Cut top talent, and what do you get?

The New York Times' David Carr writes a wonderful column about the recent trend of newspapers cutting their top (and highest paid) talent to save the money they'd otherwise have to pay their oldest and most experienced writers.

He writes:

Yes, the revenue picture is grim and growing grimmer. The biggest outlay besides putting the printed artifact on the street is salaries. And journalists tend to get a lot more indignant when the sheet cake and goodbye speeches are being served up on behalf of people who have the same job as they have.

But there is a business argument to be made here. Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.

In my local market, the Burlington Free Press let go one of its columnists, Ed Shamy, who wrote funny, sarcastic and always enjoyable columns about life in Vermont. If the paper explained why they picked him to cut, I missed it. But the end result is the newspaper is less interesting to read, has less relevance for local readers, and has lost a strong voice that helped define what it means to live here.

Apparently we live in the healthiest city in the United States.

Two things: 1) It's based on people's self-reported evaluation of their health, with 92 percent of Burlingtonians (is that the right word? Burlingtoniads?) saying they are in good or great health. Self-reported data is notoriously unreliable. And 2) "vegan options are plentiful." Ehhh - not so fast.

As a one-time vegan and full-time vegetarian, I was suprised there weren't more vegan options in Burlington, given the large college population and its leftist leanings. There weren't any vegetarian restaurants in Burlington until September, when the New Ethic restaurant (which I recommend) opened in the Old North End.

Enough about Burlington's health. How about the health of its daily newspaper, the Burlington Free Press?

Gannett announced more layoffs earlier this month. The paper had already cut six staffers (although not all in the newsroom) in August.

The Burlington Free Press is just one of the many victims of the collapse of the newspaper industry. Yet residents of Burlington should be very concerned: it's the only daily paper in the town. If the paper cuts back on its coverage -- and, worst case scenario, even shuts down in a few years as ad dollars continue to dwindle -- it's going to leave this town poorer in many ways.

This came to mind listening to government officials talking about bailing out the auto industry: You can still buy cars from other manufacturers even if the US automakers collapse. But if your town's daily newspaper goes belly up -- well, you can't look to Japan to supply news for your town.

So how about a bail-out for the ailing newspaper industry? It would prop up an industry that employs 54,000 reporters, editors and writers (down from a peak of almost 57,000 in 1990) and pulls in advertising sales of $42 billion a year.

Aside from the economic impact, think of the civic benefit. If newspapers shut down, who will write that investigative piece into a local drug problem, or uncover wrong-doing by a local politician?

All News is Local?

Will Bunch, a writer with the Philadelphia Daily News, writes this column in the American Journalism Review about the lack of connection between reporters and the communities they cover:

"The entrenched job loop for ambitious journalists – sending college grads like Peace Corps Volunteers off to short-term stints in far-flung outposts, en route to isolated newsrooms that poorly cover a patchwork of neighborhoods and suburbs – isn't working for either news people or the communities that they cover."

Ivy League grads skip from paper to bigger paper, seeking journalism awards and the prize at the top, a job at one of the country's big dailies, Bunch writes. This might be part of the problem hurting papers today -- a lack of connection with a community means the reporters aren't writing articles that will grab readers' eyeballs.

But I wonder if smaller newspapers need to rethink their mission. Why do small city papers include world and national news? It might have been the case 50 years ago that their readers relied on their local papers for this news, but today surely most of their customers are reading old (world) news by the time the paper lands on their doorstep. Should local papers be truly local? Would they serve their purpose better if they stopped filling their pages with wire copy and invested their money in local reporters willing to dig into the issues bugging their readers?

Tim Russert, RIP

Tim Russert said this in a 1992 Columbia Journalism Review article about his approach to journalism:

"It is a vocation," he says. "I am Catholic and I understand vocations. Everybody has a purpose for being on earth. I am most comfortable and best at understanding public policy issues, trying to interpret them, analyze them, and inform the public about them."

That's what was enjoyable about watching him on "Meet the Press" -- aside from his strong interview style, he understood his mission and stuck to it throughout his career.