If not for the lousy weather, Jennifer Stewart would have
been in a downtown courtroom this afternoon, covering the opening
arguments in a high-profile murder trial. But thanks to the slushy,
slippery conditions outside, the judge sent the jury home at noon. So
Stewart had returned to the Chronicle Herald newsroom to
write a nothing-much-happened update, as well as a second story. The
Nova Scotia Court of Appeal had released its decision in a case
involving whether a 48-year-old man—convicted of a string of violent
offences, most recently, a vicious assault on another inmate—should
be labelled a dangerous offender. The decision had actually come down
the week before but had languished in Stewart’s to-do pile until the
overworked Supreme Court reporter could find time for it.
Welcome to the New Herald Order. After the Daily News closed in February 2008, management had clamped a lid on staff
overtime. At the end of their shifts, dayside reporters sometimes had
to turn over cursory, in-progress notes to night reporters, who then
had to cobble together some sort of article out of the bits and pieces.
More than once, Stewart had spent a day listening to closing arguments
in a trial only to be forced to hand off her story to another reporter
“coming in cold” at the end of the day because the judge was announcing
the decision at 4:30 and the paper “didn’t want to pay me an hour’s
overtime.”
If the news wasn’t urgent—and with no daily newspaper competition,
how many stories really couldn’t wait?—Stewart might hang on to her
notes and write the story when she had time. Which was the case
today.
She was just beginning work on the story—“Alexander Dean McLean
has been declared a long-term offender and will be…”—when she
noticed Kristen Lipscombe, the paper’s education reporter, approaching
from the direction of the office of Dan Leger, the director of news
content. Lipscombe was in tears. Rick Conrad and Greg Guy, two of the
newsroom’s union reps, followed behind, ashen-faced.
It was February 3, 2009, shortly after 3:30pm. Less than an hour
earlier, Frank De Palma—“the assistant director of newsroom” in
clunky Herald management-speak—had summoned Conrad to a 3:15
meeting to discuss “a union matter.” Conrad assumed it was to meet with
the paper’s new special projects editor, Andrew Waugh, whose
appointment had been announced earlier that day. The union had argued
the position was unnecessary in difficult financial times, and Conrad
thought the meeting might be designed to smooth the waters.
But as he and Guy approached the meeting room near Leger’s office,
Conrad noticed Theresa Williams, the Herald‘s director of human
resources, waiting with De Palma. She carried a box filled with
envelopes.
Oh shit, he thought, this is it! The layoffs…
When Stewart saw Kristen Lipscombe returning to the newsroom a few
minutes later, she knew what it meant too.
And, worse, what it would mean for her personally.
Three weeks earlier, on January 14, 2009, Herald management had summoned the newsroom’s full union executive to another
meeting to formally lay out what everyone knew. The newspaper business
was in free-fall, and the Herald‘s fortunes were plunging.
There were so many problems it was hard to know where to begin.
Over the course of the past 15 years—while the internet was
changing everything about everything—the newspaper industry had
failed to figure out a financially sustainable digital-age business
model. Many, including the Herald, had flirted with charging for
their web content but quickly gave up, and began giving away for free
online what other readers paid to read on paper. The result: More and
more paying readers were cancelling subscriptions, preferring to get
their news faster and for “free” online.
Meanwhile, the industry’s traditional cash cow—classified
advertising for everything from jobs to jewellery—migrated to the
more user-friendly online world, where the ads were not only searchable
but also free.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, last year’s global economic meltdown
melted down the newspaper industry’s most important revenue foundation:
display advertising. Advertising traditionally generates 80 percent of
a newspaper’s revenues.
Analysts began to question whether the newspaper—as a
species—could survive. In the United States, big city dailies,
including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and
even the iconic New York Times, began to seem like so many
past-their-prime dinosaurs. In Canada, CanWest, the country’s largest
daily newspaper publisher, is now so deep in its own debt the future of
the daily newspapers it owns in many major cities is in doubt. There
have already been layoffs at Canada’s biggest dailies.
How could the Herald, one of the few remaining independent,
family-owned newspapers, be immune to the forces ravaging an entire
industry?
That was the message Sarah Dennis, the paper’s vice president and
daughter of owner-publisher Graham Dennis, delivered to the union
executive January 14.
In December alone, management claimed, the company had brought in
$700,000 less in revenues than projected. And it had lost real money in
2007 and 2008. The paper had no choice but to shed $1.5 million in
newsroom costs. Immediately. One option was to eliminate 25
positions—or about one quarter of the current newsroom staff. Dennis
insisted “layoffs are the last thing we want,” which was why she had
wanted to “consult” with the union about how to achieve the necessary
savings with the least possible pain. The union had a week to come up
with suggestions.
The union’s executive had a few immediate ideas, including: Don’t
fill Jim Meek’s special projects editor job. Meek, a veteran
journalist, recently quit to join Bristol Communications. Given earlier
belt-tightening, the paper wasn’t doing many special projects, so not
filling his position might save a couple of junior reporter jobs.
Management rejected that recommendation outright. Just as it
“pooh-poohed” the idea of reducing the freelance budget to retain more
full-time staff.
The union also had a request of its own. Before suggesting ways to
cut $1.5 million from the newsroom budget, it wanted to see the
company’s books in order to satisfy itself the financial situation was
really as grim as management claimed.
The Herald‘s owners had certainly sent mixed signals about
their financial health. During the past year—while restricting reporters’ travel and overtime, offering early retirement packages to
senior staff, shutting down the Mayflower TV guide, reducing the
physical size of the paper and increasing its subscription
price—management also spent what the union suggested was $7 million
moving from a downtown office building it had owned until 2002 and occupied for
more than 90 years into new and lavish leased digs overlooking the
Northwest Arm.
The company refuses to say how much the move cost. And it wasted no
time rejecting the union’s request to see audited financial statements.
“This is a privately held company,” Leger told allnovascotia.com. “We’re not going to
broadcast our financials to allnovascotia, or CTV or Frank.”
Already sour relations between the managers and the managed curdled
in the aftermath of the January 14 meeting. Somehow, word of the
union-management session leaked to other media. Leger—a former
executive producer of CBC TV’s local supper hour news show—openly
accused business reporter Judy Myrden, whose husband, Paul Withers, is
a prominent CBC news reporter, of being the source.1 After the leak and
the union’s request the company open its books, Sarah Dennis stopped
even meeting with union leaders.
And then things got ugly.
Dan Leger isn’t keen.
“Can’t we do this by phone?” he asks, then answers his own question.
He acknowledges it’s a “magazine thing—staring down the crusty editor
and all,” but adds: “the thing is, I’ve done six or seven of these
[interviews] now and I’ve gotten burned on almost everyone of
them.”
He’s too busy to meet me today. Or tomorrow. This week, in fact, is
“crazy.”
We agree I’ll call back next week.
To understand why many Herald journalists are
skeptical about the financial health of their employer, you have to
understand the often fractious history of relations between management
and its newsroom.
For much of the Herald‘s 134 years, the Dennis family—which
has owned the paper in all its various incarnations from the Halifax
Morning Herald‘s January 14, 1875 first edition—has had a
reputation as a benevolent, if paternalistic, employer.
As recently as 2006, the Financial Post numbered the
Herald among Canada’s 100 best companies to work for. The
paper’s owners, the Post noted, had even “recently provided a
cash subsidy—$200 for every employee—to offset high home heating
and gasoline prices.”
But the flip side of that benevolence has always been a
father-knows-best paternalism, coupled with a sense among many
reporters and editors that the owners play favourites, protecting
middle-management featherbedders while journalists do the heavy
lifting.
In 1977, that discontent led to the first attempt to unionize the
newsroom. The company fired 10 reporters and editors because of what it
initially described as “financial difficulties.” Nine of the 10 had
signed union cards. After the union retaliated with unfair labour
practices charges, the Herald unilaterally reinstated them all
just days before the scheduled hearing, but then assigned them all
menial duties. Most quit. The Herald‘s remaining—and very
rattled—newsroom employees decisively rejected joining the union a
few months later.
It wasn’t until 1999 that The Newspaper Guild finally succeeded in
unionizing the newsroom. It then took months of legal wrangling over
who should be included—and excluded—from union membership and
another six months of exhausting, difficult negotiations to finally
conclude a first contract. In 2004, it took strike threats and the help
of a federal mediator to nail down the terms of a second four-year
contract. The key issue then was the company’s pension plan, which the
union claimed was “so horrible that a 47-year employee retired a few
years ago with a $13,000-a-year pension.” The company did propose
sweeteners to the plan, but the union argued they would primarily
benefit managers while leaving union members “out in the cold.” The
union eventually won.
Last year, after the paper and its newsroom union reasonably and
amicably concluded another four-year contract, which included further
improvements to the pension plan, union negotiators began to hope
management had finally accepted their existence.
But then, days after the two sides signed the new contract,
Transcontinental shut down the Daily News, effectively ending a
20-year competition for local readers and advertisers.
That dramatically changed the newsroom dynamics.
Within days, management sent out a memo, outlining draconian
newsroom travel and overtime restrictions as part of “widespread,
ongoing efforts to find ways to trim costs.”
And now this.
If the paper was really in such trouble, the journalists wondered,
why was there no talk of management layoffs? There were 16 non-union
newsroom “managers,” none of them in the cost-saving crosshairs. In
fact, the paper still planned to replace Meek. Why hire even more
managers if they’re going to have 25 percent fewer employees to
manage?
On January 23, just over a week after the initial meeting with
Dennis, Terry O’Neil, director of news administration, emailed the
union executive to break off discussions. “It is unfortunate that the
union did not have any recommendations to put forward,” he wrote. “We
will be in touch in the near future regarding next steps.”
The union executive quickly replied management must have
misunderstood. Even though the company hadn’t opened its books, the
union was prepared to sit down at any time to discuss how to deal with
the situation.
Ominously, management didn’t respond. That is, until Frank De Palma
informed Rick Conrad he wanted to meet to discuss a “union matter.”
“In a decision released last month, the Appeal Court…”
Stewart stared, uncomprehending, at the words she’d just written.
No one from management had even come into the newsroom to explain
what was happening. It had been left to the union reps to break the bad
news to their fellow journalists.
“Um, could everyone gather round?” Conrad spoke into a suddenly
silent newsroom as everyone watched Lipscombe make her way back to her
desk. “The company today…”
Conrad was too upset to continue. Greg Guy took over. He told the
reporters and editors what De Palma had told him: Today, the
Herald was giving redundancy notices to 24 newsroom employees,
the first step in a 45-day process of eliminating their
positions—and, most likely, them.
Twenty four! Stewart knew she had been the tenth last person hired
in the newsroom, which meant…2 She tried to force herself to write
her story, but she couldn’t help but be distracted as friends and
colleagues made their “perp” walks with De Palma. Daniel
Bonner!…Bonner had started the same day Stewart had. Kristen
Lipscombe the year after…
Stewart knew it was only a matter of time before De Palma came for
her.
Ironically, De Palma had hired her six years before.
Stewart, a Dartmouth girl who always knew she wanted to write but
was unsure whether to become an English teacher or a journalist, had
opted to take the four-year journalism program at King’s College partly
because it meant she could stay at home. She is, she jokes, “a hometown
girl.”
The Herald was her dream job. On her first day at the paper,
she recalls, newsroom veteran Joel Jacobson offered her his usual
newbie’s greeting. “He comes up to you and takes your hand in his, then
kisses his own…” She smiles. “I was made to feel very welcome in the
newsroom.”
Stewart became full-time in 2004, in part because management forgot
to let her go when her initial one-year contract expired, so the union
invoked a clause in the contract requiring anyone employed continuously
for more than a year be considered permanent. But that was only part of
the reason. Stewart was a damn fine young reporter, and everyone knew
it.
In November 2006 when the courts beat opened up, she jumped at the
promotion. “I really like covering courts,” she says now. “The courts
are the last stop at the end of the road for many people, and I wanted
to be there to tell the end of the story.”
“Jennifer?” It was De Palma. “I know this stinks,” he said
quietly as they walked together to the meeting room.
Inside, Stewart half-listened to the spiel—“above and beyond,”
“great work,” “wish it could be different,” “financial
situation…”—and wondered if this was what they said to everyone.
She looked at De Palma. He was staring at his feet. Teresa Williams,
the human resources manager who’d once told Stewart she pictured her as
a lifelong employee at the Herald, handed her the letter. There
were tears in her eyes.
And then it was over.
For once grateful for the Herald‘s restrictions on overtime,
Stewart handed off her unfinished dangerous-offender story to a night
reporter and left.
“The atmosphere,” Leger tells me on the phone, “has become
such that it would be just adding fuel to the fire to talk publicly.”
It’s been a week since I first called for an interview, and he’s no
more keen today. “I’ve been asked—and I agree—to put the kibosh on
any further public statements until there is a clearer picture about
the state of the paper going forward,” he explained.
What about after the buyouts and bumping finish?
Sure, he says without much enthusiasm. Call me then.
This is more than just a story about a talented young
reporter losing a job she loves. Or even about her colleagues who are
being bought out, squeezed out, retired out or bumped out.3
This is also a story about what could be the beginning of the end of
daily newspaper journalism in Halifax.
While the union is probably right, Management is unfairly—and
unwisely—targeting its members, that doesn’t change the larger
reality. The Halifax Herald, like all daily newspapers, is in
serious, life-threatening trouble.
Leger is wrong. The day the layoffs were announced he claimed in an
interview with CBC TV’s Elizabeth Chiu4 that readers wouldn’t notice
any difference in the newspaper, declaring the lost reporters mere
“bells and whistles.”5 Staff retaliated a few days later by bringing
bells and whistles to the newsroom and making noises with them whenever
Leger or another newsroom manager was within earshot. The reality is
that those reporters and editors are not bells and whistles;
eviscerating one quarter of your frontline staff will inevitably affect
how much—and how well—you report the news. At a certain point, you
can only do less with less. Ironically, cutting the news makes the
paper less relevant—and less likely to attract the readers it needs
to survive.
But Leger is right about something else. “When the news is free,” he
wrote in a column five days after the first union-management meeting,
“there will be no news. Reporters aren’t volunteers. Someone has to pay
them or they can’t carry on.”
If nothing changes, it is conceivable the Herald—at least
as a print-on-paper newspaper, and possibly altogether—could
disappear.
Don’t believe me? Last month, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News,
which began publication 16 years before the Herald’s first edition,
became extinct.
Why not the Herald? And why does the Herald‘s survival
even matter if—as many blog posters were quick to note—people can
now choose to get their news free online instead.
“Paying for a newspaper in 2009 is like being served leftovers in a
restaurant,” someone who called himself jamesgreene wrote dismissively
on the CBC’s website. “Everything you want to read, watch, or listen to
is just a click away…traditional media,” he declared with
ill-concealed glee, “you aren’t extinct yet, but if you look up in the
sky, that bright object is www.asteroid.com and it’s headed for
you.”
The problem is that that asteroid could easily take out the “news”
along with the newspaper. And while it might take readers a while to
notice its global absence—if the New York Times disappears,
you can still find international news on the website of the Washington
Post, or the Guardian, or Haaretz, or Al
Jazeera (at least until they too go the way of the
Times)—the consequences locally would be immediate and
disastrous.
Consider March 10, 2009, a not untypical day. That morning’s Halifax
Herald contained 28 locally-generated news stories, along with
17 more local items from business, sports and entertainment
sections—and that’s not counting editorials, columns, obituaries and
the rest.6 By comparison, CBC Radio’s prime-time newscast at 7:30 that
morning contained just seven local news items. CBC-TV’s supper-hour
news—which covers the same provincial turf as the
Herald—included 10 local stories in its 60-minute package.
There isn’t a news organization in Halifax—including The
Coast—that doesn’t depend to some degree on the Herald‘s
superior news-gathering resources—for news, story ideas, background,
occasionally for outright scalping.
No other news organization staffs the courts full-time or attends
school board meetings regularly. The other media—and those of us who
consume it—depend on the Herald to cover routine news so we’ll
know when something out of the routine happens.
Bloggers are no substitute for trained, paid journalists. Most don’t
report; they comment on what they read elsewhere—and their work is
rarely edited or vetted before publication. Bloggers also don’t have
the wherewithal to fight the broader battles over issues like access to
information: It was the Herald that took the provincial Workers
Compensation Board to court to force it to reveal the names of
companies with poor safety records, and the Herald that lifted
the lid on restaurant health inspection reports.
One of the problems in coming to terms with what the latest cuts at
the Herald really mean, however, is that we may not immediately
notice what’s being lost. The irony is we won’t know what we don’t know
because no one will be covering it.
That makes it easier, of course, for politicians and bureaucrats who
prefer to operate without anyone looking over their shoulders. Consider
that it was reporters at the Daily News—defunct—that broke
and pursued the provincial immigration scam scandal, and the
Herald—reporting ranks routed—that told us about the
Atlantic Lottery Corporation’s lavish executive expenses.
There is a reasonable Darwinian counter-argument that states
print-on-paper newspapers are long past their best-before date, that
there is no longer any logical rationale for continuing to gum up the
environment with dead trees, ink, waste paper and delivery exhaust to
deliver day-old news and information when computers can do it more
effectively and at far less cost.
The problem is no one has yet figured out how to make online
journalism pay—or at least not cost.
With the old media hurtling toward self-destruction, there are
plenty of—increasingly desperate—suggestions of new economic
models. Creating an iTunes-style micro-payments system for news
content, for example, inventing a variation of Amazon’s Kindle book
reader to take news sites out of the free-for-all web world,
transforming the traditional, mass-market-something-for-everyone
printed newspaper into a tightly focused print daily aimed at an elite
audience that can—and will—pay for it. Some even argue the smartest
thing is to let the old media—and their corporate owners—collapse
of their own ineptitude, hoping something new and better will emerge
from the ashes.
Last month, in fact, The Dominion, a left-wing national media
network that publishes in print and online (dominionpaper.ca) and “seeks to provide
a counterpoint to the corporate media,” staged a series of meetings
around Halifax to drum up support for its plan to “build a working
[local] alternative to mainstream media that’s reader funded and member
controlled.”
Even if it succeeds, however, it is likely to be more an alternative
than a prime source of news and information. Which brings us back to
the questions. Why? What if?
Dan Leger still can’t talk to me. It’s now a week before the
layoffs. “Sorry I can’t be of more help,” he emails, “but going on the
record now would probably just complicate life.”
Life for others is complicated, too. Including close to two
dozen Herald journalists, most of whom have spent their entire
careers at the paper and no longer have jobs.
Some—like entertainment editor Greg Guy and veteran columnists
Peter Duffy and Joel Jacobson—reluctantly accepted buyouts rather
than see younger colleagues lose jobs. But they take decades of vital
community history out the door with them.
Others, equally reluctantly, remain, bumping juniors because they
have to pay for mortgages or kids in college, or just because they
can’t conceive of a life beyond the Herald. But most no longer
feel the loyalty they once did to the place that pays their salary.
Some of the paper’s brightest younger journalists—including health
reporter John Gillis and city hall reporter Amy Pugsley Fraser—opted
for buyouts rather than wait to be pushed out the door. It felt like “a
weight lifted,” Gillis explained in a Facebook posting, “but I’m still
gutted to see my colleagues treated the way they are.”
Colleagues like Chris Lambie, who won a National Newspaper Award for
the Daily News in 2002 and was a finalist for the Herald in 2008, and Kristen Lipscombe, a finalist for the Atlantic New
Journalist Award in 2005, and, of course, Jennifer Stewart.
When word leaked that Stewart was among those to be cut, several
crown attorneys signed an open letter, describing Stewart as someone
who is “highly admired by all lawyers in the Halifax region for the
accuracy of her reporting, her diligence and her balanced reporting,”
adding there is something “fundamentally wrong with aborting the
careers of the dedicated young stars in the newsroom. They are the
future of the Herald…”
If, that is, the Herald has a future.
Related Stories
Peter Duffy to do something or another for Peter Kelly
PR ranks swell as journalism suffers
Letters from the Herald‘s editor
Chaos at the Chronicle Herald
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2009.
Tough luck folks. Come join the rest of us at the EI office. 🙁
Thank you Stephen and the Coast for a thoughtful and moving story on a complicated and emotional issue.
This is a great story. It’s so unfortunate that the paper has had to let employees go. Truthfully, I think I would pay for an online subscription if I didn’t already get the paper at work. It affects a lot more than just the journalists who were let go too – what about new kids coming out of school with aspirations of writing for the Herald? Will the journalism program survive? Obviously everyone involved is sorry to see the direction that newspapers are forced to head in.
Stephen, the younger generation haven’t bought a paper for decades.
The giveaways, and other media seems to satisfy them. I admit to reading a lot of papers online and when some of them wanted to charge for reading them I went away until they were free.I bought the National Post when it started and the columnists were all over the spectrum. In spite of that people such as you couldn’t resist criticising Conrad Black and there are many people out there salivating at the prospect of the Post folding. I buy one paper on a Saturday, Globe and Mail.
I have no idea how newspapers can survive in small markets. I see Nancy Pelosi is trying to get government stimulus money to keep the San Francisco Chronicle alive and continue endorsing her.
It looks quite bleak and no easy answers.
The Herald might be able to generate more public interest and more advertising dollars if it employed and dealt with more local people, events and issues. A large amount of their content comes from syndicates from the United States. I used to work for the Herald and the Canadian sydicate that I am part of was partially replaced by cheaper, or even free content from the U.S. I still live in Nova Scotia and have little desire to leave this beautiful province, though I only work for one paper here, now. Like most people from the Atlantic Provinces, all of my work is outwest, where they seem to value Canadian content a lot more. Even the Coast buys columns from the States.
I’ve heard through the grapevine that management has sent a memo to employees asking them to help cut costs, such as, drawing the blinds on hot days so the AC will run less frequently. Seriously!
If Herald VP’s, took a slight pay cut, agreed to decline any bonus payment, agree to a wage freeze, give up 1 week paid vacation or any combination of the above it would go a long way to getting the line level employees on board.
Cost cutting starts at the top and if the powers that be aren’t willing to do it then why should the staff?
The final bit about the crown attorneys sending a letter supporting Jennifer Stewart nearly took me out—what a classy, heartbreaking move.
I’m sorry for everyone involved that this story had to be done in the first place.
International news et all is the specialty now of 24-hour news channels. For local media to survive, it has to be local, both in staff and content. Otherwise, the public has no reason to pick the Herald over anything else as it has nothing that noone else has.
One of the commenters is mistaken. The “younger generation” does buy the paper. While that person is only buying the Globe on Saturdays and looking for free content online, I’m paying to have the Herald delivered seven days a week. But I think that will end this week. Without the “bells and whistles” that the talented journalists provided, I don’t think I care to support the Herald any longer.
Thank you for this excellent article. It’s a shame what the Herald has done to the newsroom staff and I’m glad to see the Coast is letting everyone know just how bad it has been for the reporters.
Many people work overtime and don’t get paid. If you consider yourself a professional, which as I recall is what journalist are trying to do, then an innate characteristic of your career is working overtime for free. What’s the deal with handing your story over to someone cold? Maybe put in a few extra hours??
Very glad to see the Coast covering this story — another paper might not be so diligent in covering the degeneration of a ‘rival’. And glad to see comment about how interesting it was that no managers were on the chopping block – ain’t that convenient.
I’d like to say though that while I think the Herald was an important institution, I think sometimes old institutions need to fall – or in this case, change – to make way for something new. I don’t know how the new Halifax Media Coop (new local offshoot of the Dominion) will fare in the long run, but I think it’s a very interesting new hybrid that deserves watching.
One – as far as I know – it does not rely on advertising revenues, but rather on reader subscriptions. Two readers are invited to have some say in what kind of stories are published. Three while professional journalists are generally used, readers can also – with some training – publish stories as well. Another interesting thing about the coop is it states its code of ethics up front – inviting anyone to hold it to it.
Is it a good thing to only be exposed to stories one is most interested in – maybe not. It is good to have variety in media – so one can choose what kind of information one wants. But also hopefully, occasionally be surprised by something one wasn’t expecting.
We may be in the midst of a revolution – it is unfortunate that so many reporters at the Herald lost jobs, but I hope they will move on quickly to find new ways to apply their skills – may be in more effective ways.
It’s coming to an end folks: the paper as we know it is dying. Online content, Globalization and 24 hour news channels did it. It’s not less readership amongst younger people, it’s down for young and old. I agree with lilac to a point; if there was more local content I feel that it could see better readership, but given the fact that globalization is so strong at the moment and access to information is so immediate, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Thank you Stephen for bringing light on this issue.
This is probably a naive comment, but if so many newspapers are feeling the crunch, and if free online news seems to be the problem, why don’t they band together and all agree to charge a fee for online news stories, or an online news subscription? Clearly, everyone is in trouble (even the New York Times for crying out loud!), so why not take control of the medium responsible for everyone’s woes, i.e. the Internet? I suppose independent or free news sources would still spring up in competition with the bigger papers, but if readers were forced to pay for local or even national news across the board, then maybe we could go back to the old system (if, indeed, that’s what we want). Or maybe newspapers could agree to only offer online content to print subscribers, and everyone else would have to pay $.50 for an article. Perhaps by making online news more exclusive, they could encourage readers to subscribe, and thus increase ad revenue. Realistically, I doubt any newspapers would be willing to make such deals with their competitors, but sometimes a little ceasefire is needed to restore the ranks. Otherwise, both sides stand to lose, as do the readers.
Raoul Duke, I’m an employee of the Herald and this is the copy of the email we all received on March 12th.
“To All Staff:
To help conserve energy, by reducing solar gain, staff members are asked to keep their window blinds halfway closed on a regular basis and fully closed on sunny days.
Thanking you in advance for your co-operation.”
——
Aside from that, I’m very glad to see an article like this in The Coast. Stephen, you did a great job.
Very sad to read this article.
This has been coming down since the Daily News expired last year. Unfortunately, the paper is cutting the meat, not the fat. There are deadwood editors there who don’t even reply to emails from writers, preferring to get their ‘stories’ from the wire service rather than from their own journalists or local freelancers. And management is only further eviscerating what was once an excellent paper. I’ve subscribed for nearly 20 years, but am about to let it go.
Young people also read the papers for free in coffee shops and restaurants. The news may be free for now but what will we do when it’s not there.
And shame on the Coast for running big ads for smokes while constantly preaching to us to put our principles first.
This was an interesting article and generated interesting comments. I find these points particularly noteworthy:
Clearly, most if us get it — the newspaper business has undergone a fundamental change and existing sources of revenue such as classified ads and subscriptions are no longer enough to sustain a full local news-gathering operation.
What a lot of people, including Mr. Kimber, seem not to get, is any concept at all of what model ought to replace it. The article takes Herald management to task for doing what they did. They are doing what they think they need to do to survive, rightly or wrongly. I suggest that Mr. Kimber would have an equally hard time holding on to his shirt if he had the responsibility to run an operation like the Herald. There are no easy answers here.
I also find it interesting that Mr. Kimber takes the angle he did on this story given his role as the head of the journalism school at kings. He is in a job where he is training people to go out into a world where there may be damn few jobs. It would have been good for him to mention that particular axe that he has to grind.
Downsizing an organization is never easy. What the Herald staff went through is no different, and in many ways was done a lot more sensitively, than what is done in countless other organizations. The only difference is that journalists tend to write about their own and wring every ounce of emotion out of it.
As for the comments:
joeblow: there is a lot of content (both ads and editorial) in The Coast that is a lot worse than an ad for a pack of cigs.
ariadne: that “deadwood” you mention are most likely the people who management of the Herald would have liked to cut loose, but who are protected by the union. Remember, a union’s first rule is that it doesn’t matter how good you are at your job, only how long you have been doing it.
heraldemployee: are you saying that management is incapable of offering any direction to save money? The memo you quote, while offering only trivial savings, is no different from countless others I have seen in places I have worked asking employees to use fewer paper clips or to drink less coffee. While I too may think Dan Leger is an arrogant dork, that doesn’t mean none of their initiatives have any merit.
Raoul Duke: you have no idea whether any of those ideas you offer would make a hill of beans worth of difference. I suspect the management cuts will come sooner rather than later — but you have to deal with the union cuts first, and to do that management needs all its resources available. Now that the dust from that has settled, wait for the other show to drop.
Sorry, but any reporter who lets a major story like a dangerous offender decision “languish in a to-do pile” for a week because she might have to work an hour of unpaid overtime isn’t worth her salt and deserves to be let go. Competition or not, that is just lazy. Is a court reporter in Halifax really that “overworked”? I strongly doubt it. Reporters and clock-punchers don’t mix. Sounds like the Herald newsroom had become bloated with reporters who apparently keep bankers’ hours and it was time to thin the herd. Journalists in other parts of the country find it hard to believe that 24 people was only a quarter of the staff. Welcome to reality, Herald staffers.
wonder if pressgirl is sara dennis in diskize. seems to have same opiniun about reporters
and keith. guess what. boston globe cut 42 managers before it touched reporters. g&m cut managers along with reporters. aliant cut 500!!! managers. herald cuts none. wheres the sensitivity in dat my friend
I would like the opportunity to see Keith doing the walk of shame out the door in front of all his colleagues. A file box of desk belongings in one hand, pink slip in the other, your union boss on one side and an HR representative escorting you to the front door.
A discussion of “sensitivity” is moot when you’re losing your job.
Of course there is no proof any of my suggestions would work. That being said it is obvious morale is at an all time low. Work colleagues are losing their job and MGT is sending a memo asking employees to draw their blinds on sunny days. Leadership starts at the top and asking a leader to give up a small percentage of their 6 figure salary or 1 week of their 5 week vacation sends a message to everyone that MGT is trying to help.
Keith, the “do as I say not as I do” approach only works in prison …. and that’s exactly what the Herald newsroom must feel like right now.
Raoul, that same scenario happens most everywhere these days. Nothing unique about the Herald. Except that those affected have a lot of friends who have the ability to write stories about it and get them published.
I love reading the newspaper and dread the day they no longer exist. Reading on line is not the same and not, in my opinion, better. Local reporting is so important. It’s the younger people who need to be convinced since not may of them seem to buy newspapers. I only hope the pendulum swings & people want to hold the paper in their hands while they read. Great article. Thanks.
I think that the Herald should have laid off managers before laying off reporters. Reporters contribute to the “Herald” more than all those managers. I have cancelled my subscription to the “Herald” because they have cut many journalists who have written many excellent articles in the past. Herald managers and the Dennis family should be extremely ashamed of their stupidity, inflexibility and GREED.
hfxposter, If Miss. Lipscombe is so “incompetent” as you put it, why was she nominated twice for Atlantic Journalism Awards? You obviously have no appreciation for the fact that journalists are under pressure daily to write two or three stories and that there isn’t always time to scrutinize every person and detail involved. Unfortunately, this will be an increasing trend now that newsroom staff has been drastically reduced.
Ah, the anonymity of the Internet. It far too often allows people to spew out of ill-informed opinions and hurl insults at others while hiding behind their computer screens. Reporters perform an important public service and aren’t afraid to put their names on their work. However, they’re also human and will inevitably make mistakes, no matter how hard they work. How would you feel if every little error you made was dissected daily by people who don’t necessarily understand your line of work? There are corrections in newspapers every day because most editors and reporters care deeply for what they do, take great pride in their work and take responsibility for their mistakes. Please, have some compassion for these dedicated journalists who have lost their jobs due to reasons that are out of their control.
Dang, I read the title and thought FINALLY we are talking about the Herald and the soddy and dodgy way they report the stories or the truth…I have had 2 stories shock me when I read them, they were so far removed from the truth and testimony…..the paper should be for educating the masses not something I can lay in my litter box…….. the true victims of the Herald are those who accept that banal and are incapable of critical analysis. The Herald has protected one corrupt public servant after another with its politricks and prejudice.
The Herald
It is sad to see so many people laid off from local paper; I noticed a few weeks ago the paper was going under renovations with the announcement section on line; I wonder who was in charge of that mess? It took weeks before up-to-date obits. were in place and as for milestones, well go figure, cannot find, why fix something that wasn’t broken. Unfortunatley in this era papers can be read on line and reflects on
sales of hard copies, but the way they are treating their readers (& staff) is ridiculous. Shame on the paper and surely they can come up with better solutions for this costly piece of fluff.