The wrenching changes — diminution, that is — of newsrooms and editorial pages across the nation were the subject of an interesting discussion on KCUR’s Central Standard show today.
Host Gina Kaufmann’s main guest was Yael Abouhalkah, a Kansas City Star editorial writer for 32 years..until Publisher Tony Berg fired him (with severance) a few weeks ago.
As most of you are painfully aware, The Star currently has no editorial writers and has been filling the editorial page with letters to the editor — a great thing for letter writers but not so good for the community at large, especially in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 8 general election.
What has happened at The Star is not unique at major metropolitan dailies. You have to look no farther than to St. Louis, where that paper’s editorial page was down to two people a while back. Also, of course, the number of editorial employees at newsrooms nationwide is severely diminished from 10 years ago, when the sledgehammer effect of people turning to the Internet for their news and opinions began registering.
Scott Reinardy
Scott Reinardy, a journalism professor at the University of Kansas, said on today’s show that between 2005 and 2015, newsrooms across the country cut about a third of their editorial employees, or about 20,000 people. Some newspapers, he said, sliced editorial-side employment 60 to 70 percent.
A third guest, David Uberti of the Columbia Journalism Review, said that as newsrooms cut loose experienced employees, what they forsake is “local or regional knowledge of power players” and a font of institutional knowledge.
“Editorial writers,” Uberti said, “tend to be very experienced journalists with deep ties to the communities. There’s no substitute for experience in that regard.”
A new editorial page editor — Colleen McCain Nelson — is due to begin working at The Star perhaps late next month, and she will face big challenges. In addition to having to assemble a staff (I doubt that Berg will allot her more than a couple of writers) she will have to familiarize herself with the community and its political and civic leadership. Although she is a KU graduate, she has never worked in this area. She’s currently a political reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and before that she was an editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News.
(Coincidentally, a former editorial-page colleague of hers at the Morning News, Tod Robberson, was named editorial page editor at the Post-Dispatch early this year. Robberson and Nelson worked on a series of editorials that won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. The series, called “Bridging Dallas’ North-South Gap,” focused on gaps in economic opportunity, race relations, housing and education in different parts of Dallas.)
Gina Kaufmann
As for Abouhalkah, who is 61, he has started a blog — http://www.yaelabouhalkah.com — and told Gina Kaufmann he did not go away mad. He managed to get a career in and build a financial nest egg that should afford him and his family a comfortable lifestyle.
I was lucky that way, too, having retired at age 60 in 2006. But a lot of journalists — those whose careers were cut down when they were in their 30s, 40s, 50s and some in their early 60s — not only went away mad, but frustrated and disillusioned. I know a few of them, and I completely understand how they felt and still feel to some degree. So does Reinardy, the KU professor, who has written a book called Journalism’s Lost Generation: The Un-Doing of U.S. Newspaper Newsrooms.
In a recent Columbia Journalism Review interview, Reinardy said that in doing research for the book he spent a lot of time interviewing current and former journalists. He described the mood that has formed in newsrooms around the country as a sort of “organizational depression.”
He explained it this way:
“There has been so much loss in those newsrooms. Journalists don’t necessarily just lose jobs, they lose careers and some real self-identity. I had many journalists who broke down and cried, who were so genuinely upset about what had happened to the profession they loved so dearly. It was really troubling.
“So I don’t have a statistical measurement for morale, but when you start walking into these newsrooms and talking to people who dedicated 20 years or 25 years or 30 years of their life to not only the profession but maybe even this individual newspaper, it was pretty telling to see how upset they were at what had occurred to their beloved industry.”
…One final note: Gina Kaufmann told listeners she invited Tony Berg to appear on the show. Berg accepted an invitation to appear on Central Standard back in March, two months after he had become publisher. But this time, when the subject matter was obviously going to be dicey for him, it was a different story. “We never heard back,” Kaufmann said.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
You mention the editorial writers of the shrunken St. Louis Post-Dispatch, once a great investigative newspaper–do you know what happened to Repps Hudson?
Repps is teaching part-time at Washington University in St. Louis. He is on Facebook and driving his boyhood hometown friend nuts with his political opinions.
Jim:
Heartbreaking. Have sent this on to several Star colleagues and others.
Word is that Tony Berg is going to be the guest speaker for the January meeting of the 40-year-ago Club, a Star-related group as you know. We meet at 12 noon at Brio Restaurant on the Plaza, 2nd floor. Usually the 3rd Monday of the month, but I would need to verify.
If you would want to go, you will be my guest.
Just let me know. No hurry. Berg might back out, who knows?
All best,
Laura
It won’t take much for him to outshine Mi-Ah Parrish at her appearance there several years ago, will it? We should have known then that she was going to be a disaster as publisher, but we didn’t want to think that way.
(I’d love to go, Laura. Keep me posted.)
As a long-time subscriber to the Star, I hope someone asks Berg (if he appears at the January meeting): 1) Who approved Laura Herrick’s column “Women can take action to prevent rapes” for publication? 2) What does the Star’s removal of the column say about its commitment to freedom of expression (including expression which many find highly offensive)? 3) Has he apologized to Herrick for subjecting her to the embarrassment of first publishing her column and then removing it?
I’m not hopeful of ever getting straight answers to these questions, but there’s no downside to asking. (For that matter, the same questions could be asked of Abouhalkah and Diuguid, if they attend these meetings.)
My son was in KC over the weekend. He brought with him three issues (from last week) of the Dallas Morning News. My goodness! Each newspaper had several (four to six) sections chock full of news, sports, features, opinions, columns, sections up to a dozen pages — meaty! Tons of local stuff. Even lots of ads. How puny the Kansas City Star for those days looked alongside the Morning News! And the DMN website, recently upgraded, always has lots of interesting things to read. Belo, the owners, keep the news coming.
Don’t know if Parrish thought going to Arizona would be even cushier than running the show in KC. But she has had to deal (in print and on television) with responding to the shit storm that ensued over her newspaper’s endorsement of Hilary Clinton. So, maybe things are not as easy in AZ.
I agree with the argument concerning the loss of institutional memory, although I think it applies to reporters much more than editorial writers.
The loss of institutional memory seems less important as papers reduce staff and both reporters and editorial writers are called upon to write about subjects outside their area of expertise.
Yael, for example, was very good when confined to matters regarding KCMO governance, but once he expanded to national politics, or Kansas state politics his commentary was no more informative than had they been written by any person with a smattering of interest in politics.
The simple reality of The Star’s editorial page is that it had become boring, and predictable with a complete absence of any real diversity of thought.
Undoubtedly, it had certainly become one dimensional, and, like you say, that’s not good.
Thanks, Jim.
I was listening on you-tube recently to a talk at Montgomery College, “Athenaeum Symposia-Leonard Pitts” in which Leonard deplored the way history is most often taught. He advised the students that if they were interested in a particular historical event, they should read of the newspaper accounts of the time. Writers of history have the luxury of being able to look back at a historical event, but that reporters writing at the actual time didn’t have the capability of looking at how the event or circumstance would play out in time. While I couldn’t agree more with Leonard, in the back of my mind, I’m wondering how long this will continue to be true. As print journalism shrinks more and more, fairly soon there won’t even be anything in print to microfilm.
Both my prof at grad school in social theory and my mentor were big on hermeneutics. For social theory we were not allowed to write about a theorist unless we could read them in their original language. Then you had to read newspapers of that period to learn how words were used during that period. The difference in meaning once you do that is often dramatic.
As for worrying about a historical record. The Internet lives forever. Archives get burned, or destroyed, but there are numerous copies of everything out there of anything ever published on the Internet accessible from anywhere on the globe with Internet access. That alone makes it more valuable.
Maybe the most interesting aspect of the “dispiriting decade” is how myopic and ego-centered newspaper people have viewed the disintegration of their autonomy, not realizing and reporting how this power shift has similarly devastated other American professions, especially teachers and doctors.
I wonder what it’s like trying to sell a set of encyclopedias?
But you have to be able to find it. I once was the custodian of the minutes of a statewide group. Part of the minutes were printed-out hard copies, part of them were on those little discs that neither I, nor any then current officer, could read on our computers.