When Tribune Company bought Times Mirror in what was called “The Deal of the Century” by Editor and Publisher magazine, everyone thought the revenue would come rolling in, and this new creation would become the premier newspaper company in America, propelled largely by the “national buy” it could provide advertisers because it had properties in major cities nationwide.
That was the first time they misread the tea leaves.
Greenwich Time and The Advocate in Stamford, where I worked, were part of that deal, and in the beginning when the acculturation process started, they sent me to Chicago for orientation, or more appropriately “reorientation.” I’ve been reoriented by corporations a lot in my career, but I’ll spare the details.
Around that time, the Los Angeles Times, the flagship paper of Times Mirror won an unprecedented five Pulitzer Prizes in one year, and I still remember a senior executive in Tribune telling us, “What good are Pulitzer Prizes if circulation is sinking?”
The next decade or so my life as editor usually involved cutting costs. I guess Tribune figured cost-cutting was the strategy to stop sinking circulation.
But “quality” is a verboten word in most major newspaper chains. Only the little guys, the independents, care what the community thinks, and they, to my thinking, are the future of this business, along with local websites.
And while I’ve often been simple-minded, I suppose, in my assessment of the decline of newspapers, I still believe my theory has validity. The big guys are collapsing because of greed. Sure, classified is migrating online; sure, ad revenue is down; sure, young readers are hard to come by; sure, there’s a proliferation of news sources.
But I believe many of these companies could have weathered this transitional time — at least prior to the economic collapse — if they hadn’t been so darn greedy and willing to cut newsrooms and consolidate editing and reporting functions, and even worse, send copy editing to places like India. How crazy is that?
Think about it. The Gannett Company, which pioneered the concept of cutting costs, often had profit margins in excess of 40 percent. What mature industry in America has similar margins? And there are other companies that demonstrated the same kind of obsession with making money at the expense of the news operation. Now they, too, are faltering and no one wants to read their newspapers.
An industry is toppling and the corporate geniuses hastened it. Even Sam Zell, who thought he could work miracles, has failed and everybody in Tribune will suffer as a result, especially the readers.
Now, it’s up to the weeklies and the independent websites to provide community journalism. It’s a noble cause, a cause that once characterized this business before making money became so obsessively important that it destroyed the news.
