The Sacramento Bee's crisis of relevance

2009-03-10T01:49:00Z

The Sunday, March 1, edition of the Sacramento Bee, included an article written by publisher Cheryl Dell entitled "It's not a lack of readers, it's a lack of advertising." The gist of the article was that despite the Bee's growing readership, advertising revenue has fallen, forcing the paper to reevaluate its business model. While it's never a bad idea to revisit policies when times get tough, I don't think Dell's column went far enough to acknowledge one of the biggest albatrosses hanging around the Bee's neck : the McClatchy Company.

I'm not trying to demonize McClatchy. The problem is that as a profit-seeking business, McClatchy has institutionally different goals and definitions of success than do its subordinate parts, including the Bee. McClatchy is a profit-seeking corporate entity, but the Bee is a member of our cherished free press, an institution enshrined in the Constitution and fundamental to our civil society. And though the Bee should be a civil servant in the best sense of the term, its expensive investigative reporting is going to create natural conflicts with McClatchy's profit motivation, beyond corporate editorial pressures.

For starters, consider that many papers nationwide, McClatchy-owned or not, are profitable in and of themselves but were required to make drastic cuts because their corporate owners incurred too much debt too quickly to maintain their business expansions. While the Bee may not itself be profitable, it is hard to believe that the paper has been so hammered by the recession that it had no choice but to eliminate half its staff and cut valuable inches from the printed edition. Not when its parent company, McClatchy, has watched its stock price drop from $74.50 in 2005 to $0.41 today. Sacramento's primary news source is suffering because McClatchy can no longer make the payments on its purhase of Knight-Ridder.

Consider also that though it is a sound business decision to save money by adopting corporation-wide platforms and standards, it undermines the ability of a newspaper to acknowledge and embrace its city’s character. Instead of a newspaper tailored to the unique interests and values of Sacramento, we readers are treated to mostly the same diluted content as other McClatchy readers. This is especially evident with McClatchy's web properties. Given an amazing and infinitely malleable digital distribution medium, Sacbee.com is a bland pixel-for-pixel rehash of McClatchy’s Charlotte Observer. Blank out locations and names, and you could not tell California from North Carolina.

Another sound business decision is to drop expensive original reporting in favor of cheaper, already-ubiquitous feeds. These days, there are more ways to receive an AP news feed than there are AP stories, and the same is true of nationally syndicated columns. Unfortunately, the Bee does neither itself nor its readership any favors by reprinting what is already widely available and eliminating what it alone can provide: local news, local opinions, a broad and diverse forum for community discourse, and public scrutiny of local powers.

A strong Bee would measure itself in its relevance to Sacramento, not its contribution to McClatchy’s share price. This means cutting back on wire and syndication reprints in favor of a renewed focus on local stories and local issues. This means celebrating life in Sacramento. This means redesigning the paper to reflect Sacramento’s unique character. This means prioritizing investigative pieces. Where advertising is concerned, this means pushing advertising quality over quantity and providing more column inches than ads.

As we've seen, good journalism can be severely undermined by the pressures of profits. If a for-profit business model is failing the Bee (and by extension, Sacramento), perhaps the paper should be excised from its corporate parent and given new life under a business model that would let it get back to journalism. That's something Cheryl Dell ought to consider.

New layoffs at The Bee: Who?

2009-03-09T22:49:48Z

Just one work day after union members voted to accept wage cuts and layoffs to postpone even more cuts, The Sacramento Bee started laying off some 128 employees in editorial and other departments Monday morning.

Among the names of those getting pink slips today were pop music writer Rachel Leibrock and sports writer Martin McNeal, as well as general assignment reporters Ramon Coronado, Melissa Nix, Walt Yost, sports writer Scott Howard-Cooper, and photographers Brian Baer and Florence Low. And for virtually the first time since the paper started shedding positions nearly three years ago, there were editors among the casualties.

Also leaving are IT wunderkind and newsroom gadfly Marco Smolich, and longtime newsroom aide George Costenbader.

Coming after the departures of some 65 newsroom employees over the last year through buyouts and attrition, the layoffs further weaken The Bee's news-gathering operation, bringing the editorial staff down to 190.

A number of positions are also being eliminated in advertising and the classified call center, as well as a graphic artist, an ad assistant and three people in the IT department. Other jobs in the packaging center are also being eliminated.

Early waves of departures have come over the last three years, after buy-out packages were offered to a range of names such as Bob Sylva, R.E. Graswich, Janet Fullwood and other name writers. The cuts have accelerated in the past year: The Bee's Dale Kasler reported today that the paper has cut 301 jobs since last June, about a quarter of its staff. But unlike earlier rounds, this one featured little to soften the blow.

There could have been even more layoffs, if the Guild members hadn't voted to accept the company's latest conditions: 3 to 6 percent salary cuts, and a week's unpaid furlough, and freezes in pension contributions and 401k matching contributions. Accepting those conditions allowed management to keep 19 other employees on, at least for now.

According to today's Bee, the news department is losing 29 union and non-union workers, or nearly 13 percent. That brings the total of newsroom jobs shed over the last year to about a quarter of the original 250 employees. Parent company McClatchy is laying off 1600 employees, or 15 percent of its work force.

There's no guarantee that this will be the end. With McClatchy's stock under fifty cents a share today (down from a high of $77), the future of the company looks bleak.

It could have been worse. The Rocky Mountain News recently stopped publishing entirely, and both the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the San Francisco Chronicle are apparently weeks or even days away from doing the same.

Ed Fletcher, a Bee reporter and shop steward for the Newspaper Guild's unit at the paper, said in an email that he didn't want to release the names of those being laid off yet, out of respect for their feelings.

But because they are, many of them, public figures whose departure is a loss to Sacramento, their names should be mentioned. So here, pieced together from different sources, is a list of the names of people said to be laid off today at The Sacramento Bee. If you heard other, or different, names, please comment below. Note that these are only half of the people being let go today.

Melissa Nix

Martin McNeal

Quwan Spears

Brian Baer

Florence Low

Rachel Leibrock

Terry Dvorak

Walt Yost

George Costenbader

Yvonne McKinney

Robert Faturechi

Scott Howard-Cooper

Rachael Bogert

Marco Smolich

Debbie Meredith

Chad Jones

Jennifer Morita

Ramon Coronado

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The Sacramento Bee's crisis of relevance

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