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Article Excerpt
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At The Washington Post, the newspaper where I've worked for over a quarter-century, we're just now wrapping up the summer of the long goodbye. Beginning in May, the more than 100 newsroom employees who took the paper's latest buyout offer have been feted at, or subjected to, a seemingly endless succession of bon-voyage celebrations and/or wakes: boozy parties in bars and residences, cake-and-cookies klatches in the newsroom, a formal farewell tribute in one of the Post's meeting rooms.
It was the third Post buyout in the past five years, and by far the most significant. Several valued reporters, critics, and editors took the first two--among them the respected political analyst Tom Edsall and my fellow book critic, Michael Dirda--but the core of the newspaper remained on staff or continued to work on a more limited basis on contract, as I myself have done since the 2006 buyout. But the 2008 buyout cut right into the paper's heart, stripping it not merely of notable bylines--military reporter Tom Ricks, music critic Tim Page--but also of editors little-known outside the paper but invaluable inside: Deborah Heard, editor of the Style section, Belle Elving, Home editor, K. C. Summers, Travel editor, Marie Arana (full disclosure: my wife), Book World editor, and many others.
What price the Post will pay over the long run for the loss of these gifted and dedicated people is impossible to say, but the paper is almost certain to become a different place to work and--of far greater importance to the millions who read it in print or online--a very different newspaper. Because of the high position it enjoys in American journalism, the Post is playing out the present newspaper crisis on a grand scale, and how it responds to the crisis will be studied in publishers' and editors' offices around the country.
An Industry in Crisis
Make no mistake about it, this is a crisis. Speaking in May to a group of journalists, Rupert Murdoch pointed out that, as his own newly acquired Wall Street Journal reported, "in the last five or six months, the average newspaper had seen its ad revenue drop 10 to 30 percent."A decade and a half ago, the average daily circulation of the Post was 832,232; it is now 638,000. The Washington Post Company's operating revenue in 1999 was $157 million; last year it was $66 million. Newspaper consultant Mark Putts has examined the overall financial picture for American newspapers and, as reported by Charles Layton in the April/ May issue of The American Journalism Review (AJR), predicts that "by the year 2020 print ad revenue will be about half what it is today," leaving newspapers with "six more years of economic pain--continued cuts in staff, newshole and newsgathering resources--before they even start to turn a corner" with improved revenue from Internet advertising.
"The scariest problem," AJR reported, "is that many papers won't share in the online growth. ... And even as the industry as a whole survives, we may begin seeing, pretty soon, big American cities with no daily newspaper." As Potts puts it: "It's going to be really bloody, incredibly devastating. And I think there are going to be a lot of major metros that don't make it."
As one who published his first newspaper article more than half a century ago, in the University of North Carolina student paper, The Daily Tar Heel, and who has remained continuously employed in newspapers ever since graduating from UNC in 1961, I find "devastating" exactly the right word. Like innumerable others, I cannot separate the professional, financial, and cultural loss now occurring from the simultaneous personal loss. Not to be melodramatic, but the world in which I have spent my entire adult working life is falling to pieces before my eyes. Thanks to the Post's generous pension plan, Social Security, and other modest sources of income, I'll be okay until the Grim Reaper comes for me, but it's heartbreaking to watch the decline, and per haps the fall, of the business that I love.
I am not, I should hasten to make plain, your basic ink-stained wretch of journalistic mythology, having spent almost my entire working life in what hard-boiled reporters and editors dismiss as the "soft" side of the business, which includes features, reviews, and...
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