Two interesting postings from journalists, expressing outrage at the destructive effects of corporate consolidation in the newspaper industry:
Alan Mutter, media blogger at Reflections of a Newsosaur, describes the slashing of staff, infrastructure, institutional memory and community connection at the San Mateo County Times under the management of Northern California newspaper oligopolist MediaNews. His posting, "A paper’s sad decline in debt’s grip," reminds us that the County Times was sold to MediaNews in 1996, when it had nearly 50 employees. Now its staff hovers somewhere around 10, though MediaNews contends that it’s really higher than that because the company’s got regional reporters and copy editors scattered across the region. He also points out that even though some papers, like the County Times, have seen their circulation numbers plunge, MediaNews, which specializes in cutting staff costs by eliminating editorial "redundancies" from newsroom to newsroom, exceeds the circulation of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times combined.Joe Torres from the media-policy organization Free Press writes in "Journalists Must Speak Up," at CommonDreams.org, that minority journalists, who had made uneven but real progress for decades in approaching parity in representation in newsrooms, are now losing ground, as more have left the business as a result of layoffs and consolidation than have entered. This, Torres writes, is an important public policy issue that has real consequences for the quality of coverage in increasingly diverse American communities.