"Please watch your inbox for important information about your employment status tomorrow."
-- National Geographic Society president and CEO Gary Knell in a memo to his staff, Nov. 2
A long time ago, I was the boss.
I never did like it, and I only took the job because I believed--correctly, as it turned out--that the afternoon daily I worked for wasn't going to be around forever. So I took a lousy job with a nice title and a decent paycheck.
I was happy to have it. I didn't grow up with the expectation that I was going to have a lot of fun at work. Work was something you had to do if you wanted to eat and buy books and go to the movies. You needed a job so you could get a car to go on a date. I liked writing, but I never felt entitled to a writing life. So when I got nervous about maybe not having a job I took advantage of an East Texas millionaire who knew his business but not too much about running the little chain of small-town newspapers he'd recently acquired.
My staff was small, and the reporters hadn't been trained very well. They didn't have college degrees and their wages were subsidized by a federal on-the-job training program. I had a bellicose, semi-legendary sports editor I'll call Ed who was nearly twice my age (I wasn't 30 years old) who insisted on standing on the sidelines of the local high school football team decked out in team colors and screaming at the referees. He couldn't cover all the away games because he'd been banned from a couple of stadiums.
Almost worse than that, he just wouldn't have the girls' soccer scores on "his" pages, so I had to hire kids to call in the scores and run them inside the newspaper, below the "rural news" correspondent who reported on who visited who over the weekend.
When I was hired, the millionaire made a point of telling me that I was welcome to fight Ed if I wanted, but under no circumstances could I fire him. Apparently Ed had been fired a lot; he'd worked his way up to one of the Dallas newspapers at one point, only to slide back down to where he was being nominally supervised by the likes of me. His bombastic homerism was perceived as a huge corporate asset, and while the millionaire was willing to listen to and even implement many of the suggestions I had for improving the journalistic component of his newspaper (I started an editorial page and discontinued the ad staff's strategy of listing a "front page story" on the paper's rate card), he had a soft spot in his heart for Ed, who he thought had been fired enough.
That was fine with me, for I didn't want to fire Ed. I didn't want to fire anyone. But I was the boss, so when one of my reporters made a mistake and, in trying to cover it up, compounded the error past the point where a simple correction could suffice, I had to. When I called her into my office she took it better than I did. In retrospect, I imagine her job was lousier than mine and it didn't pay her half as much. She wasn't looking for a career, just a second paycheck to supplement her husband's job at the chicken plant.
I think I'd already starting desperately scanning the back pages of Editor & Publisher by the time I had to let her go, but afterward I knew I had to leave at the first opportunity. It was honest work, but it just wasn't worth it to me.
Years later I got another chance to be the boss--they wanted me to interview anyway--but I declined it when they told me who I'd have to fire. I guess I just don't have the right stuff to be the sort of clean-eyed leader who saves a village by destroying it. I just want to be left relatively alone to write stuff. I understand that is a big ask.
Ever since I've been in this business we've been told that it was dying, and in a way that's always been true. It's always been hard out there for a content provider. It's a little funny that in my so-called career, the only time I've felt any real job security was during my relatively brief tenure as the boss.
I don't want to whine about this. We know how our media got disrupted. It's not just print--the movies have changed, radio has changed, the movie business has changed, network television has changed. The word they use is "disrupted," and I'd be a hypocrite if I said it was all bad. There's a lot of good that can come from the breaking down of the hegemony of old media institutions. It's genuinely exciting to imagine what the digital revolution has done for would-be filmmakers.
But every revolution has its casualties and collateral damage. Talented people get hurt in these shake-outs. And often the only beneficiary is some boss somewhere who obtains an economy of scale.
I hope people are distressed by the layoffs that started at National Geographic as soon as Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox took control of the venerable non-profit last week. That was one of the sacred institutions a lot of us grew up with; it will never be the same. I grieve just as much for the loss of the Philadelphia City Paper and the alternative newspaper ethos that's near about extinct in this country.
I know the Los Angeles Times, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal, San Diego Union-Tribune and New York Daily News have all cut staff this year. Bloomberg laid people off. Even ESPN has cut deep into the ranks of its mid-level producers and executives to meet the profitability set by its corporate overlord.
I hate it that Sync is gone. I miss lively news racks. I miss cutthroat competition between news-gatherers.And I don't know what to do about it.
I used to think that newspapers and other print publications were wrong to re-configure themselves to appeal to marginal users, that they ought to pay more attention to their core constituency--people who read, and who want (and need) significant details and informed analysis.
But apparently there's not enough demand out there to support websites like the film-oriented The Dissolve or even ESPN's long-form culture and sports site Grantland. Those sites represent exactly the sort of coverage I thought people were hungry for.
I'm still not sure I'm wrong. I'm just glad I'm not the boss.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 11/08/2015