Seattle times radio reporting: look for less of the same

Slog posted an internal Seattle Times memo Friday listing staffers taking the company's buyout offer.

The paper accepted "expressions of interest" from 19 people, who will get the money, take a hike, and their jobs will "simply vaporize" as The Times puts it so poetically. 

Not surprisingly, Florangela Davila, a reporter whose beat is radio -- another medium in deep shit -- was on the list opting for the sweet grass.

No fault of Florangela's, but frankly, The Times hasn't paid that much attention to the industry anyway. That's been left to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Bill Virgin, a busy business reporter who writes the Wednesday On Radio column, bookmarked by every local radio staffer in town who can read. Virgin does due diligence with industry press releases, and covers the hard news stories with the kind of access to management BlatherWatch only dreams of. He leaves the sturm, drang, and nasty bits to us, for which we've always been grateful.

(photos Bill Virgin, left; Florangela Davila, right)

Davila's a consummate pro, but her editors have chosen to skim along the rim of the radio niche with feetchs such as the recent one on Luke Burbank, or Larry Nelson's obituary. Understandably, she spends most of her time on teevee, the other half of her A & E beat.

What will happen in the future? Less of the same -- like everything else you can expect in the future reporting from The Times.

Earlier this month, The Times announced Draconian cut-backs including elimination of up to 200 employees. It's unemployment by a thousand cuts: layoffs, job freezes, quiet hallway assassinations, euthanasia, late afternoon stabbings, and Friday beheadings.

Everybody who's not named Blethen or are getting bought, are worried.

The Times, in the same memo announced an ominously golly-gee-whiz sounding re-education program in May called, “Extreme May-kover,” in which they say they'll be "looking at everything we do from a fresh perspective and forging a plan for the future."

(We know this "May-kover" business sounds like BlatherWatch satire, but seriously folks, read the Slog post linked above). 

This reflects a wide industry crisis as metropolitan newspaper circulations shrink from Interweb competition, and the general disinterest in dead tree media of those under 40. Revenues have dropped precipitously.

In an e-mail to staff late last month, Kelly said that, through February, combined print-advertising revenues for the Times and P-I were down 10.7 percent from last year.

More ominously, online-ad revenues fell 6.5 percent year-over-year. While online advertising is only a small fraction of The Times' and other newspapers' total revenue, it has been growing rapidly in recent years.

Many say it is the industry's best hope as it searches for a new business model.

Last month, The Times Co. put its Maine papers — three dailies and one weekly — up for sale, saying it needed cash to help keep its flagship paper afloat.

Though it's hard not to be gleeful about all this, we're not -- despite that legacy media has been so unapproachable, top-down, bureaucratic, haughty, tin-eared to younger demos, and fatally slow to the recognize the significance of the Intertubes.

Less reporting is less good for the Republic; the bottom-line dismantling of these big newsrooms is a net loss for everybody.

Comments

[sparky]

The purpose of local newspapers seems to be as a vehicle to sell advertisements for department stores, real estate companies and car dealerships. Sometimes one has to really dig to find news. A lot of us have gone to reading papers online, which is sort of sad. I miss curling up with a paper and a cup of tea.

[Andrew]

Our country needs to make higher education more cost effective, time effective and available so these journalists and print workers can shift careers without losing their houses and self respect. You have to wonder if they hold back miracle toothpaste for fear of puting half of the denists out of work. If college wasn't the four year fifty thousand dollar colossus that it is we'd surely have much less cause for worry when our careers are threatened.

[Duffman]

I (like sparks) like a local newspaper on Sunday morning after Church with a cup of coffee. I think this area could well with one less newspaper and re-structure and put full effort in one paper. I'm sure my mother would find life difficult without the PI - but she would cope. (She just now realized that Times/PI was a combo on Sundays...ha). Bless her soul - she may actually check out this world without ever having used a computer. I'm still trying to talk her into getting one -tho.
My vote: combine, consolidate and publish a single 'heavy-duty' newspaper with solid 'investigative reporting'.

[chucks]

I was going to suggest that the journalism majors could work as baristas at Starbucks, but those jobs are already taken by philosophy majors. The communication majors have the bar tending jobs.
My grand daughters Guinea pig died last week, so we don't need the PI or Times. I can't help there.
Guess I got nothing.

[Andrew]

Hhahhhahaahahhhhhhhh!

[PugetSound]

Duff
Be a good son and get your momma a nice computer and introduce her to the joys of email. Surely she has friends of a similar age that already use the computer and email is a great way to stay in touch.

Chucks, don't you see it is the 'journalism majors' that fill up the Starbucks. Sucking on their $4 latte and writing in their journals. It's our version of Paris in the 20's when expatriates like Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald, et al sat in those French cafes dishing bon mots and writing the great novels of our time. I guess literary talents have dropped quite a bit, eh? But hey, our kids know how to put a condom on a banana...

[Gay Gary]

I’m treading water waiting for the PI to go bankrupt so I can snatch up the name for cheap. I’d then publish a Monday through Friday, tabloid sized free version of the Seattle PI (a la AM New York or the new San Francisco Examiner) using the PIs current newsbox network and bundled deliveries to the top 200 KC businesses by employee headcount.

We’d shoot for a diminished circ. of 45K, be completely driven by display ads, have a super-barebones editorial staff of about 15 focused entirely on gossip, violent crime and sports reporting, supply the news section straight off the wire services and bulk it all out with a bigger-than-average mess of astrological forecasts, movie reviews, crossword puzzles/word jumbles and comics.

Each daily headline would be super-salacious and our biggest single expense would be the premiums on our libel insurance. We’d use a lot space publishing matte releases, print the headshot of different abortion doc every day under an incendiary headline like “KILLER?”, have a co-promotion agreement with the Seahawks to profile a different scantily clad SeaGal each day, and have a team of stringer photogs tag city officials around all day snapping pics of them standing innocently with female co-workers then publish the photos with the females face obscured by a question mark. I’d hire Mike Siegel to be the Managing Editor and Ken Hutchinson would write a regular editorial column. There would be no theater, music or visual arts coverage but plenty of sassy product reviews we’d get through a syndication agreement with gizmodo.com as well as a full page of “offbeat” news and “You Write the Caption” contests.

[joanie hussein for obama]

Gary, love, that was way more than I wanted to know.

I've never been much of a newspaper reader. I remember in the eighties I think hearing some reporter talking with Brad somebody on KING radio about the City's plan to cover parners health care.

At the time, I was appalled by the lack of critical questioning and research the reporter had done. She basically regurgitated what the mayor said and called it "in-depth reporting."

I think our local journalism has always been poor. I appreciated Seattle Weekly and Stranger when they came along.

Will I miss the Seattle Times? Not at all.

And I always hated getting ink on my hands...

[Duffman]

IMO last 'real' investigative reporter the ST had was Eric Nalder. Powers within this city do not want true investigative reporting by our media - too much to possibly be revealed. Alas we must rely on Bla'M herein for any hint of inside investigative work.

[lukobe]

Good article by Chuck Taylor on why there isn't anything around, yet, that can quite replace the traditional newspapers: http://www.crosscut.com/blog/media/13563/The+high+legal+cost+of+practicing+journalism/

[lukobe]

Nuts! URL cut off. Try this: http://tinyurl.com/45lrrc