On the Dothan Eagle and the state of newspapers

I couldn’t have been more ecstatic to have a job waiting for me when I took my final exam at the University of Alabama on a cold December day in 1992.

Just a few days later, I’d begin my journalism career at the Cullman Times as a general assignment reporter. The paper published five days a week and never had a shortage of newsy stuff happening with governors Guy Hunt and Jim Folsom, Jr. both from the county.

The publisher told me that if I started work before Christmas, I could attend the staff Christmas party and, yes, receive the staff Christmas bonus. I hustled to make it happen and when he handed out checks at the party a few days later, I scurried off in private to open the envelope and find out my windfall.

$25.

But hey, for a broke kid out of college, it was better than nothing.

I wrote news for about eight months when the paper’s sports editor resigned to become the county’s Emergency Management Agency director (yep, that’s right).

Welcome to Dothan

So I handled sports for the paper for almost three years before sending out some feelers and winding up at the Dothan Eagle in May of 1996. I went from a staff of one to a sports staff of five. I couldn’t imagine such a big staff.

Overall, there were 34 people in the Eagle newsroom when counting news, sports, lifestyle, photo, graphics and editors. We had reporters assigned to city government, city schools, city law enforcement, Houston County government and schools, Henry County, Geneva County and Fort Rucker. We sent a reporter up to Montgomery during most of the early years to cover the legislature.

We invested in continuing education, sending multiple reporters to journalism workshops in Atlanta or south Florida. We flew reporters overseas if needed. We followed stories to Memphis, New Orleans, Virginia.

We exposed some corruption along the way and forced the resignation of a handful of officials. We highlighted some wins in local education and brought attention to some deficiencies that led to impactful changes.

And we told the story of the Wiregrass, whether it was the sisters parted at birth reuniting for the first time in 75 years, or the woman donating a kidney to her friend, or the man who brought a kid back from Guatemala to get him new arms and legs.

For years, we came to work every day feeling that what we were doing made a difference. It doesn’t mean we didn’t make mistakes. We didn’t always hit the right notes, but the people I worked with made a good-faith effort to accurately report the goings-on in the Wiregrass.

And the companies that owned us made lots and lots of money.

Canada-based Thomson owned us when I came here. It wasn’t the most well-known newspaper chain in the world but it left us alone for the most part, understanding that the best local newspapers were the ones who made their decisions locally.

The Fatal Mistake

A few years later the internet began to circulate widely and most newspapers decided to jump online and offer their news for free. This would prove to be a fatal mistake. Why would readers pay for a printed publication of news when they could get a similar digital product for free?

It was about this time that Thomson sold us to Virginia-based Media General. Again, we were primarily left alone. However, the massive profit margins newspapers enjoyed began to erode in the mid-2000s and newspapers started to make some interesting decisions.

They started cutting staff. They narrowed the width of the paper and began to remove some syndicated material.

For the bigger newspapers, the cuts were pretty innocuous at first. Maybe it was the full-time movie critic, or the second food critic.

For the smaller newspapers, it was the graphics person and the obituary reporter.

No one could have predicted how quickly the bottom would fall out of newspaper advertising revenue. When newspapers tried to charge businesses to advertise digitally, they could only capture a fraction of the advertising revenue they were realizing with the printed product. And the printed product was dying much faster than the digital product could compensate for it.

So, newspapers began to cut a little more. No unnecessary travel. Multiple week-long employee furloughs. External reporters. Freelance reporters.

Even fewer pages and an even more narrow width.

Quality Down, Price Up

And all the while that much of the newspaper was being taken away, newspaper chains tried to make up for the lost advertising revenue by increasing subscription rates.

For most of the history of newspapers, about 80 percent of the revenue came from advertising and the rest came from subscriptions and other ancillary projects.

That changed quickly. Your quarter newspaper at the stand became 50 cents, and soon 75, and so on. Newspaper carriers were no longer employees but instead contractors, creating an odd situation in which you could pay your carrier or the newspaper for your subscription.

In an attempt to increase revenue, we started placing ads on the front page. No one thinks much about it today, but journalists thought it was the end of the world.

Then we started outsourcing. It was the circulation department first. If you missed your paper, you wound up talking to someone in Connecticut, or Virginia, or St. Louis, or Tulsa. We didn’t always get a paper to you, but believe me, the local folks wanted to make sure you got a paper far more than the poor soul in Connecticut who heard from disgruntled subscribers all morning from a dozen different papers.

Later, we outsourced billing and accounting. Then the folks at Media General decided we didn’t really need to design the Dothan Eagle in Dothan. They created a consolidated editing center in North Carolina, where people clocked in every day to design a dozen or more newspapers during their shift.

By this time revenue was really struggling and reporting positions were not being replaced when vacated.

That’s when Media General sold most of its newspapers to Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett wrote all of his newly acquired newspapers a letter and assured them that he bought them simply because he loved newspapers and wanted to preserve them. Since Berkshire owned hundreds of companies, what a few dozen newspapers did revenue-wise wouldn’t move his needle at all either way. He was right of course, but Buffett didn’t become a billionaire by buying losing companies.

He soon realized his investment wasn’t going to be overly profitable so his papers started doing what all of the other newspaper chains had been doing all along.

The Death Spiral

He cut more steeply. While staff numbers were decreasing at a higher rate, the higher-ups sought to increase revenue by adding more ancillary products to the base newspaper. Each quarter we were tasked with putting out a full magazine, which meant the few reporters we had left would have to stop working on the daily product to write numerous features for the magazine. These weren’t bad for the most part, but the quality of the daily product suffered when we had to put most of our resources into the magazine.

Buffett figured he could task a few mid-level managers at some of his larger papers to oversee his new acquisitions. He realized soon that this would not work. So, Buffett worked out an agreement with newspaper chain Lee Enterprises to serve as his managers. Buffett maintained ownership of the Eagle and other papers, but Lee managed us.

Lee had a reputation for cutting to the bone. It was about this time that Lee suggested moving printing operations for the Marianna, Enterprise and Dothan papers to Opelika. The Eagle fought this idea fiercely and held out as long as possible until our hand was forced.

When I came to the Eagle in 1996, our publication deadline was around 11:30 p.m. and our first paper came off the press around midnight. By the time printing operations moved to Opelika, our publication deadline was 7 p.m., making it impossible to cover any sporting events for the next day’s paper as well as most evening local government meetings.

All the while, subscription rates continued to increase.

Not long thereafter, Buffett offloaded his newspapers to Lee Enterpises in full, and this is who owns the Eagle today.

Most of those Facebook and Twitter posts you see from the Eagle are not generated locally. They are sent out to all of Lee’s papers at the corporate level.

Since then, the Eagle has moved from its downtown building to a floor in the Wells Fargo bank building on the Ross Clark Circle and will soon reduce its publication days to Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday with delivery through the mail.

I wrote sports for the Eagle for eight years and news for another 12 before spending a little more than two years as the paper’s editor. left the Eagle in 2019 and came to work on staff at Ridgecrest Baptist Church here in Dothan, where I get to make an eternal difference every day.

That newsroom full of 34 people when I came on board was 10 when I left, and it is far fewer now.

What This Means

Why is this important? This is important for many reasons.

First, practically every decision I’ve chronicled from the first to the last was made outside of Dothan. When most of those moves were first suggested by corporate, our local editors and publishers pushed back as hard as they could. They knew these decisions would affect jobs and families here in Dothan and they knew it was not in the best long-term interest of the paper.

Journalists have always been an unpopular bunch. Sometimes the criticism has been fair because journalists have been unfair. Sometimes, however, people don’t like journalists because they tell us things we don’t necessarily want to hear, but need to hear.

We certainly receved a great deal of criticism over the years as staff was cut, pages were cut, the width of the paper was cut and the price of the paper increased.

But the rank and file people at the Dothan Eagle — the sports and news and lifestyle reporters, the photographers and the editors — came to work every day and put their head down and worked with the cards they were dealt to try to put out the best product they could.

I worked with so many different people. Some of them still work at the Eagle and many came and worked a few years and wound up elsewhere. Overwhelmingly, our people showed up each day with no agenda other than to try to tell the story of the Wiregrass.

Second, every community needs a newspaper to keep an eye on the government. It doesn’t mean this or that governmental body is better or worse than another. It just means that, occasionally, a council or a commission or some individuals within government will operate outside of the interests of the people and will need to be exposed. Without adequate staff to effectively monitor the local government, the temptation to get away with things increases.

Is that kind of thing going on in the Wiregrass right now? Who knows? Maybe it isn’t going on at all and maybe it is going on a lot, and that’s the point.

And third, the story of the Wiregrass needs to be told. I have friends in local television and they do just fine with their limited resources. However, TV or no TV, a community needs a newspaper. The community deserves to read about the local teacher going above and beyond for the students. It deserves to know about the local enterpreneuer who came from hard times to build a company. It deserves to know about the young kids with a lemonade stand who are raising money to help their friend fight a terrible disease.

And I don’t like what’s replacing the newspaper. The purely partisan sites serve no one really well. They don’t want to tell someone else’s story. They want to tell their own.

We have good people who still make it out to many of the local ballgames to highlight some great athletes. They’re still writing the stories about the high school stars who make it to college, or about the Wiregrass legends inducted into the local sports hall of fame. They’re still taking great photos.

But the resources continue to dwindle. When you pick up an Eagle or read some of the stories online, it’s important to know the story of the Dothan Eagle so you’ll know why the story of the Wiregrass isn’t told as fully as it once was.