Virginian-Pilot cuts reporters – should we gloat?

Our local newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, continued on their trek of job-cutting by letting go a number of relatively big names in the by-line this month. Some chuckled and some went so far as to gloat.

Count me among the gloating.

Columnist Kerry Dougherty thinks that’s wrong. She wrote:

“They gloated about the misfortune of hardworking writers, columnists, photographers and editors. They took pleasure in The Pilot’s struggles.
They demonstrated a shocking lack of compassion for people who are losing their jobs.
Some said they couldn’t wait until The Pilot was gone.”

Apparently other people are tap dancing on the Pilot for reasons different from mine. They say the Pilot is falling because of its liberal bent. I don’t agree. The Pilot was making money when it was just as liberal and Virginia was voting more conservative than it seems to be lately. Heck, if anything, the Pilot should be raking in the dough if matching the political views of the masses was the test. They’ve endorsed winners more often than not lately.

No, the Virginian-Pilot is losing quality and is being slowed by the weight of their monopolostic advertising rates that don’t hold up to competition.

Sorry, Kerry. I lost a job in 2000 due to a corporate restructuring that took four offices and merged them into one that was smaller than any of them. The Pilot didn’t write a story about how bad that was for me, a single dad at the time raising a four-year old. I’m not writing one for Mal Vincent.

I also got married in 2011, but since I married a woman, the Virginian-Pilot didn’t put my bride and me on the front page with a banner headline, although I could argue that finding a great woman to actually marry me is bigger news than any gay marriage could hope to achieve.

The Pilot claims they are simply victims of the recession of falling ad revenues and the shift from print to online.

Awwwwwwwwwww.

ABC, NBC and CBS used to be the only networks in the nation. We now have hundreds of networks, and ABC, NBC and CBS are still chugging along, thank you. If you offer what the people want, than people will watch or read you. Radio used to be the only portable music available, but now every six-year old can hold a paper-thin device that plays 60,000 songs on demand. Somehow, radio still draws listeners and advertising dollars.

But part of my job is buying advertising. Newspapers simply price themselves out of the advertising market for businesses who need repetition in advertising to build a brand. Want to run a single radio ad in Hampton Roads? Be ready to set yourself back about a hundred bucks per ad. A tv ad on a cable network in Hampton Roads? You’ll have to dig deeper for about $150 to $200 per ad.

Call the Pilot and ask, “How much for an ad” and get your $2,500-10,000 answer for a single ad run once.

They’ll claim they’re worth it, with one newspaper a day compared to how lost a tv or radio ad can get in a 24 hour day.

True, but if I had $5,000 to spend on advertising, should I run a newspaper ad once or run a radio ad 50 times?

That, more than some sad reference to a recession, is what is hurting the newspaper. The market for advertising has options it never used to have. Advertisers can produce their own spots for tv and radio and not spend a fortune. Equipment for audio and video, including editing and mixing, isn’t hard to find, purchase and operate.

Technology has helped electronic media compete for advertising dollars by lowering the costs of entry. Print is still pricey to buy.

That, coupled with falling circulation numbers, puts newspapers in a bind. The Pilot still wants to command high daily print ad rates despite no longer being most people’s source for news.

Their solution, which is to fire more reporters and writers and rely on more national news, isn’t going to get readers back. I don’t need the Pilot’s sports section to tell me who won the game last night. My App told me the score with a link to highlights. I don’t need the paper to tell me today’s weather forecast. My weather app has that with the current radar.

The Pilot is becoming a newsroom of recent college graduates willing to work for less in hopes that they can get picked up by another newspaper soon. That’s the New York Jets. That’s not a successful newspaper.

So, Kerry, I agree lots of talent got the bad news this month, but I’m not going to give them the “aw shucks” – I’m giving them the “that’s life.” No job is guaranteed. The second some company decides they can do without any of us, our job is toast.

There used to be many candlemakers before Edison and many blacksmiths before Ford and Benz.

And there is too much in Pilot business model to expect much more than additional layoffs.

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