March 12, 1997 was the worst day of my life. On the same day I
lost the best job I ever had, as the news editor at the Twin Cities
Reader, a Minneapolis weekly, my father also died.
Nine years later, a disquieting sense of dej
à vu has come over me.
That day, our owner announced in the newsroom that we had
produced our last newspaper. The paper had been sold to our
cross-town competitors. That night we all went out together, drank
to our health (repeatedly), laughed, cried, and staggered home. We
were close.
March 12, 1997 was the worst day of my life. On the same day I lost the best job I ever had, as the news editor at the Twin Cities Reader, a Minneapolis weekly, my father also died.
Nine years later, a disquieting sense of dejà vu has come over me.
That day, our owner announced in the newsroom that we had produced our last newspaper. The paper had been sold to our cross-town competitors. That night we all went out together, drank to our health (repeatedly), laughed, cried, and staggered home. We were close.
Many went on to distinguished careers, some at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, others at the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
You may have read this week about the sale of the 32-newspaper Knight-Ridder chain to McClatchy, which owns, among other papers, the Star Tribune. After the sale, McClatchy announced it would sell off a dozen of the 32 papers.
Two of those dozen Knight Ridder papers are the Monterey County Herald and the Pioneer Press, where several friends from the Twin Cities Reader still work. And this week I started work at the Herald as its night city editor, where I will also write this column.
Ownership anxiety has gripped us all once again.
My coolest calculation of the dynamics of this uncertain situation – McClatchy says it could be three to six months before new ownership is determined – is that both papers will survive. The Pioneer Press is clearly at greater risk, since it is the same metropolitan market as the larger McClatchy property, the Star Tribune.
But no one who has been through the trauma of a shutdown, as we at the Twin Cities Reader experienced, is willing to take anything at face value. Newspaper deaths happen. Sometimes, depending on the intentions of the new owners, jobs are drastically cut back to finance the debt often involved in such acquisitions. A third, rosier scenario, of benevolent ownership committed to continued journalistic excellence, seems simply too much to hope for.
So today I find myself, with my former colleagues in St. Paul, once again walking the razor’s edge of uncertainty. Among the companies mentioned to be interested in some or all of the dozen papers is MediaNews, a Denver outfit controlled by Dean Singleton. I used to write for a MediaNews paper, The Salt Lake Tribune, and I’ve witnessed Singleton’s parsimoniousness. He has a well-deserved cut-and-squeeze reputation when it comes to profit margins.
Therein lies the source of the anxiety among Twin Cities Reader alums. Suddenly, we are all in the same boat again, in different cities, facing a stiff wind of change and trying to keep moving forward by doing good work. Working for people like Singleton is no journalist’s first choice, but unless local or other ownership steps forward, it could happen now in both Monterey and St. Paul.
Not knowing is the worst.
All we can do is hope that McClatchy, a company with a good reputation for quality management and good journalism, will look for new owners in its own mold. But McClatchy, with its bottom line to worry about, will likely take the best money it can get for those dozen papers, draw down its debt on the purchase of the remaining 20, and wish us all well.
That’s what the owners of the Twin Cities Reader did nine years ago this week. Forty-eight hours later, some 30 devoted newspaper employees hit the bricks. We hadn’t just lost our jobs. We had been deprived of our callings in life.
Newspapering is not just a profession for anyone whose primary interest is a paycheck. The money is adequate, not spectacular. The reporters and editors who put out this and other papers do it for the love of it, the purpose of it, the devotion of it. We really can’t imagine doing anything else.
We are grateful for the opportunity to do this work, and we don’t take it for granted. So we stifle our fears and go on in the hope that the community will support us in this limbo. In the end, a crucial element of civic life suffers when the local newspaper doesn’t thrive – or, God forbid, dies.
