BH media layoffs

Oh, the Gannett papers around us have been doing it for a good six months now. A lot of USA Today material, and then send a reporter out once or twice a week to a sporting event to make it look like they still give a rat's ass.

 

In about 12 years, Danville went from a proud section producing some pretty damn great talent to nothing. It's depressing.

Buffett won't put money into losing propositions. He invested money in newspapers years ago when MG sold and he hasn't gotten a ROI. He's not a white knight who is going to prop up a newspaper group that's bleeding money. And it is.

 

Danville has alumni right now covering D-I and pro beats at metros all over the country, plus an editor in OKC. It's sad.

 

I haven't seen this anywhere, but about two weeks ago, The Oregonian laid off 11 from its newsroom, including four from sports.

 

I drove through Lynchburg and Danville the Monday before Memorial Day last year and bought both papers. I counted a total of five by lined stories from the local staff. Now Danville does not even have a sports staff.

At what point does it male sense for a publisher to just merge these papers. Given the paucity of local material these paper have there would be no need to expand page count. I would think it would be cheaper to produce.

 

First off, "page pussycat" may be the greatest typo I've ever seen on this site. Damn near spit my coffee out.

There's actually a ton of local material in Lynchburg, between Liberty and its move to FBS as an independent, 20-plus high schools, minor-league baseball and three Division III schools. They used to staff both Virginia and Virginia Tech with beat writers but scaled back once BH came into play and they realized they could do more by getting that material from sister papers. I actually agreed with that move, even though I was the one taken off the Tech beat. Three or four 180-mile round trips weekly between Lynchburg and Blacksburg to cover the same stuff three other papers were covering made little sense.

The lack of bylines might have had to do with the day of the week ... Mondays and Tuesdays were sparse just because staff needed time off on Sunday/Monday.

Danville used to cover Tech and UVa, plus Martinsville and SoBo Speedway, along with a handful of high schools and Averett and the rookie D-Braves. But that section slowly dwindled to the point where they couldn't even do that effectively. That truly was a shame. You talk about combining them into one section, but that essentially had already happened. The page designer in Lynchburg often did both sections, just swapping out a story here or there and adding local agate. Danville's an hour drive from Lynchburg and would be tough to staff on a regular basis with Lynchburg based reporters.

 

SJ Instant Classic!

 

Between writeups like that and newspapers all over the place practically begging for people to sign up for online subscriptions with the support journalism taglines it's a bleak, bleak time for newspapers. That's been obvious for a long time, really, but now the powers that be are putting it right out there in front of everyone and not even hiding it. The end passed a long time ago.

I hate seeing people lose their jobs, and man, it just adds insult to injury all around to see how it's being handled.

Somehow justifying things with huge price increases for way less content and quality is crazy. Then more or less blaming Amazon and the like? Having reporters go on Twitter and beg people to get online subscriptions so local journalism doesn't go way -- because, yeah, that's the job they signed up for -- like it's the public's fault. When actually it's been a terrible business model and ignoring the internet for how long and not adjusting and the suits turning a blind eye and cutting and looking for profits and whatever else and not actually caring for local media or their own product?

It all just drives me batty.

 

BH also bought Martinsville a while back, right?

 

BH pretty much owns everything in Virginia, save for the Pilot, Daily News Record, and Daily Press.

 

The public isn't without blame. So many people think access to news should be free or dirt cheap because that's the model we gave them. Heck, subscription prices barely covered delivery in the past, and at times they didn't even cover that because ads did. And when advertising was the driving force for revenue, that worked. But now it simply doesn't, and people don't want to pay. It would be like someone going into a Starbucks and demanding caramel macchiato for free and then when they had to pay for it scoffing because they can get coffee free at work. Sure, you can, but it's probably crappy coffee. News is one of the only commodities I can think of where people don't place a value on it. There's always the "we can get it from TV or free" mentality, but there is so much that TV depends on news for that people don't realize.

And we can blame the industry for not reacting and all that like we have for the last decade plus, but that doesn't do anything to save it. Moving to a subscription-based model might. Yes, we need to provide content to make people want to subscribe, but with the right staff, I think that can still be done. A lot of it will be digital subscriptions, but that has to be part of it.

I work for BH and they closed one of the papers in the town I live in, and after it closed, I heard so many people complain about not having a local paper anymore. But when I asked them when the last time they picked up a copy was, barely any of them had picked it up in the previous month. And it was a good paper with good content. They just consumed it online for free. And they didn't care about it until it was gone. Just seems like that's going to be the case for a lot of local news outlets -- people won't realize how much they depend on them until they don't have them.