I lost six friends yesterday. A disaster eliminated them.
Not a natural disaster, mind you, but the kind caused by an accountant’s keystrokes.
Sadder still, someone who didn’t know these people, and maybe didn’t even care to know them, will profit from those keystrokes in the short run.
Yesterday, six news staffers at my workplace — five editors and a photographer — were expunged from the payroll of Lee Enterprises’s largest property and St. Louis’s principal news source. Out the door with these six and the few belongings they had also went about 50 years’ worth of institutional memory and irreplaceable expertise, to say nothing of the collegiality and professionalism they brought to work every day.
They were expunged about a month after Lee Enterprises deferred paying into pension plans for 2011 while handing the CEO and CFO performance bonuses totaling at least $1 million, and about two weeks after the company tamped down rumors that layoffs were pending.
Discussion abounds over whether these matters led directly to what happened Tuesday. At the least, the timing is atrocious. Regardless, the events have combined to frighten those employees remaining. The ax has fallen close enough, repeatedly now over the past few years, for the remainder to feel a breeze from it.
Among the people still filling chairs Tuesday, the mood was quiet, somber. Funereal maybe fits better. But nobody slaked their duties or relented during the inevitable march toward deadline. Our readers still needed their news Wednesday morning, no matter who was left to gather and present it.
And journalists — the really good ones I’ve known, anyway; certainly, the six who were shown the door Tuesday — tend not to soften while the world around them hardens. Public service comes first; that’s what being a journalist is all about. It’s a difficult, demanding profession that satisfies maybe one out of every two customers, and leaves the one customer often miffed. This is a hazard of striving to serve everyone equally, without fear or favor.
Because they routinely and willingly face that hazard, journalists also tend to be resilient. I have little doubt that the six former colleagues of mine will find new courses in life, ones that may afford them more prosperity and happiness. The thing is, nobody I know in journalism — and I’ve had ink-stained fingers almost 30 years now — pursued it for money or fame; so many other professions better satisfy those needs. They instead felt called to it, drawn to it, as if journalism sated them in some deep-seated way far more than just a career could.
More keep coming, fortunately, as the fine, aspiring journalists I have worked with at local universities attest. I wonder now, however, how many of these motivated, energetic students will be able to look back through 30 years of news gathering and public service, or even 30 months, when the institutions that were designed to support them in their pursuit crumble before anyone just jumping aboard gains adequate footing.
Yes, I realize journalism must adapt with the times and technology. I’ve heard the sermons, both weak and strong, and believe me when I say I’m among the converted. Perhaps we are indeed entering a “golden age” of journalism, with mobile technology and widespread electronic information access, that the static institutions associated with “mainstream” media had to be moved or removed to reach.
Still, something worsens when a medium plunders itself, and the newspaper subscriber from Florissant, Mo., who rang me up at work one evening a few weeks ago illustrated it. She called a random newspaper department number, she said, hoping to bypass the general voicemail that intercepts and, yes, discourages many outside callers, and got me on the line to complain about an article in print that glared with a grammatical error.
The error was in a part of the newspaper unrelated to mine. Nevertheless, now that she had me on the phone, she wanted to vent to somebody — anybody.
“This is shameful,” she said. “This is awful. How can you sleep knowing you put out a product like this? And you know, it just keeps getting worse.”
I assured her that, no, sometimes I don’t sleep.
“Ma’am,” I said. “I agree, it shouldn’t have happened, and I apologize. It certainly wasn’t the result of laziness or anything like that.”
“What was it then?”
“Well, I’m not sure, but ...” and I whisked her through a summary of the layoffs and cutbacks going on at the newspaper, explaining that these were happening while content management had expanded to include Web, mobile and other platforms, and social media.
“Basically, we’re doing much more with fewer people,” I concluded.
There was a silence of a few seconds at the other end, followed by, “Oh. Well, now I understand. Nobody’s ever taken the time to explain it to me. Thank you.”
She hung up sounding apologetic, but I doubt my explanation will salve her for long.
The six people who were laid off Tuesday were among the vanguard of a watch attending to details that this reader, and many others also concerned with accuracy, consider crucial. They understand that credibility lies not just in the act of journalism, but also in the pursuit of perfection while performing it. Yes, errors do occur; however, the overall goal of getting details down properly and precisely should not be minimized, even as journalism leaps off the page and into the “cloud” — even as executives sift for ways to cut costs en route to that cloud.
Implying to our readers and our newest journalists that precision is negligible serves neither constituency, and in the end won’t serve the bottom line, either.
