The Oregonian‘s parent company has rescinded a long-running “no layoffs” promise, according to Editor & Publisher this morning. News comes after the Oregonian offered generous buyouts for long-serving staff last August:
Publishers at the chain’s 20 daily newspapers, which include The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.; The Oregonian in Portland, the Staten Island (N.Y.) Advance and The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, broke the news to staffers Wednesday.
“We wanted to communicate to employees that this is coming,” said Steve Newhouse, chairman of AdvanceNet, the chain’s online division, and a member of the Newhouse family, the company’s longtime owners. “We have had a pledge not to layoff employees for economic conditions or advances in technology.”
But Newhouse said recent industry problems have forced the company to rescind the pledge. He said staffers are being told today that the pledge will remain for six more months, and then layoffs could occur.
Sounds like Valentine’s day could be a downer next year. So: What does the Oregonian need to do to get its head back above water? Few know it, but I am secretly a business consultant working for McKinsey & Company in my spare time, as well as an undercover FBI agent who sometimes receives messages from God through his teeth. With such credentials I should be able to turn a major daily newspaper around in a jiffy, so here’s my quick and dirty prescription:
1.Cut all wire copy from the printed edition. You’re wasting ten eight six four pages every day on content that most of your readers can hear about on TV, or read on the interwebs. I don’t care what your “older, rural” readers say—tell them to suck it up and get broadband.
2.Quit the videos. Nobody wants to watch videos on your website, so why bother trying to up the video content? To sell advertising? On something nobody’s watching? You’re not a TV station.
3.Invest in your local, long-form coverage. Nobody else can afford to pay a different writer to research and write 4000 words on a given subject five times a week.
4.Cut the “business” section. Most of it’s from the wire, anyway. Run your next Pulitzer package on Oregon’s (struggling) “Pioneer Economy,” instead.
5.Get some arts writers who don’t write sentences like “The blissful hand-holding and considered, thoughtful architecture is enough to make one seek the audacious, if not to disrupt the potential for entropy then to shake things up in a design and architecture landscape stirring for more.”
6.See 5. Seriously. Get people who sound like they actually live in this city and state.
7.Your beat reporters are awesome. Tell them so. And push their blogs and opinions harder. I like nothing more than seeing what an experienced beat reporter thinks on a given subject.
8.Are you still sending your sales staff on a ski trip with their clients once a year? Oh, you quit that. Well then, hire Alec Baldwin to give ’em a motivational speech over lobster. “How much does that cost,” you ask? Just melt down a few pair of Fred Stickel’s cufflinks. It’ll right Jack Lemmon’s morale, a touch.
9.Hire some new reporters. When was the last time there was a new face in your news room? God knows you hardly even need to pay them, these days! They would bring needed energy, a sense of the future, and of course some hip clothes.
10.Push: Xanax, Zoloft, Effexor, counseling. Repeat.
11.Stop acting like it’s the end of the world. We can all have a little party while the ship goes down, can’t we? But if everyone’s going to insist on being morbidly depressed, at least restrict it to “the world’s gone to shit Fridays.” Have four motivated days of the week.
12.Your publisher. Wonderful man. But perhaps he’s getting a little old for this? That’s probably illegal, what I just said. But you know, there are ways around the labor laws…
13.The Kindle is going to do NOTHING for anybody. Forget it. In fact, you could do worse than publish the entire paper on old-fashioned presses at the IPRC. Market it as “vintage,” get your newly-hired arts writer to wax lyrical.
13 was weird. So I think that’s probably enough advice for the time being. Still, I’m not disputing that the Oregonian is a grand old institution in this town. There’s a feeling, walking past the offices, that it’s been around forever. That it will always be around, in some form or other, and I’m glad. But now’s the time for some bold moves over there. God told me so this morning, through my teeth. Your further prescriptions are of course solicited in the comments.
I’d like to add, “Watch out for cataclysmic events brought on by giant meteors.”
Get rid of management. They are expensive and generally just get in the way of putting out quality content in an efficient manner.
Also, I’m sorry but please, please, please offer expensive, “been there too long” stale culture editors (yeah, you know I’m talking A&E) a very nice early retirement. Portland has changed drastically in arts and entertainment (and food, especially) culture. The A&E is like a dead weight bookend and out of touch. Look at how great food day and Mix have become, and how Mix has blossomed into a 10 month a year advertising generating source since you hired a new editor. Imagine what A&E could become in better hands…
Wow Matt, you know they pay consultants qiute handsomely for this stuff. why would you give it all away?
These are spot on suggestions for a start-up paper. Unfortunately the Oregonian is not capable of transformation.
1. There’s this amazing privileged argument from the journos which goes, if we don’t all cover the blank, blank and blank, we’re doomed to authoritarianism. Truth is wire services + crap reporters screwed us all – think Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Iraq – multiple system failure. Swarm intelligence will fact check your ass. We don’t need no stinking paper.
5 & 6. “Lissome” should not appear in a family paper.
7. Some, not all.
8. Not just sales staff.
10. Not a problem.
12. This is the problem.
13. Journo John Gunther, touring through town in 1938, wrote that the BPA and the Oregonian were the only powers of note. Still true, but seeing the Columbia Gorge is dotted with windmills and your ability to write circles around these jokers makes me reconsider.
14. Stop trying to be hip. You aren’t hip. You never will be hip. When you try to be hip, it is sad. Watch the “Poochie” episode of the Simpsons 20 times in a row if you need to understand this.
You guys know that sales don’t get a company salary, right?
No point in laying off someone who brings in the paychecks.
Great advice, Matt. And I think the Oregonian is sorely in need of it.
One thing you didn’t mention (unless I just missed it) is the paper’s website, Oregon Live. I think this is one of the biggest problems with the paper. Its future is increasingly online, but Oregon Live is a nightmare to navigate. There needs to be an “Oregonian.com” website with navigation choices based on the sections of the paper: News, Business, Living (I refuse to say “How We Live”), Metro, etc.
I disagree about the paper’s use of video being a bad idea. I think most decent papers, like the New York Times, are starting to use a lot of video, and in certain cases it can really broaden coverage. However, filming your reporters and critics simply talking to the camera, as the O has often done, doesn’t really cut it.
You mentioned publisher Fred Stickel being pretty elderly. But I think he’s actually defended the paper from what could have been more severe cuts.
I also agree that the paper uses way too many wire service stories. You’re right: people can get those stories from other sources. The O is guilty of using too many wire stories just to fill out the paper. But it detracts from the integrity of its own coverage. However, I disagree with your idea that the O get rid of its Business section entirely. It just shouldn’t be so stuffed full of wire stories.
Having freelanced for the paper until recently, I don’t feel comfortable addressing the work of its own writers, as you addressed. But I think people like Shawn Levy, DK Row, Kristi Turnquist and Barry Johnson do a good job. Unfortunately, though, the paper doesn’t devote a lot of space to them.
A couple of recommendations I’d make: The paper should stop publishing its “How We Live” section on Fridays. That’s overkill when they’re already publishing A&E. Worse yet, the paper devotes separate teams to the How We Live and A&E sections.
What’s more, I think both How We Live and the Sunday “O!” section need retooling. Just let them be traditional arts sections, and stop stuffing them with health stories and other stuff that doesn’t fit there, like trite “I am an Oregonian” profiles.
Also, can we please get rid of this totally absurd “O!” name for what should be the Sunday arts section? Every other section name is descriptive. This should not be a dilemma. Why is arts the only section in the paper that they won’t call by its name? It almost feels like the paper feels covering arts in earnest is somehow too pretentious.
And speaking of absurd, “How We Live” makes me cringe every time. Every single day, be it weekdays or Sunday, there should be a section called either “Arts” or “Living”. Anything else is bullshit.
The Oregonian also probably has too many writers on staff. In this day and age, I’m not sure if it makes sense to have, just by way of example, a classical music critic on staff collecting a 40-hour-a-week paycheck when there are classical music articles about once a week. I could write 10 articles in that time.
I say this not to pick on David Stabler or classical music, because I’m a fan of both. Stabler’s a good critic. I could be talking about any number of other writers and beats. But the model for newspapers is changing. They need more freelancers working on per-assignment commissions and fewer staff writers. It’s just simple economics.
The Oregonian has a lot going for it. Some of their writers and editors are really superb. I just don’t know if they have the power or sense of things to right the ship. I sure hope I’m wrong, though.
Also, nudie pics. And Olivia Munn wearing a maid outfit jumping into pies.
Wait, no. Not that.
They don’t deliver to the rural areas anyways. My parents live in Coos Bay, and they have to get the O, three days late, by mail. Not only have they read the internatioal/natioal stuff online by then, but the situtation has changed to the point that it isn’t worth reading about at all.
Even the O’s own reporters hate the website. When Anna Griffin makes more jokes at the Portland Public Schools roast in Feburary about the paper’s own website, than about Sam Adams, we all know that there is a problem. (On the plus side, it is nice that I can make comments on the other paper’s websites without having to registor, although quite frankly, a little weird.)
OregonLive was a terrible website 10 years ago, and it’s barely changed since. They’re probably stuck with it, but it’s just sad.
I don’t understand what the point is of In Portland. If it’s local news, just put it in the local section. And why are there two special sections in one day (In Portland and Homes and Gardens), while the Monday paper has about 10pp to the whole thing?
And who is Barry Johnson, anyway? Where did he come from? What is his column supposed to be about?
@5,6: What the hell does that sentence even mean?
@Kiala: Yes, that.
The best thing the Oregonian could do for us is die. Then we might have a chance at a decent newspaper with a decent web site.
“You guys know that sales don’t get a company salary” – D, are you sure about this? We all got a pretty nice one when I was at The O. There were a LOT more ads being sold then… and about the same number of people..
Most I have worked with, if not all, worked on commission
I stopped reading that paper the day after they canceled their pictorial Portland Nudist section, hosted by Vera Katz.
Barry Johnson has been writing about art in this town since before any of us were born. Or 1979, anyway. As for what his column is about, well, I couldn’t tell you.
D – that “commission” was on TOP OF their salary.
Ask one of them. They’ll tell you.
Oh! And next can we please address the WWeek site? Because I was just looking at it and my eyes started to bleed.
Oregonlive.com is the biggest joke in Oregon. Many of the major papers have decent online components and I’m not sure why The O thinks they can’t adopt it.
http://www.theoregonian.com needs to be the place I go to view The Oregonian online. Plain and simple. They need to workout whatever internal problems they’re having and get on it… they’re a decade late.
Oregon Live is not the O’s fault. It’s put out by their parent company, AdvanceNet, which slaps the exact model on all their papers [here’s the Star-Ledger’s http://www.nj.com/starledger]
Everyone I know at the O wants Oregon Live replaced; staffers and whole departments have petitioned and offered better models and to even pay for a new site, to no avail.
Oh, who cares? They’re going the way of the dinosaur no matter what they do. It will happen just as soon as all of those people old enough to still have land lines for their telephones kick the bucket.
The O needs to cut ties with their parent company then and find a new investor who lives IN THIS CENTURY and they should have done it a year ago. Or ten years ago.
kiala: have you any experience in the business world? A wholly owned company does not, on its own, “cut ties with their parent”.
What are you talking about, @YouKnowWho? Didn’t you hear kiala? Cut ties with the parent company! Just like that! Cut ’em! Do it! Better yet, do it 10 years ago!
I wish, wish, wish there was as simple a solution for helping newspapers as know-it-all, know-nothing, snarky Internet commenters everywhere seem to think there is.
I worked at the “O” for 24 years. Incompetent management, a ridiculously parental culture and unbelievably stale sales and business practices are major contributors to the paper being on it’s knees. I hate to see it go, but I don’t think they are capable of shaking off the old and bringing in true innovation.
Dream Weaver: but for 24 years, you sucked at the Newhouse teat. And, assuming you took the buy-out (?) you’re sucking even as we speak…
No, I left in disgust before the buyout was offered. And towards the end, it was the Newhouses sucking on me. For all those years I gave my all and earned every penny. When things started to fall apart and the pressure became unbelievable, I decided that I was losing sleep and battling depression just to keep lining Newhouse pockets. So I left while I still had some dignity.
No, I left in disgust before the buyout was offered. And towards the end, it was the Newhouses sucking on me. For all those years I gave my all and earned every penny. When things started to fall apart and the pressure became unbelievable, I decided that I was losing sleep and battling depression just to keep lining Newhouse pockets. So I left while I still had some dignity. And sanity.