Mary Ethridge grew up with Knight Ridder, and with the Akron Beacon Journal, where her father was editor. Her brother was managing editor of Knight Ridder’s Charlotte Observer for much of the 1980s. And so when she landed a reporting job at the Beacon in 1988, Ethridge says, “I was thrilled.”
But the deep cuts in the Beacon Journal‘s newsroom announced last week — one-fourth will be laid off between now and October — have hit Ethridge hard.
“If you cut a quarter of the newsgathering staff and tell the others that remain that you may cut again, how can you possibly motivate people to do their jobs to the best of their abilities?” she asks. “We were already to my mind short-staffed to begin with, and now it’s going to be even tougher.”
“You feel it already — you feel the complete vibe changing in the newsroom,” says Ethridge, a business columnist. “It’s a very surreal atmosphere, ’cause everything’s in flux and everybody’s upset. It’s really devastating.”
And so Ethridge is taking a voluntary layoff (thus saving someone else’s job) and will move on, “telling people what they need to know” through freelance work, perhaps, at magazines or other newspapers.
“Part of me wanted to stay and fight the good fight,” she says, but “another part of me just said, ‘You know what, maybe it’s just time to move on.'”
“She’s very, very talented. Smart. Great writer,” veteran columnist Bob Dyer says of Ethridge. “Hard-charging reporter, and she’s just had it. She’s gonna hang it up. Very discouraging.”
Ethridge will be one of 39 newsroom employees to lose their jobs. Newly installed Publisher Edward R. Moss told the staff the news last Tuesday, saying that costs needed to be aligned with revenue and that advertisers have “cut back significantly and impacted our financial health.” According to Moss, the newspaper’s profits have fallen some 50 percent over the past four years. A company spokeswoman put the paper’s profit margins “in the low double digits.” That would mean that the Beacon’s margins were better than 20 percent four years ago.
The newsroom layoffs — including eleven reporters, eight copy editors, three management-level editors, and four photographers — were part of a company-wide restructuring, Moss said, adding that “‘There could be the need for further reductions’ in the newsroom if revenue does not improve,” as the Beacon Journal reported the next day. The story was published on the front of the business section. Its subhed, like something out of a journalism horror movie, said it all: “Dropping profits spur new owner to lay off quarter of newsroom.”
The paper is hardly the only one shedding staff in the waning days of the summer. The Dallas Morning News and Cleveland Plain Dealer both announced buyout programs in August, while the Springfield (Mass.) Republican said this week that it would lay off 44 part-time employees.
Once widely regarded as Ohio’s best newspaper, the Beacon Journal has a storied history. It was where the fabled Knight Newspapers chain began, and it has won four Pulitzer Prizes. But this year the paper was sold by Knight Ridder to McClatchy, then sold again to Sound Publishing Holdings Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of the Canadian publishing company Black Press Ltd., for $165 million — a deal which included the Beacon‘s Web site, Ohio.com.
Based in British Columbia, Black Press owns over 100 community papers, most of them weeklies, and is led by David Black, its president and CEO. The company’s largest holding prior to the Beacon Journal — which claims a weekday circulation of 135,000 — was the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, circulation 65,000, which Black bought after Gannett, the owner of the Honolulu Advertiser, tried to shut it down. “Five years later, going head-to-head with the nation’s largest newspaper company, the Star-Bulletin is still in business,” AJR noted recently. “When the deal went down, Black made it clear he didn’t have to be the top dog in the islands. ‘I can continue forever if I’m making money,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to make much. A dollar would do.'”
When Black’s surprise purchase of the Beacon Journal was announced, the newsroom heard reassuring things: then-Publisher James N. Crutchfield said no layoffs were planned. Black referred to the Beacon and its hometown as “a really good paper and a really solid city.”
But when he got up to speed on the newspaper’s finances, Black’s tune changed. In late July, just before the sale of the paper closed, staffers were told that job cuts were coming, though no one had decided how many. “We need to be growing this business. We need to be growing readership. We need to be growing advertising. And that’s got to be the focus,” Moss said. “And so there will have to be a lot of hard decisions over the next several months.”
“I don’t really believe that quality of a newspaper is a direct function of body count in the newsroom,” Black said in a widely noticed quote in a Reuters story Aug. 21. “I walk through way too many newsrooms where I see people just talking or looking on the Internet and having fun.” The next day, the Beacon Journal‘s future arrived.
Artist Kathy Hagedorn was one of the layoff casualties; the art department will be reduced from four full-time and one part-time staffers to three. Pointing to Black’s background in weekly papers, Hagedorn argues that he does not understand why such a large staff is needed to produce a daily paper. “It just seems like he came in and hacked us up,” she says.
And so the Beacon Journal is now forced to hurriedly and drastically remake itself, scrambling like so many other American newspapers to attract more advertisers and revenues with less staff.
Moss, Editor Debra Adams Simmons, and Managing Editor Mizell Stewart III did not return calls for comment. (Nor did Andale Gross, a reporter who is the unit chair for the Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild.)
Beacon Journal spokeswoman Rita Kelly Madick confirmed that the paper hopes to save $2.3 million with its newsroom layoffs. She hastens to say that the cuts are not an “attack on journalism.” “Sadly, the whole company will be seeing layoffs, and those other layoffs we have to announce in the next couple of weeks,” Madick says. “I think the significant thing here about our profits is that they are decreasing quickly.”
Meantime, the restructuring of the newsroom is moving forward, with the first part of the reorganization unveiled in a memorandum to the staff Tuesday. The memo details 42 reporting beats for the paper, and reporters were asked to give their top beat choices to their department head by noon on Thursday.
While the Beacon Journal has traditionally covered Summit, Wayne, Portage, Medina, and Stark counties, the revamped version will pull back to reemphasize local news from Akron and Summit County, and focus on key communities, such as Wadsworth in Medina County.
Some of the other highlights the memo spells out include:
- Restore a dedicated investigative reporting capacity to the Beacon Journal
- Shift features and lifestyle coverage away from arts, movie and television reviews toward previews and enterprise reporting
- Set the stage for future improvements to the newspaper, including a revamped Enjoy! Entertainment magazine as well as design and content changes to the A section, Local and Business
- Establish a new culture of collaboration and working across departments. You may find yourself writing for more than one section of the newspaper — and that’s OK!
“In general I think they basically preserved the nature of the work that we had been doing anyway — just consolidating,” says political reporter Lisa Abraham. “Belt tightening, I guess, would be the way to look at it.”
“It’s a big area to cover, and it’s always been spotty,” longtime reporter Katie Byard says of the paper’s traditional five-county coverage. “There’s some hinterland areas that we’ve never covered well, and we’re acknowledging that now.”
The expected beat changes include reducing the number of medical writers from three to two, with the same proposed reduction in education coverage, where one of two K-12 positions would be eliminated, though the higher education beat would remain. (Byard, who is one of those K-12 writers, says she is lobbying to keep the old education structure, and that Stewart is listening to reporters’ beat arguments.) In features, the television and movie beats have essentially been converted to a popular culture beat, and the now-separate theater and classical music/dance beats will be condensed into one fine arts beat (“high culture” on the memo), according to George Thomas, who will no longer be the paper’s movie critic. Sports will continue to cover the Browns, Indians, and Cavaliers (memo: “reporter must stay abreast of news regarding LeBron James”), although the section will lose the byline of highly regarded Browns beat writer Patrick McManamon.
The business desk should keep its current staffing. But as Ethridge points out, “In the mid-’90s, we had thirteen reporters. Now we’re down to five of us.”
Meanwhile, “This place is just totally in flux,” Dyer says. The layoffs are done by seniority, so those newsroom staffers newest to the paper are the first slated to go. But with some employees volunteering to leave, the tentative list of those who are staying and those who are going is changing rapidly. (In a one-for-one tradeoff, each volunteer who steps forward saves the job of a less senior staffer who would otherwise be laid off.)
That means there is “a lot of scoreboard watching”: “I had four people come up to me and say ‘Hey, I think you’re leaving.’ Which is news to me,” says Dyer, who plans on staying.
“It’s just sort of chaos in here,” the news columnist adds. “I’m amazed we’re getting a paper out, but somehow we’re putting out a decent product.”
Harry Liggett, who retired from the Beacon Journal as an assistant news editor in 1995, is cautiously optimistic.
“I still believe if the new owner and the new publisher really take hold of the thing, they can still have a good newspaper,” Liggett says. “Not a great one like it used to be, but a good one.”
Julie Wallace, a reporter with six years at the paper, jokingly called herself “the poster child for layoffs.”
“If they honor the one-for-one, which they said they’re going to do, I should be okay,” Wallace says, adding that she is the only person at the Beacon Journal who has now been laid off twice — in 2001 and 2006. “But I was saved last time too, which is why I’m still here.”
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.