Staff cuts hurt the Need to Know

Big-city newspapers aren’t telling citizens the things they need to know.

That’s the headline on an article in Governing magazine that criticizes news media. Akron is mentioned a couple of times. Governing is a monthly magazine published by Congressional Quarterly whose primary audience is state and local government officials. Governing serves 85,000 subscribers and more than 275,000 readers each month.

Former Beacon Journal reporter Peggy Rader, who is now Communications Director for the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, called our attention to the piece.

Here are a few graphs pulled from the article:

It is hardly unusual for politicians to lash out at the local newspapers that cover them. But a few months ago, when Mayor Francis Slay of St. Louis took aim at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he skipped the standard complaints about bias or sensationalism. Instead, he charged in his blog that staff cuts and other changes at the newspaper were hurting the city itself.

”The P-D’s spotty and often inaccurate coverage of local, state, national, and international news has made opening the hometown newspaper a chore fewer and fewer St. Louisans are willing to face each morning,” he wrote. “The paper’s current struggling fiscal health and demoralized voice are drags on our own civic renaissance.”
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A few weeks after Slay aired his feelings, a group of prominent Los Angeles residents made a local and national stir by raising a similar alarm. In a letter to the chairman of the board of the Tribune Co., the Chicago media conglomerate that owns the Los Angeles Times, 20 community leaders urged the company not to pursue further cuts to a newsroom that already had lost 260 reporters, editors and photographers and trimmed the space devoted to news.

In Los Angeles and St. Louis, as well as in Akron, Hartford, Baltimore and an increasing number of other communities, a line is being drawn between corporate decision making and the role the newspaper plays in civic life.
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“Our younger city employees don’t read the newspaper,” says David Lieberth, chief of staff to Akron Mayor Donald Plusquellic and a former radio journalist. “I’ll be in a meeting with 10 people and say, ’You saw the stories in today’s Beacon?’ and everyone says, ’No.’ ”

It is the loss of those other stories, and the nuanced view of community life they offered, that particularly troubles political and civic leaders. In Akron, where the Beacon Journal used to give unstinting coverage to community affairs, city government is now covered only sporadically, with drama substituting for amplitude. “In the absence of having coverage on a daily basis, people seem more suspicious of government,” says Lieberth. “When people read only about conflicts, when television news only comes to the city to cover the murders or because the city council is going to explode that night into a shouting match with the mayor, if that’s all they’re seeing, then it’s an incomplete picture of city government, and people think all we are is dishonest and confrontational.”
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If the people who live in a community are going to understand the way city hall or the county commission or the school board shapes their lives, they need journalism that is there for the long haul and not just the occasional shout in the dark.
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It was a similar concern about coverage in the Los Angeles Times that motivated civic leaders there to write what amounted to a manifesto on journalism in the city. The group, which included John Mack, who chairs the city’s police commission; former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher; and United Way President Elise Buik, shared a feeling that under Tribune management the Times had lost its ability to cover the region well and that further cuts would enfeeble the one entity able to tie the vast, diverse Los Angeles Basin together. “These are people who are active on committees, who help chair the political campaigns, who are the do-gooders, and they’ve become increasingly unhappy with the quality of local reporting in the Times,” says Kevin Roderick, a former Times reporter and editor who now runs LAObserved.com, a Web site devoted to covering the local media and community affairs. “It has to do with the savviness level of reporting, a sense that local coverage has become much more surface-oriented and not grounded in expertise.”

Click on the headline to read the Governing magazine story.

Peggy adds her own thoughts about the newspapers in the Twin Cities:

“Another 20 reporters are being laid off in St. Paul. [Pioneer Press] So far, the Strib [Minneapolis Star Tribune) remains fat and happy. And exceptionally lazy. They wouldn’t know a good story if it bit them in the a**. All they can focus on is the scandal of the lesbian fire chief who is an alleged sexual harasser. Well, okay, that’s a pretty good story, but it’s the first news out of the city hall reporter in months. I do not exaggerate.

“No one knows how to cover meetings anymore. When I tell people I used to cover township hearings on sewer line expansions they give me looks of great pity. Shows what they know. So then I have to impress them by telling them I covered Mt. St. Helens’ eruption. The sewer hearing was more challenging.”