Tedium - Strip-Mined News 🗞

An illustration of the Virginian-Pilot building, where the newsroom was located until relatively recently. (Boston Public Library/Flickr)

After the outsourcing is complete, it’s time for the strip miners to appear

To explain the cutting a bit more, let me tell you a story about a beloved paper I once worked at.

Between 2006 and 2008, I worked at a publication of The Virginian-Pilot, a paper that Tribune now owns. I had a lot of good memories of that paper, and they centered on 150 E. Brambleton Ave. in Norfolk—which is about a central as one can get for a newsroom in that part of Hampton Roads, Virginia.

From the outside, they had one of the most iconic buildings in the city, and it was a building that had survived for more than 80 years. Earlier this year, it was sold for less than $10 million, to be turned into apartments … because who needs a centralized downtown newsroom, anyway?

Traditionally, the Hampton Roads community has been split in two from a journalistic standpoint, with a large body of water (the Hampton Roads channel where the James, Nansemond, and Elizabeth rivers connect, leading to the Chesapeake Bay) separating the two halves. The southern side, which has the two population centers of Norfolk and Virginia Beach, was traditionally covered by The Virginian-Pilot. The more spread-out northern half, meanwhile, has its own paper in Newport News, the Daily Press.

The Daily Press is also owned by Tribune, which saw synergy opportunities in acquiring the Pilot. To reflect that, the office was the first thing to go. Now, before COVID-19 hit in a big way, the Pilot’s office was to move to Newport News with the Daily Press.

While this was technically possible—the papers, after all, are within 30 miles of one another—it was the kind of decision one would make if you owned a business but did not live in Hampton Roads to observe its daily function. See, the two halves of Hampton Roads, beyond being separated by a massive body of water, also have limited transportation options to cross that body of water—two sets of bridge tunnels that have been daily traffic nightmares in the area for more than half a century. A half hour can quickly turn into an hour and a half depending on how the traffic is that day.

So yeah, not exactly well-thought-out. Local leaders were very upset about this decision.

That move was announced in February. In March, before the move could really take place, COVID-19 hit, and suddenly, all these newspaper workers found themselves away from the newsroom, doing their jobs at home, or (as these are reporters we’re talking about) in their cars. There were furloughs during this process—painful ones, where people were effectively not working for weeks on end. Over the past six months, this was the situation facing hard-working journalists, with the Pilot’s move to Newport News move put on hold as a result.

Well, until September, when the other shoe dropped—and Tribune announced it was closing the Daily Press’ offices. Tribune has suggested it might reopen offices in the future, but given the runaround they’ve given these far-away newsrooms so far, who knows?

The saga of Hampton Roads’ journalism woes—in an area of 1.8 million people—is a microcosm of a whole country, honestly.

And perhaps the most vicious figure in this trimming scheme is a company named Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that holds majority ownership in Digital First Media, a major newspaper chain … and, more recently, a significant minority in Tribune Corp. Alden is scary—they literally do not care about journalism, because if they did, they would avoid laying people off. Instead, they just keep cutting.

As Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo wrote of Alden’s M.O. earlier this year:

In the journalism world, Alden didn’t really become a synonym for evil until 2018, when the Denver Post made national headlines for openly revolting against its hedge fund overlord. Prompted by yet another painful downsizing in the nine-time Pulitzer Prize–winning Post’s newsroom, which had already dwindled to under a hundred journlists, the fierce but futile uprising brought journalists out of their offices and into the streets. The ensuing publicity threw Alden’s draconian playbook into sharp relief: buy distressed newspapers on the cheap, cut the shit out of them, and reap the profits that can still be made from print advertising.

At least Hampton Roads still has two newspapers, despite all the cuts. Some areas are lucky to still have one. But other parts of the country have been dealing with this for years, with reporting and other journalism resources lost along the line.

And if we end up losing the newspapers entirely, just imagine what little might still be left below.

It might look as thin as the junk Metric Media is selling as local journalism.

Eight years ago, extremely bothered by what I learned about Journatic’s business model, I raised concerns about the state of local newspapers at the time, and ended my piece by posing this question:

How are we going to prevent our newspapers from becoming miniature Demand Media-style content farms? Print revenue has slowly disappeared, and with Journatic, we’ve found how far newspapers are willing to go to save money. How do we prevent a further sliding scale? Good local journalism is still needed, but what will keep it safe?

This is a question that remains unsolved, years later. And it is scary that in many ways, we’re no closer. In fact, we may even be further away. There are a few reasons I can see for that:

1. Talent consolidated in major markets. For years, if you wanted to be a journalist with an online profile, the pressure was on to go to a big city like New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, or San Francisco—with a heavy lean on the first two. Only with COVID-19 and its work-anywhere ethos is this really changing.

2. Changes in value proposition and audience. Local newspapers used to hold a lot more value for consumers because they were what consumers turned to not just for local news, but for a broader perspective on the world at large. It’s been years since that was true. On top of all that, the audience of newspapers—the print kind—often skews older.

3. A lack of a consistent business model for local news. Selling ads on paper has somehow maintained its power all these years later, despite the fact that digital options are prevalent and viable. The problem is that digital advertising is not as viable as print once was, and there has been a strong backlash against digital ads. Also not helping: Until recently, it’s been hard to convince people to subscribe to news online.

4. External ownership that doesn’t understand the market. The reason why the strip miners and excavators are proving so effective at taking over different markets is because so few newspapers maintain local ownership, in part because journalism is a hard business.

But the truth is, the reason that nobody has solved this problem correctly is because it’s a hard problem.

If we don’t fix it, though, we will know less about our communities, and we will effectively give control of our public knowledge and research to monied interests who don’t actually care about the local community and would rather score the easy cash-out.

Think about your small town. Is it missing a paper—or does it have a paper that doesn’t carry the weight it once did? Given the alternatives, what would you do to protect that paper’s reporting capabilities, even if you couldn’t save the physical product itself?

The answer will be different for every community. But I hope you have an answer. Local journalism needs it more than ever.

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