Local Newspaper Layoffs A Response To Digital Dislocation

This week, two local newspapers—the Greensboro News & Record and the Winston-Salem Journal—announced major staffing cuts, 50 in total. Both are owned by BH Media Group. This comes as the world of print journalism is still navigating consumer trends in digital media.

The News & Record's changes, which begin later this week, will reposition the newspaper so that it can continue to provide daily news coverage:

• Consolidating the Monday, Tuesday and Saturday papers into two sections.
• Adding a fourth section to the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday papers.
• Merging all news coverage on Sundays into one section and moving the weekly Politics page into Ideas, which will be packaged behind the News & Record's news coverage.
• Consolidating Community News coverage with a higher profile on Fridays and Sundays.
• Eliminating the Op-Ed page in the Monday paper.
• Eliminating the daily TV grid, the horoscope and other select features.

To put it all in perspective, WFDD's David Ford spoke with Elon University Communications Professor Glenn Scott.

On the newspapers' responses to “market changes”:

Advertisers are not spending as much money on newspapers as they once did. Each couple of years the situation changes a little bit, [but] primarily this is a continued disruption of the digital era—digital revolution. So, newspapers today, if we pick one up, we realize that these inserts from the big box stores are really some of the main ways that newspapers are providing advertising that for them provides revenue. And as the big stores feel competition from online retail operations, they tend to reduce the amount of spending on these inserts, and sometimes in what we call the display advertising that's inside a newspaper.

So, newspapers have been reporting declines of up to 13 percent, year on year, for quite a long time now. As they've had less money coming in, they have to restructure. They have to think about doing things differently. Newspapers know that they need to migrate to more online. The future is online news, but most of their advertising still comes from the newspaper—the print version. So, what's happening right now in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, is a consolidation. I think they're going to be printing all their papers at the printing press in Winston-Salem, at the Journal, which means that they can lay off some of the people who work in what we call the back shop, in the press room and so forth in Greensboro, but probably they'll also be reducing the number of staff they have both to gather information and process information.

On parallels between newspaper and music industries:

Any kind of media content producers are dealing with some of the same problems. In the music industry, we've seen that people don't buy albums so much, they get their music digitally. Organizations like Apple figured out that they could sell one song at a time for anywhere from 99 cents to $1.29, and consumers would buy them. That worked for a while. That was kind of a mini system of subscriptions. And today we see more online sites want customers to buy a monthly subscription in which they can access music as well.

Same thing in the newspaper business. Newspapers know that the future is not to depend as much on advertising. It will be to depend on online consumers paying a monthly subscription rate to access their news online. So far, a lot of consumers aren't willing to do that. It's outside their habit. It requires a different calculation for how much money they want to spend. So, it's been a slow process.

On how local newspapers begin to monetize their products online:

What newspapers need to be able to do is say, ‘If you want the story about who won the high school baseball game last night, you need to pay ‘X' amount of money.' News organizations haven't wanted to get into this micro-transaction business much so far, so they're not too interested in a 99 cent purchase. But the day may come when software makes that a little more possible.     

For the most part, news organizations would like to find a formula where people are willing to buy news online the way they buy music. And we're going to see that. It's going to happen. Consumers are slowly changing.

On the ways in which the layoffs have been handled thus far.

I think it was relatively standard. I'm an old newspaper journalist, and I love the industry, and I love the people, so it hurts me when I hear about people losing their jobs. This kind of coded language that we hear from publishers—you know, their job is to make it sound as good as possible: ‘We're reorganizing. We're going to do some different things. We're going to give people a more focused, targeted news product,' is the best they can say.  

It's a tough time in the industry. I'm sure that over time, as we adjust to this great digital disruption, we will find again models that work better. But for now, newspapers themselves are struggling, and their communities are struggling because people aren't getting as much high-quality reporting as they used to get. But what we learn from disruptions like this is we have to change. The news organizations have to change. The journalists, the pressmen—they have to change. And consumers are going to change. So, it's all part of a process, but it's not comfortable.