CJR: Damage Report

Feature — July / August 2007

Damage Report

Most of the two hundred journalists who left The Dallas Morning News landed on their feet. Those who stayed are not so sure.

Linda Stewart Ball left The Dallas Morning News in 2006, and she couldn’t be professionally happier. “I’m extremely satisfied,” says Ball, forty-seven, a reporter at the paper for fourteen years who accepted a buyout and became a freelance writer. “I love being my own boss.” Reese Dunklin, who received a 2004 Livingston Award for Young Journalists, chose not to take the buyout. At thirty-three, Dunklin wants to remain at the Morning News but concedes he is worried about the paper’s future. “At times you wonder where it’s all headed,” he says, “because you sense this air of desperation.”

Management at The Dallas Morning News used a combination of layoffs in 2004 and buyouts in 2006, plus attrition, to slash some two hundred journalists—30 percent of the staff—from the newsroom. This kind of scenario has played out at metropolitan dailies across the country, from Long Island to California. But what happens afterward? What has been the result for those who left, for those who stayed, and for the Morning News itself as managers make cuts to try to maintain profitability?

What we found is that Ball and Dunklin are not atypical. We surveyed almost half of the two hundred who left the Morning News as well as dozens who stayed, and the findings are surprising. Whether they jumped or were pushed, most of those who left are more satisfied today than before they left. More than half managed to stay in journalism.

Those who remain, meanwhile, say the mood is uncertain at best. Circulation is in freefall. Readers increasingly are dissatisfied. Turnover disrupts stability. Many older staff members were pushed out in the layoffs; now some of the younger ones are leaving on their own. Brittany Edwards, a twenty-four-year-old feature writer who plans to try magazine writing, says many staff members do not believe that management can correct the paper’s problems. “People feel they are into quick fixes,” she says. “They don’t look at the long term.” Chris Borniger, a twenty-eight-year-old copy editor who is heading to law school, says he has lost faith in management. “It seems we are just grasping at straws,” he says. “It is incredibly disheartening.”

The Layoffs
Bill DeOre was stunned. He’d been at The Dallas Morning News for thirty-five years, including twenty-five as the sole editorial cartoonist. On October 27, 2004, DeOre’s boss told him management had eliminated his job.

That same day, editors told another sixty-five newsroom employees to pack their bags. Publisher Jim Moroney had warned the staff a month earlier that there would be a reduction in force, but the layoffs shocked them anyway. “Thirty-five years there and then nothing,” says DeOre, fifty-nine. “If they had taken me, stripped me naked, put me on a big white horse, and marched me down Main Street with a big sign that said, ‘Bill DeOre doesn’t work for The Dallas Morning News anymore,’ they’d be doing me a favor. People don’t know I left. They just airbrushed me out.”

Not so long ago, the Morning News had been at the top of its game. Between 1986 and 1994 the paper won six Pulitzer Prizes. A 1999 Columbia Journalism Review survey of more than a hundred editors ranked The Dallas Morning News as the nation’s fifth-best daily. Participants praised the paper for maintaining its commitment to editorial excellence after the Dallas Times Herald, its daily competitor, folded in 1991.

Then came a series of managerial fiascoes. Belo Corp., the parent company of the Morning News, invested $37 million in a company that produced a hand-held device called CueCat. To use it, a newspaper reader had to sit at a computer and scan bar codes on the page to visit Web sites for more information. The product proved to be a disaster, and in 2001 Belo was forced to write off its entire investment. Three local cable news partnerships with Time Warner that began in 2000 cost Belo $10 million a year before Belo withdrew in 2004. That same year, Belo revealed that the Morning News had overstated its circulation by at least 2.5 percent daily and 5.7 percent Sunday. The company agreed to reimburse advertisers $23 million, which Robert W. Decherd, Belo’s chairman and chief executive officer, called “an investment in the company’s future.”

Many at the paper began to worry, and their fears were well-founded. On September 29, 2004, the newsroom staff met with Moroney, who had been named publisher in 2001 by Decherd, his second cousin. Moroney had bad news. Revenue had been flat for four years. Newsprint costs had risen. Profit had dropped 35 percent in three years. Less than a month later management axed the sixty-six people; their median age was fifty-five, their median tenure fourteen years. (Eighteen former staffers, all over forty, filed an age-discrimination suit in federal court against the News and Belo in October 2006.)

Some of the laid-off staff members remain angry and hurt. Larry Powell spent twenty-nine years at the paper, including twenty as a columnist, and he still misses the newsroom. “What it felt like to me was the end of a love affair,” says Powell. “You keep thinking, ‘If I say this, maybe she’ll take me back.’ You still have this great love, but it is unrequited.”

But as it turns out, most of the ousted staff people seem fine now. We received responses from thirty of those who were laid off. Only three said they were dissatisfied with their new jobs. Most, in fact, said life after the Morning News was better. Doug Bedell, fifty-five, a former technology columnist, now handles public relations for a Dallas law firm. “This company is lean, has smart people running every department, and is collegial and team-oriented,” he says. “That’s far from the atmosphere of The Dallas Morning News in 2004.”

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Comments

jobsbard

Thu 5 Jul 2007 12:32 PM

Thorough and interesting article. I posted it on my job blog (www.sunoasis.com/jobblog.html

A few points:
1- Down-sizing always happens to real people and not numbers.
2- What is happening in newspapers is a continual erosion of loyalty
between "the company" and the employees. Employees, even journalists have to see themselves as free agents.
3- Writing, editing, reporting talent is very transferrable up and down the labor spectrum.
4- I can see what newspaper management is doing: Cut everything out in the paper that is being done well on the web such as movie, restuarant reviews. Stay local.
5- What is happening today was predicted long ago by Alvin Toffler among others. That is, mass media would be deconstructed across the board once computers were all connected together. At that moment a "communications revolution" is created not simply a technological one.

David Eide
Sunoasis.com

ecreager

Fri 6 Jul 2007 09:32 AM

Interesting story. However, I wonder whether it accurately reflects the feelings of all of those who left.

Could it be that only the happy and lucky ex-employees were willing to be interviewed, while those who have flamed out weren't so willing to share?

I also wonder whether researchers asked about finances. Are the happy people also better off financially than they were at the Morning News, or are they happy despite having a lower standard of living and worse benefits?

DallasBits

Fri 6 Jul 2007 01:03 PM

Thanks for explaining how and why my hometown newspaper so quickly became The Dallas Boring News and sadly joined the ranks of the Fort Worth Startlegram and Houston Comical.

Why read the paper or watch its broadcast affiliates if:
• the national and international news goes no deeper than what we’ve already seen in AOL pop-ups.
• they take incidental local news and try to make it tabloid
• they no longer take the time to balance stories or editorials
• they dropped features that made DMN unique or represented the interests of “fly over country”
• you’re not a Cowboy or Stars fan.

To have dropped the opportunity to exploit the Texas connection with Washington makes me think DMN is no longer on the presidents’ reading list either.

If you re-build it, they will come…if it’s not too late.

Jars583

Sat 21 Jul 2007 10:22 AM

Tracy,
Your article read like a novel and was well-researched. I feel very happy to have been one of your students! I have a great example to follow in journalism. Cindy (Brown) Mallette

Worldfoto.org

Mon 30 Jul 2007 06:21 PM

All I would have to do is replace the names and this story would be about the paper I work for.

In many respects companies that own newspapers are unwisely placing their money on technology and guessing that the web and videos--warts and all--will be the new frontier for revenue.

"fool's gold" I say to them.

Journalism is a "calling," not just a job. You enter it to serve the public and to help humanity evolve. When those who control newspapers are only in pursuit of profits, the "public service" in journalism is abandoned, and you end up with "infotainment." Why do I remain? The mortgage….

mainbrain

Thu 6 Dec 2007 07:43 PM

I've lived in Dallas for 25 years, and am not a journalist, but I'm a newspaper reader and am interested from that point of view. One important aspect you failed to mention (and maybe it was not germane to this article) is the extreme political bias of the newspaper. The CEO Robert Decherd is a graduate of the Dallas prep school St. Mark's, and is part of the business elite of the city, which is very much like a country club. His paper consistently sides with business interests (read: Republicans) in this city.
A case in point was the biggest politicial issue this city has seen in the last 50 years, where Dallas voters were to decide on Nov. 6th whether they wanted a toll road inside the Trinity River Park, which is a flood plain. On the pro-toll road side stood the Morning News, the Mayor, 13 of 14 City Council Members, and all the business elite. Although the mayor continued to lie to voters during the campaign, long after the appropriate authorities (like the Army Corps of Engineers) contradicted what he was saying, the Morning News supported him, while failing to show the contradictions. They failed to do simple investigative journalism, like interviewing the Corps of Engineers to verify what the Mayor was saying. On top of that, the Morning News waited until the day after the election (which the pro-toll road side won) to publish articles damaging to the the winning side. In fact, they also sat on damaging information they had a month prior to the election, and waited until post-election to publish it. You can read more about this here: http://www.trinityvote.com/blog/comment.asp?bi=364.
I know several longtime DMN readers who decided to cancel their subscriptions after this political issue, because it was evident that the paper took an elitist attitude, and was not interested in serious journalistic inquiry.

I don't know enough about the newspaper business to know how much this affects readership, but credibility has to be an important factor, right?

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