Earlier this week we ran a story about employee buyouts at The Kansas City Star and The Wichita Eagle, Kansass two biggest newspapers owned by the McClatchy Co., who is wanting to trim staff by 10 percent, or 450 people, among the 30 newspapers it owns across the country.
This is on top of 1,000 pink slips recently delivered to employees at the news organizations of Gannett, Yahoo, BuzzFeed, HuffPost and AOL.
Its true, newspapers in both print and digital form are having to reinvent themselves in the wake of major advertisers concentrating only on Facebook and Google, who currently capture 80 percent of the digital ad market.
The result is that many newspapers are going belly-up. Since 2004, more than 1,300 communities have lost news coverage of their local affairs.
Such areas are referred to as news deserts, a takeoff on food deserts for areas that lack fresh goods.
With the proliferation of round-the-clock news portals, you may think losing the Register or the Humboldt Union is no big deal. After all, the Register isnt the only place to find out the scores from last nights games.
But picture your town without any recap of city council or county commission meetings, school board or hospital board. In the news business, this is referred to as public service journalism, the day-to-day reporting and commentary that helps hold public officials accountable and keeps an informed citizenry.
Take our story on Betty Hendricks, the gutsy 62-year-old featured in Thursdays paper and her decision to switch careers after 25 years with Walmart. Without that story, Betty would have dropped from my radar as a customer at Walmart, without me knowing that shes going back to school to pursue a career as a paralegal. How awesome is that?
And thats what I mean about building community. I care about Betty in a new way and wish her the best toward her endeavor.
LIKE MOST any business, publishers face three options: Grow, maintain the status quo or prepare to sell.
At the Register, our focus is growing. And in that effort were reaching out to younger generations to convert them into readers as well as expand our digital advertising and news base. Just as important, we continue to hew to the belief that we play an important role in the community and that if we decline, others will suffer as well.
If our aim were to just keep rolling along, then that would entail cuts to staff and investments in digital products and services. Maintaining the status quo in reality means youre falling behind.
If our sights were on the exit door, well, I cant even go there.
They always say its good to have a Plan B. Not in this case.
