I thought I loved journalism. The excitement of being in the middle of a fast-paced newsroom, the responsibility of shaping the daily paper, the camaraderie I shared with my co-workers. But I was wrong; I only liked journalism. And, sadly, that isn’t enough anymore.
My newspaper career started a decade ago with my realization that being an engineering major was a nightmare, and ended with the thought that maybe I should have given that 8 a.m. chemistry class a second chance. In my decade of reporting and editing I’ve covered local theater, helped edit an English-language newspaper in Cambodia, and worked with hundreds of wonderful people throughout California. But decisions made many pay grades above mine, and a radically changing media landscape, made the idea of continuing to work at a newspaper a depressing proposition. So I decided to take a buyout from The Modesto Bee and try my luck with law school. The decision to leave wasn’t easy but is looking better by the day. In the two months since I left, there have been layoffs at McClatchy Newspapers and talk of printing the Bee in Sacramento to save money. I can’t help but worry that more layoffs and further radical changes are in store for my friends who still toil away in the industry.
This year’s dramatic changes are the result of a slow-moving storm that has been gathering strength for years. During my almost four years at the Bee, innovation and change were painfully slow. The Bee, and many papers like it, had been a local monopoly for so long that it had a hard time figuring out how to meet the challenges presented by innovative online competitors. Craigslist barely existed in the area several years ago, but by the time of my buyout it had come to completely dwarf anything we offered. While we were still figuring out how to post Google maps, Yelp was establishing a fairly useful Modesto site. And even as our Web traffic grew, it seemed like nobody had a handle on how to make much money off of those thousands of eyeballs.
None of this was any single person’s fault. I respect every person I worked with and think most of them had a good grasp of what needed to be done. The problem was making anything happen. The cliché about trying to turn a battleship around seems particularly apt. Simply getting the bureaucracy in place to respond to the changing environment took years, and it still probably isn’t exactly right.
And now that real change is finally coming, I’m not sure the journalists who remain are going like it. It is going to mean more work with fewer people. It is going to mean that journalists are expected to have more skills. It is going to mean that the job you came to love will likely change in drastic and sometimes unexpected ways. It is going to mean that the company may decide it no longer needs you. I am confident that the Bee will survive, but what it will look like in five years isn’t entirely clear.
Despite all the uncertainty, I think a few things about the future of daily newspapers are likely: most will continue to produce a print product, but some will not publish it every day. They all will become much leaner. The Bee employs several hundred people, and I expect that number will settle somewhere around a hundred, maybe fewer. And if you’re one of those employees, watch out. If you don’t produce content or bring in advertising, expect to be out of work. Centralized finance, human resources, circulation, editing, IT, and printing are the future. If it can be done somewhere else, it will be. And if they can cut it, they will. Reporters will be expected to do most of their job with little or no supervision. And high-quality editing will be something that only the largest newspapers and magazines do.
So, those of you who remain have to ask yourselves this question: Do you love journalism? If you do and you think you can handle all the changes that are coming, hunker down, get some online skills, and prepare to ride out the storm. I am positive there will be jobs for the skilled and determined among you. But if you don’t love it, get out now. The longer you wait the less time you’ll have to prepare for your next career. I spent eighteen months preparing to go to law school. If I had waited another year, I might not have been able to make the transition as smoothly as I did. And if you wait too long, someone in human resources could make the decision for you.
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The steady drip of layoffs and buyouts, slowly desiccating once-vibrant newsrooms around the country, has also produced a reservoir of anger, sadness, fear, uncertainty—even some cautious optimism here and there—among reporters and editors who invested years, decades in some cases, of their lives to print journalism. We’ve asked anyone so inclined to channel these emotions, not into rant—although there will be a bit of that—but rather into reflection on what went wrong, and where we might go from here. We will publish one per day, under the headline “Parting Thoughts.” All of the letters we publish will be collected here.
Nic Roethlisberger is a former Modesto Bee copy editor.