than relying on just two eyes.

Good editing takes practice. You learn to stop and look at certain words, such as "lay" or "its" because their misuse is very common. You also look at antecedents and plural nouns. When you're doing this kind of work every day, it becomes second nature. I am no longer doing this every day, so I have yet another excuse for any mistakes I make.

Celebrate the 30th birthday of a revolutionary

I'm writing this post on a Macintosh computer, 30 years after the Mac was introduced to the world in that memorable Super Bowl "Big Brother" commercial. At that time, my family had a PC Jr., or maybe it was an earlier Radio Shack computer. We could do little more than word processing on whatever it was. There was no Internet, and the only things online were birds and fallen limbs.

The Mac was revolutionary (which justifies the Super Bowl commercial) with its small, monochrome screen and its (voila!) mouse. The computers I used at the newspaper in those days were very basic, monochrome DOS machines with a blinking green cursor and green type. Commands had to be written in arcane code to do something as simple as boldface or italicize a word. There was no mouse and no icons.

It was a lot like the Apple IIC computer that I used in a BASIC programming class I took at Atlantic Christian College in 1981. Everything was in code, and you better get it right! The early Apples had been heavily marketed to schools, and many of today's adults got their introduction to computing on Apple IIs.

My wife got to use one of the early Macs when she went to work as a church secretary in the mid-1980s. She soon mastered the word processing, page layout and spreadsheet functions, creating her own church software package. Macs swept the newspaper business, and sometime in the late 1980s, my newspaper bought one Mac for the use of the entire newsroom. We used it for designing logos and occasionally for getting online. Later, the Associated Press stopped sending photos via its patented Laserphoto scanning machine and began posting photos online so that member newspaper could download them, via that Mac computer.

When that Mac, which cost about $8,000 with its software, monitor, printer, etc. became archaic, I purchased it from the newspaper for a few hundred dollars, and it became our family computer. We could dial up to get on AOL, and we used the installed word processing and other software. We used the mouse to get around.

It was the 1990s before the newspaper invested in Macs for the entire newsroom, and we became a truly connected newsroom for the first time. I loved the Mac and got into good-natured arguments with my older brother, a long-time IBM employee who sneered at all things Apple.

The newspaper stuck with Macs for as long as I was there. We had the basic rectangular box Macs and the short-lived Mac Cube (with its "toaster" CD drive), some early iMacs and some eMacs. When we were contemplating a major software change in the 1990s, we considered dumping Macs because Apple Computer was deeply troubled and rumored to be headed for bankruptcy. Then Steve Jobs returned, the iMac and iPod came along, and Apple became one of the most admired and loved companies in the world.

When our oldest daughter went off to college, we bought her an electric typewriter. Four years later, when her sister headed to college, we bought her a used Mac Classic — which looked just like the original 1984 Mac. When her Mac's screen failed to light up, I purchased from a friend (for shipping charges only) an original Mac — one without a hard drive; everything was on those revolutionary 3.5 inch discs — in hopes that I could swap out the monitors (picture tubes) and have her Mac working again. When I got the case off (no easy task, by the way), I discovered that the "yoke" that held the wires connecting the monitor to the guts of the computer had fallen off when she hauled the computer home from college. I put the yoke back, and it continued to serve her needs. I ended up using that original Mac for a bookend.

Our family is on its sixth or seventh Mac, some bought new, some bought used. My current working companion is a Mac Mini, a cube barely larger than a CD case that has all the speed and computing power I need. It's hooked to an HP monitor (I went cheap). We've had three iMacs, none of them the fruit-colored plastic blob that was the original iMac style, and now we own iPods, iPhones and iPads, too.

Computers have come a long way, and so have we, in the last 30 years. The ingenious, revolutionary Mac led the way.

Five years after

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the end of my newspaper career. Early in the afternoon, the publisher walked into my office and told me he was laying me off. He gave me two choices: I could leave immediately and receive two months' severance pay or I could work through the end of the year and not get severance pay. Pretty easy choice. I worked through the end of that day, came in and worked all of the next day and carried my pictures, personal papers and mementos to the car and left.

The newspaper business was falling apart in 2008. I was not the first layoff that fall, and I would not be the last. One colleague got her walking papers the same day I did. Others would follow, particularly older, more experienced, higher-paid, loyal workers.

My second decision was almost as easy as the first. I would not leave Wilson, where we had lived for nearly 30 years, raised our children and settled into a home we loved. My first reaction to the publisher's news was, "I'll lose my house." I spent a month or more catching up on household maintenance that had been ignored as I worked long hours, and I turned to thoughts of what I'd do next. I wanted a new career, not just a job. I made a couple of stabs at self-employment, starting an editing, writing and public relations agency, or starting a free newspaper or news website. Neither came about, and at the end of my severance, I went on unemployment, which proved sufficient to pay the mortgage while I diligently applied for jobs within commuting distance of Wilson. I turned down an offer to edit a daily newspaper, because it would have demanded moving to the city where the paper was located. A newspaper editor has to live in the place he's covering. As my wife, whose job was supporting both of us, pointed out, "There's no point in both of us starting over."

There were hard times, times when I doubted my worth, regretted my 33 years in the newspaper business (29 years at one newspaper), and wondered whether my family and friends would be better off without me. When I finally got a job, a year after the layoff, I put all of that behind me and tried to learn new ways to be useful and make a difference in the community.

Five years later, I am especially grateful to the many former colleagues and old friends who contacted me to express their shock at my fate and to reassure me that I deserved better. Those kind words got me through the worst moments of that year when I fell into despair.

People have asked me whether I miss the newspaper business, and I tell them honestly, yes. It was an exciting, stressful, time-consuming, and often fun time, getting to follow closely the events in the community, getting to know some interesting people, and trying to make sense of the world for readers.

But that world no longer exists, and I am content with where I am, grateful for the past but eager for the future.

Newspapers' efforts have set them free

This morning's News & Observer leads with the news that the state will pay $12 million to two men who were wrongly imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. The article highlights the previously reported stories of Floyd Brown and Greg Taylor, both railroaded by unethical acts by local and state investigators. Between them, the two men served a total of 31 years behind bars.

Today's news also highlights the earlier history of Alan Gell, who was convicted of a murder he didn't commit — couldn't have committed because he was in jail at the time of the murder — who had previously received a $3.9 million settlement from the state for the nine years he spent in prison.

These cases are shocking on several levels: $12 million is a lot of money, enough to raise eyebrows in a state that tosses around billions in budget talks; but no amount of money will regain for these men the years they spent in prison, separated from loved ones, missing family events and being treated as guilty criminals even though they were innocent; the state of North Carolina should be ashamed, not just over the embarrassing publicity about monetary compensation and stolen years but also over the disgrace that public employees effectively framed these men so that the state could claim a higher conviction rate and clear these crimes from its books.

One major takeaway from these shameful events is this: Newspaper investigations led to each of the sentences being overturned. Without a free, vigorous and financially healthy press, it is unlikely these travesties would have been uncovered. At a time when newspapers are losing their value faster than a McMansion in a bursting housing bubble and newsrooms across the country are being decimated by budget-slashing publishers, newspapers are as important as they ever were in comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, watching over the public interest and protecting democratic processes.

Don't expect the bloggers, the nonprofit online experiments, the online media sites compiling other people's work, or the radio and television stations more intent on trailing celebrities and sensationalizing the crime du jour to do the work that dedicated, persistent newspaper reporters have done for generations. America still needs newspapers.