(Cross posted from ShiftLock, my tech column in the Canadian Newspaper Association’s paper, The Publisher)
“Schmuck!”
The red-faced man was sitting high in his SUV, leaning out his window, pointing with one hand, and calling across to us. He was entering the parking lot, we were leaving it. A kind of backwards irony.
Can the print monster be beaten?
He works in pre-press, in imaging; we work on a team that’s rolling out a new, centralized content management system across the whole chain. We’re not too popular this day.
“You schmuck! They’re going to lay off 40 of us, plus another 100 in the newsroom – thanks a lot! Schmuck!” He was half joking, but there was an ugly edge to his voice, and no wonder.
The Toronto Star – the largest daily newspaper in Canada – had just announced that it was considering outsourcing all of it’s print production: copy editing, page building, image services, and pre-press (Printing had already been ‘in-sourced’ to a subsidiary.) The restructuring would trash one out of every three jobs in The Star newsroom.
The new CMS wasn’t the cause of this outsourcing, but it sure will make it easier. So we’re the schmucks. As we drove away, I thought about it.
A newsroom without copy editors? Without page builders?
At last!
I don’t mean to sound joyful at the carnage that’s coming. A decade ago, I was laid off myself in the first-ever round of layoffs at the Toronto Sun, on my birthday, no less; a brutal, life-altering event and one I would never wish on anyone.
But.
But — this has to happen.
Here’s the thing: it turns out you can axe fully one-third of the jobs in the newsroom, hand that work to centralized or even outside agencies, and it will have only minimal impact on your circulation and readership.
Think about that for a second: fully one-third of the newsroom pushed out the door – and life just goes on.
And if that can be done, it will be done – you’ll have no real choice. It’s a brutal, economic imperative.
CanWest and Quebecor have already demonstrated, you can produce large portions of your paper using stand-alone production centres – ones that cost a third or more less than in-house staff.
The truth is, the market now devalues a lot of the skills newspapers were happy to reward with nice fat middle-class lifestyles, or at least were happy to back when our franchises were protected by the multi-million dollar entry fees we call printing presses. Monopolies have a way of distorting things.
Copy editing, page layout and design, image processing, even photography and some forms of reporting -
these skills are either non-critical, or they can easily be replaced by some clever software, a decent spot of training, the judicious use of templates, and simply settling for less — or some combination of these.
That newspapers are embracing these solutions should not be surprising.
We live in an era, in an information-rich society, where news and information has become commoditized and it’s value is rapidly sinking towards zero. It’s increasingly hard to make people pay for their news.
Sadly, we also live in an era where the cost of advertising is also approach zero (because of an oversupply) — it’s hard to find people to pay for their advertising.
This isn’t about a recession; these changes are structural, not merely cyclical. And as such they demand rapid and decisive responses from owners and managers: we need to decide exactly what business we’re in – and it sure ain’t printing and shipping paper.
Seen in this light, the Star’s (still not finalized) move seems almost a belated recognition of the cold hard facts of our new economic model.
There is an economic imperative at play here – and while brutal, it’s cleansing and critical; it allow us to start over, to have a good hard look at what we’re doing.
For example, if you were going to build a newsroom from the ground up today, would you build one where 90% of your newsroom staff (to say nothing of your production team) were involved in something OTHER than the gathering and creation of local news?
Would you? Of course not.
But that lopsided ratio is evident at most daily newspapers in the country – a tiny handful of staff are directly involved in finding and creating local news each day, while the majority spend their days and nights re-packaging wire stories, sports stories that might as well be wire stories, and music, television and movie gossip.
Schmucks indeed.
Worth Reading
Clay Shirkey looks at what we’re asking reporters to work on these days
Jeff Jarvis states what may seem obvious from the outside: the future of journalism is entrepreneurial
Explode the Newsroom – it’s almost six years old now, but this post by Tim Porter still rings with wisdom: write fewer (better) stories; go weekly every day; structure by audience, not topic, and more.