The Printer’s Devil

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A few weeks, I had to call the nearest big-city newspaper to ask for help in figuring out Missouri’s state court system.

An editor picked up the phone and said, “Oh yes, so-and-so will be able to explain that to you.”

There was a pause.

“Oops, I forgot. We laid him off this morning.”

Since then, the paper, and another metro paper, announced a series of news layoffs and staff reductions.

This is serving your reader, stupid but busy style.

I’ve mentioned before that people buy newspapers because they want to read what’s in them.

But during economic downturns, newspapers cut and dumb down their reporting staff — the one thing that people are buying papers for.

Publishers try all sorts of gimmicks, from “community newspapering” to “hyperlocal news,” but they can’t resolve the real bottom line. They’re peddling crap because it’s cheap and despite their long-time loyalty to their local newspaper, readers are becoming less patient.

Unlike the local China Mart, which has driven out all of the competition, people don’t have to subscribe to their local newspaper — indeed, during tough economic times, subscribing to a newspaper becomes a luxury.

It’s an easy decision to abandon the local paper — and as one reader who did so pointed out to me, the local papers make it easy by putting all of their copy on the Internet for free.

Remember the late lamented Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, which committed suicide.

However, at a time when other newspapers were going belly up during the Great Depression, Mr. Knight and Mr. Ridder built a mighty chain by hiring and expanding their papers’ news staffs.

And cost-cutting fails the public in other ways.

I once covered a city hall in which the city manager was a wheeler-dealer. He was apt to be sneaky and, much to his annoyance, I was always prying around to keep track of his backdoor deals.

Whenever I succeeded, it generated a juicy story he found annoying.

But we respected one another and during slack times, I’d hang out in his office. He was always intensely interested in how newspapers do business — I, of course, was careful not to give away my secrets I used in bird-dogging him although he was smart enough to figure them out on his own and close the appropriate bolt hole.

But he was an apt pupil.

One day, he announced he was leaving to be manager of a larger, wealthier city near his hometown.

I twitted him, saying that while he wouldn’t have to deal with me any more, he would have to deal with the large metro paper that I had mentioned at the first of this entry.

He smiled — a wide smile I could imagine a shark would make swimming to a fat, but slow, fish.

“Are you kidding?” he asked. “They’ve cut costs so much, they now just send some inexperienced kid to the office once in a while.

“It will be no problem to blow smoke up their ass and they’ll never know.

And the word is getting out. A city commissioner I know once passed me a guide handed out a media guide by a national cities organization that noted that newspaper staffs were getting smaller, less experienced — and by implication, easier to bamboozle.