A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blow-by-blow account of what happened at the Dothan Eagle.
I wrote about how I joined a staff of 34 in 1996 and left a staff of 10 in 2019. I wrote about corporate decisions that led to staff cuts, outsourcing to the max, the removal of content and other product-damaging moves. I wrote about subscription price increases all along.
It’s a painful thing to work through. Newspapers enjoyed incredible profit margins for a long time because (a) they had a viritual monopoly on total market coverage in communities and (b) they could offer comparatively meager salaries because most people who choose journalism for a career have ink coursing through their veins and would (and do) work in the business for not all that much.
So, when your greatest expense (payroll) is considerably less than what it could be and when you can offer total market coverage, you turn quite the profit.
But enough whining — for now.
This is what I didn’t write in my first post:
We knew this was going to happen.
We didn’t know exactly how it was going to happen and we didn’t know when it was going to happen. But, once the first cuts starting taking place in the newspaper industry in the mid-2000s, we knew we were working in a dying print industry.
We also thought, however, that we could pivot.
Sure, maybe the print product would go away now that there was broad access to the internet. But soon, we would make the transition to digital and everything would be the same, except how you consumed news.
Most of us in the industry — from about 2005 on — kept waiting for an announced transition from print to digital.
We did not count on newspaper companies having no idea how to do that.
It’s hard to pivot toward a new way of thinking. AT&T didn’t invent the iPhone. Kodak didn’t invent the digital camera. The Pony Express didn’t invent the railroad and Central Pacific didn’t invent the airplane.
And newspapers didn’t invent the internet, or know how to use it very well.
But here’s the thing: Your Kodak film cameras and your Polaroids were replaced by something better. Your rail travel was replaced by something better. Your landline was replaced by something better.
What has replaced newspapers — if anything — is a hot piece of garbage. So, yes, I’m nostalgic about newspapers. But I would feel much better if what was replacing them had a hint of sanity.
By the time newspapers began to realize the print product would die, they were at least 10 years behind having needed to do something about it.
And they eventually tried, with some tiny pockets of success. However, for the vast majority of newspapers, a gutted, thin, staff-depleted shell of a printed newspaper still generated consideraly more revenue than all that digital effort could muster.
Once newspaper executives realized this, the companies had two choices:
(1) Invest heavily in digitally-driven community journalism. Re-hire adequate staff. Spend a good bit on a massive community marketing campaign and churn out the same product people had come to know, trust and read for years, albeit in a different format. With this option, companies would have to sustain losses initially until the community responded to the change.
(2) Embrace the notion that the industry is dying and squeeze whatever profits remain all the way to the bitter end. Cut proportionally to the amount of revenue lost. Generate additional revenue by charging for things what were historically free like obits and wedding announcements. Rely heavily on revenue generated by required legal notices. In other words, see one end of the ship taking on water and run like mad to the other end and stay above water as long as humanly possible.
It didn’t take us long to figure out which option newspapers were choosing. I’m surprised we weren’t literally given a swimsuit, snorkel mask and flippers.
I believe that if newspaper companies had chosen Option A, the Wiregrass would have supported a digital product that included the same level of content it had when the staff was adequate for the market.
But they chose Option B. And now they are asking you to support the product while providing almost zero resources to generate local content.
So, we knew.
There were so many days we came into the newsroom learning that someone else had been let go. It always resulted in a day-long awkward silence where we all wondered if we would be next. A lot of us tried to maximize our usefulness to the product by learning to do many different things. All the while, most of us had our own Option B in the back pocket.
My experience, of course, came in the newsroom. But salespeople tried to go out into the community and sell a damaged product, knowing that they could be let go if they didn’t generate some kind of revenue. The billing department, circulation, even the press operators knew they could be outsourced any time, and they eventually were.
Department heads worked with dread toward quarter’s end, knowing there was no realistic way to hit the number that corporate was telling them they had to hit.
And who would they have to let go to hit the number? How many families would they have to affect to make sure their own family still had bread on the table?
I know that times change and industries die. I know newspapers are not unique. I know some of you reading this have gone through similar situations in your workplace.
But I still long for an entity to cover this community because it needs one. And I’ll say this about the crew that continues at the Dothan Eagle; the same thing I said about our resource-depleted crew during my last 10 years there. They are putting their heads down and covering the community the best they can with the cards they are dealt.
What a Newspaper Needs to Do
There are a handful of things you need from a newspaper. We didn’t do all of this as well as we could back in the day, but these are the things we tried to tackle:
— What is happening and when is it happening? The Eagle still prints a community calendar called “Around the Wiregrass.”
— When do local councils, commissions, school boards and other government bodies meet? These meetings are open to the public. And when I say local, I mean Houston, Henry, Coffee, Dale and Geneva counties.
— How are your local tax dollars being spent?
— What happened at my council/commission/school board meeting? And, more importantly, what is the context? How does what happened coincide or depart from past actions? Will this directly affect my child in the classroom? Am I going to feel this in my wallet? How does this connect with other recent decisions made by the board? Have there been reasoned voices of dissent? Give me the backstory.
— I know who’s getting arrested, but what about crime should concern me? What are the trends? Are there specific types of criminal elements here now that have not been historically? What are cops facing they haven’t had to face? Do they have adequate resources? And are our departments acting correctly in the community?
— Are our schools good? Why or why not?
— What is the business climate in my community? Are there indications my community is experiencing something decidely different than other similarly situated communities? If so, what are the likely reasons why? What do home sales/offerings, business real estate sells/vacancies mean for the city?
— Who’s running for office? What are their qualifications? How will they say they will vote on issues important to me? Are there any red flags worth noting?
— Give me something to cheer about. Let principals or CEOs, wives or husbands, etc. clue us in on the teacher or worker or student who’s doing something that’s going to make me smile and feel good about my community.
— Tell me the scores and let me root for some kids. This is last on my list because I think Eagle sports continues to do a good job of this thanks to the hard work of a couple of veterans.
A community whose citizenry doesn’t know the answers to most of these questions will fill the unknown with speculation. Some of it may be well-reasoned and some of it may be toxic.
Needless to say, you need a staff for this. To have a staff, you need revenue. To have revenue, you need a lot of suscribers and a healthy amount of advertisers.
But, to get the subscribers and the advertisers, you must have the content first. That was the big mistake newspapers made. They cut and cut and cut. Then they made the transition to digital and asked you to support it at a much higher cost than you paid for a product with a lot more content.
As I said previously, someone needs to tell the story of the Wiregrass.
Thanks for the kind words!
You are a fantastic writer and so gifted in doing so. This is best article I've read on substack in my feeble opinion. I'm nostalgic and sentimental and will forever miss holding a newspaper in my hand, getting ink on my hands, and reading news. The digital world will never compare. I'm just thankful I'm old enough to have enjoyed the version of the news produced on a web press!!