An Elegy for Us
by Julia M. Klein
DECEMBER 8, 2008 TAGS:
In the late 1980s, I lived on Pittsburgh’s Grandview Avenue, with its vista of the city’s three rivers and dramatic skyline. But my office window looked out on a more desolate urban landscape: the South Side, where the steel mills had closed and displaced steelworkers lived in tiny homes that hugged the hillside.
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I think of those jobless workers now as I read about the crescendo of buyouts and layoffs in my own profession. Between the accelerating flight of readers and advertisers to the Web and the deepening recession, is the death of ink-on-paper newspapers imminent? Or is it, in Mark Twain’s inimitable phrase, greatly exaggerated?
It certainly feels like the end of days. Most commentators are busy preparing their funeral orations. Some worry about the fate of democracy; others insist that journalism’s core civic and watchdog functions will survive on the Web. Not much attention has been paid, however, to those whose jobs face extinction.
One day in the mid-1990s, I remember sitting in the office of then-Philadelphia Inquirer editor Maxwell E.P. King, preparing to discuss my future at the paper. Another editor popped in to exult over a lucrative split in the stock of corporate parent Knight Ridder. When he was gone, I turned to Max, the grandson of legendary book editor Maxwell Perkins. “It’s a dying profession,” I said, with my customary tact. Max looked appalled.
Our leaders, even the most gifted of them, failed us; they refused to see what lay ahead. At best, they were practicing denial. The Internet? Not a threat, they said, but an opportunity; giving away our content online would serve to reinforce our brand, to woo new print readers. Did they truly believe that? Another former editor told me recently that he remembers saying the words and knowing they were lies.
At the end of 2000, after 17 years on staff, I took a buyout from the newspaper. It was a painful decision, but by then the trends were clear, and many of us were bailing out. Max, tired of endless cost-cutting demands, was long gone, to a foundation job in Pittsburgh, and so, too, was the editor who’d been toting up his stock profits that day.
At the Inquirer, two more buyouts would follow in quick succession. Soon, it seemed, Philadelphia was populated by ghost journalists, some retired or in new professions. We would meet unexpectedly on street corners and ask, tentatively, “Where are you now?” We might also have said, “Who are you?”
The Philadelphia story, which had once seemed so potent, has long since been eclipsed by the national tragedy. Over the past few years, thousands of newspaper journalists have lost their jobs. Layoffs have replaced buyouts. It became clear that the terrifying tap on the shoulder could happen to anyone, young or old.
In the past decade, the Los Angeles Times, one of the country’s great papers, has lost nearly half of its 1,300-person newsroom. Presiding over and often protesting the paper’s decimation was a dizzying succession of editors and publishers, perennially out of synch with one another and a changing array of corporate bosses.
The once-impressive San Jose Mercury News is another sad case, its editorial staff down to about 155 from a high of more than 400 in 2000, at the peak of the dot-com boom. Of the five friends I had there, only one remains on the job. Last year, even the editor tasked with implementing a revolutionary revamp of the paper was fired.
The smaller newsrooms of the present are no doubt ferociously busy places, intent on doing the proverbial “more with less.” Reporters skip lunch to file for the Web; editors are riveted to their desks by the flow of copy. But as the character of newsrooms alters, and their ambitions shrink, even some young reporters are rushing for the exits. The mantra of “local, local, local” eliminates the possibility of derring-do in foreign capitals; news summaries and charticles replace elaborately crafted, Pulitzer-winning narratives. Those, the new bosses say, are not what readers want.
A former Inquirer editor who now heads a major journalism school says that many of her students still aspire to careers in print. If they do land jobs, though, they face bleak economic prospects, with lower salaries and less generous benefits than we received – and few of us got rich. Scarcity has allowed some papers, with union acquiescence, to institute a two-tier wage system that penalizes those who were late to the party.
One alternative will be the life I half-chose: freelancing, with pay rates that have been stagnant for two decades and no benefits at all. And that market, too, is flooded.
Amidst the general gloom, the Freedom Forum opened the Newseum this April in Washington. The new museum is a sleek, high-tech exploration of the First Amendment and the human impulse to transmit news. One gallery contains a loving evocation of newspaper history; another pays tribute to the heroism that marked the coverage of 9/11. Overall, the museum conveys little of the anxiety that pervades contemporary newsrooms.
If anything, the Newseum appears to be trying to make peace with the popular notion of the “citizen journalist” – all those bloggers and other inspired amateurs, wielding cellphone cameras and Twittering up a storm, who will take over when all the money is leeched out of the profession.
Before people die, they often rally for a while, giving hopeful signs of robust good health. So, too, for newspapers: In the aftermath of Barack Obama’s presidential victory, thousands of people jammed art-deco newspaper lobbies around the country and demanded print editions to show their grandchildren.
Don’t be fooled. Those newspapers will someday be as historic as the headlines.
In Pittsburgh, a modicum of prosperity has returned to the South Side. Restaurants and shops started the boomlet, eventually drawing the middle class to the neighborhood to live. The riverbank was reclaimed as a park, and the old mill site reinvented as a mall that mimics the homey gentility of a small town. For most of the steelworkers, though, the transformation came too late.
We, too, are in search of transformation. The quest for an elusive new business model is on: a formula that will somehow preserve newsgathering – and jobs -- even if print itself disappears. But its advent will not save most of us, and the way of life that we cherished will find its final resting place in museums.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, is a regular contributor to Obit.
I think of those jobless workers now as I read about the crescendo of buyouts and layoffs in my own profession. Between the accelerating flight of readers and advertisers to the Web and the deepening recession, is the death of ink-on-paper newspapers imminent? Or is it, in Mark Twain’s inimitable phrase, greatly exaggerated? It certainly feels like the end of days. Most commentators are busy preparing their funeral orations. Some worry about the fate of democracy; others insist that journalism’s core civic and watchdog functions will survive on the Web. Not much attention has been paid, however, to those whose jobs face extinction.
One day in the mid-1990s, I remember sitting in the office of then-Philadelphia Inquirer editor Maxwell E.P. King, preparing to discuss my future at the paper. Another editor popped in to exult over a lucrative split in the stock of corporate parent Knight Ridder. When he was gone, I turned to Max, the grandson of legendary book editor Maxwell Perkins. “It’s a dying profession,” I said, with my customary tact. Max looked appalled.
Our leaders, even the most gifted of them, failed us; they refused to see what lay ahead. At best, they were practicing denial. The Internet? Not a threat, they said, but an opportunity; giving away our content online would serve to reinforce our brand, to woo new print readers. Did they truly believe that? Another former editor told me recently that he remembers saying the words and knowing they were lies.
At the end of 2000, after 17 years on staff, I took a buyout from the newspaper. It was a painful decision, but by then the trends were clear, and many of us were bailing out. Max, tired of endless cost-cutting demands, was long gone, to a foundation job in Pittsburgh, and so, too, was the editor who’d been toting up his stock profits that day.
At the Inquirer, two more buyouts would follow in quick succession. Soon, it seemed, Philadelphia was populated by ghost journalists, some retired or in new professions. We would meet unexpectedly on street corners and ask, tentatively, “Where are you now?” We might also have said, “Who are you?”
The Philadelphia story, which had once seemed so potent, has long since been eclipsed by the national tragedy. Over the past few years, thousands of newspaper journalists have lost their jobs. Layoffs have replaced buyouts. It became clear that the terrifying tap on the shoulder could happen to anyone, young or old. In the past decade, the Los Angeles Times, one of the country’s great papers, has lost nearly half of its 1,300-person newsroom. Presiding over and often protesting the paper’s decimation was a dizzying succession of editors and publishers, perennially out of synch with one another and a changing array of corporate bosses.
The once-impressive San Jose Mercury News is another sad case, its editorial staff down to about 155 from a high of more than 400 in 2000, at the peak of the dot-com boom. Of the five friends I had there, only one remains on the job. Last year, even the editor tasked with implementing a revolutionary revamp of the paper was fired.
The smaller newsrooms of the present are no doubt ferociously busy places, intent on doing the proverbial “more with less.” Reporters skip lunch to file for the Web; editors are riveted to their desks by the flow of copy. But as the character of newsrooms alters, and their ambitions shrink, even some young reporters are rushing for the exits. The mantra of “local, local, local” eliminates the possibility of derring-do in foreign capitals; news summaries and charticles replace elaborately crafted, Pulitzer-winning narratives. Those, the new bosses say, are not what readers want.
A former Inquirer editor who now heads a major journalism school says that many of her students still aspire to careers in print. If they do land jobs, though, they face bleak economic prospects, with lower salaries and less generous benefits than we received – and few of us got rich. Scarcity has allowed some papers, with union acquiescence, to institute a two-tier wage system that penalizes those who were late to the party.
One alternative will be the life I half-chose: freelancing, with pay rates that have been stagnant for two decades and no benefits at all. And that market, too, is flooded.
Amidst the general gloom, the Freedom Forum opened the Newseum this April in Washington. The new museum is a sleek, high-tech exploration of the First Amendment and the human impulse to transmit news. One gallery contains a loving evocation of newspaper history; another pays tribute to the heroism that marked the coverage of 9/11. Overall, the museum conveys little of the anxiety that pervades contemporary newsrooms.
If anything, the Newseum appears to be trying to make peace with the popular notion of the “citizen journalist” – all those bloggers and other inspired amateurs, wielding cellphone cameras and Twittering up a storm, who will take over when all the money is leeched out of the profession.Before people die, they often rally for a while, giving hopeful signs of robust good health. So, too, for newspapers: In the aftermath of Barack Obama’s presidential victory, thousands of people jammed art-deco newspaper lobbies around the country and demanded print editions to show their grandchildren.
Don’t be fooled. Those newspapers will someday be as historic as the headlines.
In Pittsburgh, a modicum of prosperity has returned to the South Side. Restaurants and shops started the boomlet, eventually drawing the middle class to the neighborhood to live. The riverbank was reclaimed as a park, and the old mill site reinvented as a mall that mimics the homey gentility of a small town. For most of the steelworkers, though, the transformation came too late.
We, too, are in search of transformation. The quest for an elusive new business model is on: a formula that will somehow preserve newsgathering – and jobs -- even if print itself disappears. But its advent will not save most of us, and the way of life that we cherished will find its final resting place in museums.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, is a regular contributor to Obit.
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