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Four days, three rooms but only one mother makes a very long long weekend cleaning out my kids’ enclaves. But for all my time spent with dust bunnies, handmedowns and plastic junkie tzchatkes from birthday parties, I’m still looking at a better night’s sleep than bargaining unit employees at The Plain Dealer.
I feel sorry – I feel I want to say, I’m sorry. Because I love news, and I really like and cherish many of the people I know at the PD.
And I am sorry on a personal level, for their careers, their lives.
Yet, much like the way in which a panel came out today with the news that, “guess what! We’ve been in a recession since December 2007″ - which many of us have known without a panel telling us it’s so, so too the newspaper industry – the Plain Dealer and the Newhouse amalgam of properties included – has known for years now that dramatic changes were going to be needed in order to avoid certain other dramatic changes. But the first set of changes weren’t made, and now, the second set are taking place.
I’m not a newspaper industry person – at all. But I love news and I love writing and I love reading. And people who have been in and around the newspaper industry for decades knew about the changes and the need for change, but didn’t act or act enough.
Journalism must survive, and it will survive – and it is surviving. But if the people in the bricks and mortar institutes – as well as the journalism schools – who refuse to accept all the different models being created, tested, remolded and relaunched continue to say that journalism must meet their definition or it will cease to exist, there are going to be layoffs at the PD again sooner than anyone desires.
Anyway, thinking of my friends at the PD tonight.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 11:39 pm December 1st, 2008 in Business, Cleveland+, Media, Writing
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6 Responses to “The Plain Dealer to deal pain, plainly”
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Probably not a good feeling there right now. It seems more likely by the day that people that are born 20 years or less from now wont even know what a newspaper is except for what they hear about them.
Shalom Jill,
Having been through the closing of a publication, I feel for the journalists who now have to now pack up their families and leave Cleveland.
No one is going to snap up these 27 people and you and I both know that the freelance market in Cleveland can never begin to make up for losing a guild job.
On the other hand, they’ve all known what was going on and have chosen to roll the dice rather than get out ahead of the rush.
Part of the problem is that journalists like you and me suffer from the handicap of, as you write, loving news. We make the fatal mistake of thinking that most Americans love news too.
They don’t. Most Americans love distraction from the banality of their existence. If we can read/listen/watch about the suffering of Brittany, then we feel better about ourselves.
We don’t, in the main, want to have anything to do with economics, science, politics beyond the horse race or any of the other boring subjects we hated in school.
Unfortunately, those are all the topics that make up real news.
And there’s a very basic reason why we don’t like real news: real news involves the potential of change and we hate any change that might nudge us out of our personal comfort zone.
I’ve been talking about this change since I was an undergraduate in the Journalism program at Ohio University in the early ’80s. There are no surprises here. Just the cold water in the face of reality.
B’shalom,
Jeff
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Grim. I really feel for them.
I certainly can relate to your sentiments about newspapers. I even love the smell of newsprint and getting ink on my fingers. (I love the way my wife cocks her head slightly when she’s absorbed in a story in the morning.) It’s appalling to see the whole industry flailing like this.
Jill –
Very sad day in Cleveland about those Plain Dealer layoffs, but also sad for those autoworkers and bankers, government workers and other good people in our state who are getting kicked in the teeth by the brutal changes in our economy. I know the big words and brains in Washington are fixated on some kind of economic stimulation program. They might be wiser to think of health care reform and insurance coverage for families. Many of those out of work have nothing. The PD people, I have heard, lose their coverage upon layoff. That is a horrible spot to be in. Clearly, it is time for some kind of universal coverage for Americans and Ohioans. The news about newspapers these days is heartbreaking — but almost all news we hear on the jobs front jobs is heartbreaking these days.
Bill your post and thoughts on healthcare came as yet another aspect of health insurance has come to light “locally” for now . I posted this this morning BUT I think we will see more of this ( I haven’t see it covered by the local MSM )
http://thatwoman.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/superior-medical-care-or-medical-mutual-of-ohio/