Dying A Slow Death at the Chronicle
(Media • Verbatim)
Via the Brazosport News, a Valentine’s message to the ever-shrinking number of reporters and editors at the Houston Chronicle:
February 13, 2009Dear Chronicle Colleagues:
As our newspaper continues to report the condition of the economy, we read about companies in all business categories adjusting their size to match current and projected revenues. The Houston Chronicle must do the same in spite of your diligent efforts.
Consequently, over the next 60 days, we will be reorganizing our employee base in all divisions around a reduction in force of at least 10 percent. As we restructure the Chronicle, rest assured that we are planning and researching many other cost saving initiatives so we can keep job eliminations as low as possible. I ask for your help, in that regard, so please keep submitting your cost savings ideas through our new program.
I hope you understand that difficult decisions must be made in challenging times and I ask for your patience as we work through this period of unprecedented change.
Sincerely,
Jack Sweeney
In Fort Bend County, the Chronicle’s best and most-experienced reporter already left for greener pastures four or five months ago.
When I lived in west Houston 10 years ago, my wife and I (both former newspaper journalists and avid readers of at least two daily papers a day), dropped the Chronicle because no local reporter was assigned to cover the west side of town, let alone our neighborhood or area schools. It was hard enough to find out what was going on at City Hall.
Call me an aging fart, but if you (Hearst, Gannett, whomever) set yourself up as a local newspaper, my belief is that you should assign resources to unearthing local news within your coverage area. Instead of thinning the staff out to a ratio of one reporter for every 500,000 people, you’d be better off dropping the pretense. Shrink your coverage area to include only the geographic area inside the Loop if that’s all the reporters you can afford. But you can bet the people inside the Loop will read you, because if they do they’ll actually be able to find out what forces are about to shape their local lives.
Then stop offering the paper on paper, save yourself the distribution and printing costs and redesign your web site so it doesn’t look like a giant Chinese restaurant menu with 10,000 equally important story links.
If that all seems outrageous, my response is that that’s where you’re headed anyway. You’ll save blood, sweat and tears by getting it over with.
‘Course it doesn’t help when your owners are using your revenue to prop up $1 million-per-week losses at a flagship paper their corporate ego won’t allow them to close.
→ B.Dunn, Feb 14, 2009, 07 32 am
