Community, Opinion & Editorial

Doom & gloom? Not in our newsroom

BEND – “Son, get out of the business.

My first break in the newspaper industry was 1983, typing in sports statistics and weather data for The Miami News, an afternoon paper in my hometown. The newsroom was on the sixth of six floors, surrounded on two sides by nearly floor-to-ceiling glass panels looking over Biscayne Bay and a causeway that took you to the beach.

The sunrise usually coincided with our early morning deadline, and it was an incredible sensory experience to watch the newsroom flush with an explosion of colors as the sun emerged from  the ocean. The rays would bounce off electric typewriters that dotted the desktops between the earliest versions of word processors.

I had to pinch myself many times. I was a 20-year-old journalist living the dream. 

One of my colleagues at the paper then was a cantankerous veteran with 30 years of newspaper experience and hard living. We’ll call him Billy. He was fiercely loyal to Kentucky Wildcats basketball, eagerly argued that Secretariat was the most overrated thoroughbred of all time, and loved his Miami Hurricanes football teams of that era. 

He resembled Kris Kristofferson, only more gaunt, and probably meaner. There was never much conversation overnight as we put out the paper when Billy was in charge. Whenever he’d get exasperated during live production, he’d turn and whisper through clenched teeth and in a tone that indicated violent rage was just beneath the surface: “Son, get out of the business.

I was reminded of that phrase several times this past weekend at the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association’s annual two-day conference. How was the mood there? A lot of complaining about the current state of the industry. A lot of anxiety for the future of local newspapers. A lot of concern about the future of the ONPA. A lot of discussion about newspaper closings and staff layoffs in light of recent acquisitions in our industry. Where will the ax fall next?

Son, get out of the business.” 

Corporate greed biggest threat 

It was trendy in the 1990s to say the government should be run like the best big businesses – lean, efficient, profitable. The catchphrase in my workplace three decades ago was “work smarter, not harder.” In reality, that phrase equated to leveraging technology and reducing employees to help satisfy corporate greed. 

Corporations and venture capitalists have acquired newspapers all over the country, including in our backyard, in Eugene. It’s in Gannett’s best – meaning most profitable – interests to drive people to digital vs. print, reduce coverage of Springfield and other surrounding communities, and utilize its enterprise-wide, homogenized, commoditized content. 

The corporatists have mostly accomplished their goal of controlling “the media.” The danger corporate media presents to local weekly papers was made even more clear during the ONPA conference. 

I’m not talking about a competitive threat to The Chronicle’s business model; but rather to the ONPA itself – an organization that small papers rely upon because its collective strength represents us in legal matters and issues before the state legislature we couldn’t afford on our own. As consolidation happens in our industry, its potential impact is profound. 

The new owner of the Portland Tribune and roughly 20 other Oregon newspapers recently laid off a number of employees, including in its newsrooms, according to reporting in the Willamette Weekly.

Carpenter Media Group owns 180 publications in the U.S. and Canada, and purchased those publications from their local owner, Pamplin Media Group, last month.

What’s Pamplin Media? It claims to have been Oregon’s largest and No.1 source for local news, reaching more than 1.1 million readers every week “through our combined community newspapers, website and social media platforms.” The Tribune was its flagship publication. 

Now the “talk on the street” is that Carpenter might buy up EO Media, which owns 15 papers across Oregon, including The Astorian, The (Bend) Bulletin, and the Capitol Press in Salem. 

We know what happens when corporations purchase smaller businesses; they consolidate and eliminate. They shrink staff, mostly, and decrease community engagement.

And while they are shrinking the staff or closing newspapers, the natural next step is to wonder why they’re paying dues and financing the ONPA. 

You can imagine the discussions that no doubt have taken place at the executive level: “We could have our own conference, among our papers. We can eliminate the dues and costs associated with a state journalism organization. And, frankly, fighting for journalistic freedoms isn’t all that important to us. We’re all about profits.” 

The loss of the ONPA could be catastrophic for small newspapers who need the collective muscle of all media businesses to fight the first-amendment infringements and authoritarians who drive propaganda and purposefully deliver misleading information. 

Son, get out of the business.”

I’m more optimistic than ever that we have a proven business model that works in our local communities. Unique-and-differentiating content. Hyper-local focus. Engagement with readers on digital and social media platforms. Helping preserve democracy. Shining a spotlight on volunteers and nonprofits.

Get out of the business? 

We’re just getting started.

Email: [email protected]

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