Layoff Rumors Prove Reality: AJC Cuts 30% of Staff
Decatur Metro | March 25, 2009 | 10:43 amThis morning, the AJC announced plans to downsize from 323 full-time employees to 230. That’s a 28.79% reduction in staff…which they round up to 30%. The paper also announced another reduction in distribution area, eliminating service in Barrow, Bibb, Clarke, Houston, Monroe, Oconee and Putnam Counties.
As the article points out, the AJC had around 500 staffers in 2006. By May, they’ll have only 230. That’s a 54% decline in three years.
So how does the AJC plan to survive? This paragraph from a letter sent to staff by AJC editor Julia Wallace sums it up…
Our mission and goals remain the same. We need to continue to grow digital. We need to produce a very high-quality Sunday newspaper, filled with unique local content. And we must produce a daily newspaper that quickly and efficiently tells our readers the news of the day of and the news coming up.
The focus on local is reassuring. The lack of ad dollars online is not.
Will the AJC be able to right the ship? And how many people will be left if/when it does? Its become a gripping news story in itself.
h/t: Fresh Loaf
While I appreciate the problems they have and enjoy absolutely nothing more in the morning than a cup of coffee and a newspaper, I can’t bring myself to pay 75 cents for the wilted daily that its become. Since the latest section slashing, I’ve felt like a chump each time I’ve plopped down the 3 quarters for something that takes me 4 minutes to read through… only to realize I saw every single story on the local news the night before…
DM, if you don’t mind, could you start printing all your stories collectively in broadsheet format and have them available at Starbucks each morning by 8am? That would really serve my routine…
I think dh and Scott’s comments prove an important point: there is still a market for newspaper. But not just any paper, it’s got to be a good paper with content that people want and can’t get anywhere else.
Scott, do you mind if I print them on hemp?
Paula, there is indeed still a market for the hard copy. Unfortunately for the papers, its not what it once was…so the downsize is inevitable.
How do you downsize and retain quality and profit margins? That’s the trick. A little bird pointed me to this Chicago Reader piece entitled “What’s Black and White and Dead All Over?” recently. Its long but very well thought out. One of the author’s key points is about quality and readability…
“Traditional journalism, in 2009 AD, is boring and kind of uninformative.
Let’s all be perfectly honest here: what journalists at traditional local sources do you like to read? Which ones to you look forward to reading? Truly talented writers make you want to read them. There’s a former blogger, who occasionally posts on Daily Kos these days, who goes by the handle Billmon. He’s a former journalist, mostly trained as a business reporter, from what I’ve been able to glean, who blogged for a while at a site called the Whiskey Bar.
Then he stopped. I was, I swear to you, heartbroken. He’s smart. He’s funny. He’s deeply passionate. I got excited when he posted. When I woke up one morning a few weeks ago to find that he’d done a post on the financial crisis at Daily Kos, I was gleeful, because one of my favorite writers was taking on a subject right in his wheelhouse.
Really, ask yourself: how many newspaper columnists have the ethical ferocity of Glenn Greenwald? The mordant wit of John Cole? The nerdy doggedness of Marcy Wheeler? The prose skills of Roy Edroso? The quantitative skills of Nate Silver? (Baseball Prospectus is a slept-on model of journalism you have to pay for.) Precious few. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone is funny and passionate. Krugman’s analytical talents and enormous knowledge are backed by a fundamental decency. When This American Life decides to tackle a prominent news story, they often do an amazing job, and get a lot of deserved attention, e.g. their explanation of the financial crisis, “The Giant Pool of Money.”
When these debates about journalism come up, the first thing traditional journalists say is that bloggers don’t report. But that’s not all journalism is. Getting information is only half the battle—the other half is explaining it to people in a manner that causes them to read, watch, or listen in the first place, informs them, and causes them to act. And speaking from personal experience—as not only a professional but as a reader—I think traditional journalism, particularly newspapers, is failing at that.
But: why?”
Sure sounds to me like the AJC is only meeting 1 of their goals. And with 30% fewer people, I’m not thinking the other 2 will be addressed any time soon.
The AJC article refers to it as a 5% cut.
Compelling writing, DM, takes time. It is the rare reporter who can rattle out bon mots on deadline, day in and day out, to the point that he/she achieves a reputation as a must-read reporter. And there is the great paradox: The salient feature of newspapers that made them so necessary — their timeliness — also meant that the writing usually was not the stuff of Pulitzers.
Of course, that is but one reason in many why newspapers are tanking. I don’t have the time to enumerate all the others. If I did, I would do so in a compelling, must-read manner. But I got a deadline to meet.
This death is getting old.
I’m growing radicalized. Journalism is aboriginal. It’s about learning where the tigers have been hiding lately. It’s about who has syphilis and who can’t be trusted on the bison hunt. Everything I’ve written in the last couple of years devolves to one of these 10,000-year-old storylines.
Who got killed. Which overpaid starlet has wider hips and the better rack. Who lied or stole and should be shamed. I can get this crap on Facebook.
I should spend my time looking to blow my mind. I should opine. I should collect really interesting news, at knifepoint. I should make war of journalism, for fun and profit.
I should misbehave.
The Gwinnett cops banned me from their offices a couple years ago for asking questions in an impertinent tone. (Surprise! Some of you know who I am now.) That was fun, and useful.
There is no fucking profit left in conformity anymore, my brothers and sisters. Burn your sources. Take them all with you. Let them know what price is paid.
It’s a business. If the AJC is not delivering value to readers or advertisers, it will fail or be forced to take a new form. I think that newspapers have been way too slow to adapt to the changing needs of the public. Really, who has time to read long, slow developing stories, however well written they may be? I might relish those rare occasions when I’ve got a free hour and a good paper, but they’re so rare that they simply don’t sustain the current model.
Local newspapers are just the latest example of an industry, reluctant to adapt, that has changed forced upon it. Something new will fill the void, something that we may not yet see coming.
There was an interesting post about how the cost of delivering news via print is so much more expensive than via the web on The Business Insider that I came across today over here. No comment, just an interesting note about changing times.
I must concur with Grant Parker: you cannot necessarily look toward newspapers — daily ones, particularly — for great writing. Few of the very talented “writers” you mentioned would not be as interesting, eloquent or erudite if they were forced to work under daily deadlines. A writer at Rolling Stone can spend four months on a story. As a reporter who’s worked at a number of dailies large and small, I can tell you the average amount of time spent on a newspaper story is about five hours. That’s the average time spent on your run-of-the-mill metro section story.
At the same time, however, you’re right about one thing: the great writers usually don’t work at newspapers for that very reason. In fact, I can only name a few truly great writers presently working in newspapers (though many of them have taken buyouts). Anne Hull at The Washington Post is one. Dexter Filkins at The New York Times is another. Hank Stuever at The Washington Post. Monica Hesse maybe. Libby Copeland. Both at The Post.
Essentially, great writers tend to populate the top five papers: The Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and so forth. You’re simply not going to find people like that at the AJC, especially now that it’s anemic. And I’m afraid you’ll see a flood of the more talented AJCers to CNN, which is launching a very large wire service.
Cribbster, thank you. I have spent a few years in newsrooms, and can think of a few truly great writers who worked for dailies. And those writers, mind you, rarely did the metro bump-and-grind of producing stories for the next day’s edition. No, their work was showcased for Sundays, or in big projects.
Our host, DM, brings up good points about the downward spiral of journalism. The dearth of good writing is but one reason. As is often the case with a serious disease, the patient is suffering from a lot of symptoms.
I am curious to know what the revised AJC will be.
I honestly don’t think the average newspaper reader cares a great deal about the quality of writing provided it isn’t horrible. If you look at newspapers with exceptional penetration into their communities, the quality of the writing is rarely a factor. I knew of an editor once — and there are many like him — who claimed the key to keeping readers was to print as many community members’ names as possible. It seemed to work.
Obviously, a large, metro daily cannot and should not do that. I question whether there are solutions to the predicament newspapers have found themselves in. I found this recent interview for a Wall Street Journal blog to be particularly useful (and refreshingly calm):
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/03/19/one-bankers-plan-to-save-the-newspaper-industry/
By the way, a key sentence in that interview is where the analyst claims “newspapers have not been blessed with the best managers.” This is true. And it’s for a number of reasons. Some of them unavoidable. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, newspapers tossed money around like gangsters. For instance, I’m told the AJC used to fly photographers in helicopters from Athens to Atlanta after UGA football games. Granted, in those days they didn’t have digital photography, which is much quicker, but that does seem a tad ridiculous. Reporters from mid-size to large papers flew to stories. Sooooo many papers had unnecessary foreign bureaus. (Did The Baltimore Sun HONESTLY need a bureau in Johannesburg, South Africa? I don’t see why.)
And that’s because expensive business decisions were being made by editors — people who, generally speaking, are not business-savvy or even greatly concerned about finances. If money was going to improve the editorial process or product, it was spent, no questions asked. And because the editorial department was essentially shielded from the other departments (because a seperation is necessary for ethical reasons), this just went on and on until it couldn’t anymore.
I would love to see a researcher go back and analyze a Top 10 newspaper’s expenditures over the last 20 years and come up with a system to determine which were completely needless — and then figure out how many positions that money would be worth now. (Even if you couldn’t translate it that way, it’d still be interesting.)
Refers to what as a 5% cut?
I certainly don’t think that less compelling writing has single-handedly caused the biz’s downfall. I just thought it was an interesting argument. It got me thinkin’.
The situation for newspapers is beyond “find compelling writers, let them loose on world”…but we’ve been around that block before and you have a deadline to meet.
According to the AJC article and the Atlanta Business Journal article, it’s a 5% overall cut in staff. The NEWS staff is being cut by 28%.
Interesting, since I personally know an excellent writer who recently was laid off from CNN.