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As a competitive guy who believes in print journalism, I know it would be easy to gloat about the recent news that the Booth Newspapers chain is cutting back its print schedule and moving to a “digital first” mode.
Or I could poke fun at the PR spin about the chain’s network of newsrooms, print facilities and digital assets being the country’s “finest” — a statement made in an online video posted as the company started handing out pink slips to journalists, pressmen and delivery people.
But I won’t.
The reality is that what the Booth chain is going through right now is a brutal but necessary corporate restructuring that’s been years in the making. While plenty of terminated journalists and media bloggers have pointed fingers at the suits in the corporate offices, at this point fault is irrelevant. What’s relevant is how they fix the problem. And that’s what concerns me.
It appears that many of the journalists who got walking papers at the Grand Rapids Press, Kalamazoo Gazette and Muskegon Chronicle have decades of experience and institutional knowledge about their communities and the beats they cover. In short: They’re good at what they do and know how things work.
Some will be invited to re-apply for positions, but the conventional wisdom is that those positions will be at lower pay and with fewer benefits. Many believe their jobs will be staffed by twenty-something “content producers” who are handy with video, audio and the Web, but have little journalism training. That sounds like blogging to me, but time will tell.
From the outside, it does look like some of the folks at the Booth chain are confusing the delivery mechanism for the content being delivered. We’ve been hearing words like “blood-letting” and “massacre” used to describe the newsroom changes, though I would use a slightly different phrase: brain drain.
And there’s the rub because, really, it’s not even about the newspaper. It’s about the newsgathering and the newswriting and the news editing. If there’s great content, people will pay for it. I quit buying the print editions of The Wall Street Journal and New York Times in favor of their digital versions, which I read on my iPad. I don’t mind, for example, paying the Times $20 a month because I know what I’m getting. With the loss of human capital at the Booth papers, who knows what I’ll get.
It’s an ill wind that blows no good. For MiBiz, the changes offer us some opportunity to access talent that will be leaving Booth. Not surprisingly, my phone has been ringing. Now, I just have to figure out how to monetize their talents, but our goal is as clear as it was eight weeks ago when we bought the paper: We intend to build MiBiz into a regional business publication that offers the editorial quality of a Crain’s Detroit Business as well as the utility and pizazz of magazines like Fast Company or Inc.
West Michigan deserves business journalism that’s that good. We certainly have a lot of work to get there, but companies set stretch targets all the time when they’re trying to grow. We’re a growth company, even if we practice old-fashioned journalism and the printing of words on paper.
We believe in print. In an age of digital overload, people are actively choosing to unplug. And study after study shows that when people read offline, they tend to have longer attention spans and remember more of what they read and see in print.
So go ahead and flip the page. Enjoy the sensation of the paper in your hands and the ink on your fingers. Odds are, you’ll remember some of what we wrote about in this issue and, hopefully, it will help you make money or save money. That’s what business journalism is about in our eyes.
Be good.
Brian Edwards, Publisher
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