PressEthic

The situation at the LA Times caused quite a stir. Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson and editor Dean Baquet refused to make the staff cuts that their corporate parent, the Tribune Company, required. This resulted in countless op-eds and editorials across the country that praised these men for standing up for the newsroom, even when it meant sacrificing favor with The Tribune Co. (and ultimately costing Johnson his job).

This sentiment of awe and appreciation seemed to be fairly standard among journalists, who increasingly worry that their craft has become a dying art, until yesterday when Jack Shafer wrote an article on Slate.com, titled "If You Don't Buy This Newspaper ... We'll Shoot Your Democracy."

He started by comparing the way that journalists act at the mention of staff cuts with the way that the city reacts when faced with budget cuts: both parties wave their hands and make a lot of noise, as though the world is coming to an end. "They [journalists] equate the loss of warm bodies in the newsroom with the end of civilization."

It's hard to sympathize with the woe-is-us crowd of journalists when you learn that the number of full-timers employed by U.S. news-media organizations today has increased by almost 70 percent compared with 1971 ...

The idea that a newsroom should employ X hundred staffers because it has traditionally employed X hundred staffers ignores the changes technology has made in the news market ... Should every metropolitan newspaper keep its Moscow or Jerusalem bureaus when readers can click to Web coverage from the New York Times and the international press, especially when many of those papers are losing circulation?

Shafer continues by discussing the impact that technology has made on the research process for journalists, noting that a high school student with access to J-STORE and Lexis Nexis could uncover the same information as a Times reporter.

Technology has made today's reporter more productive and more accurate than his forebears. So, if the Los Angeles Times peaked at 1,200 reporters and it's down to about 940 now and Tribune wants to cut it further, it's hardly proof that the corporate meanies are defunding the newsroom.

He believes that journalism is no different from any other career - all professionals see their field as being vital to the continuance of culture as we know it and journalists are no exception.

I suspect that the egotistical proclamations of journalists really mask the low esteem they hold for the total product they produce. If you fillet the average daily newspaper—cutting out the sports section, the comics, the crossword, the horoscope, the opinion pages, the entertainment coverage, and the special sections devoted to home, dining, medicine, travel, cars, real estate, and TV listings—relatively little of the democracy-enhancing, life-sustaining reportage they boast about actually gets printed.

Shafer's viewpoint is remarkably different from the soundbytes that the general public has heard on the issue. While his article doesn't take into account the fact that some staff cuts greatly detract from news organizations, he makes a valid point: as technology improves and certain facets of news gathering become easier, don't news corporations have a responsibility to keep their organizations efficient and productive, even if that means making staff cuts?

I still think it was admirable of Johnson and Baquet to stand up for their employees and one could certainly argue that they knew better than the Tribune Co. what was best for the editorial content of the paper. However, after reading Shafer's article, I don't think that the staff cuts are necessarily indicative of the downfall of democracy.