July 28, 2008
Categories: Current Affairs
I was talking to a friend of mine about how strange last week was at the newspaper as we all awaited the executioner’s ax to fall on 35-40 newsroom employees. He's a former steelworker, and he told me it reminded him of the way things used to be as Bethlehem Steel began to unravel.
We all know how well that turned out.
I planned to do a political commentary for today, but I decided I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t pay tribute to all the terrific professionals who have had the rug yanked out from under them in recent weeks and over the weekend. I went out with several of them Friday night in Bethlehem and Allentown — sort of a last hurrah — and learned Sunday night that two of the participants were gone.
If you get The Morning Call, you saw another wave of changes this morning, throughout your paper. Some I like a lot, some not so much. The bottom line is that just as we in the newspaper business are trying to adjust to constant change, we’re asking our readers to do the same. The hope is that the readers we gain or re-interest will outnumber those who are so confused or angry that they give up.
I took a lot of business courses in graduate school, and my thesis was on my ideas about zoning newspapers by lifestyle and interest to target the audiences better. Sports fans would get a paper with an expanded sports section, people who were interested in business would get expanded stock market news, younger readers more entertainment news, and so on.
I thought this was visionary and radical. In retrospect, my ideas turned out to be pretty tame compared to where we ended up going.
Even if the new-look Morning Call represents the beginning of a better future for print journalism around here, there’s no denying that we’ve sustained terrible losses in these layoffs and buyouts. Last Friday, a few of us started calculating the years of experience represented by just a handful of departing employees, and it was staggering. You can’t lose that kind of institutional memory and knowledge of these communities without a significant impact.
I hope we — and they — go on to bigger, better things. But today, I can’t help but feel sad about all those good friends who will never be back, except to clean out their desks. They’ll be missed.
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