The Overlook Hotel

Often forgotten among the additional stress, additional work and additional drinking that go hand in hand with smaller, "more-with-less" staffs in a shrinking newsroom are the intangibles. Like the dearth of personality manifested through a lack of photographs.

You don't need a private detective to figure me out. Just look at the pictures and whatnot on my desk. That I'm a father of three who loves The Simpsons and going to baseball games across the country is obvious to any dolt who might happen by. The autographed photograph of Taj Mahal says something about my taste in blues. And the sheet music for Nearer, My God, to Thee, goes to the heart of my irreverance.

But there are a lot of empty desks in newsrooms these days, and on my worse days, it seems like our workplace is somewhat reminiscent of the Overlook Hotel. But instead of empty rooms and countless ghosts, we work in a venue with a whole lotta vacant desks -- and countless ghosts.

Those desks were occupied not long ago by people who had lives outside the newsroom. And those lives were reflected on the pictures and children's artwork that were plastered in their cubicles. I miss walking by Liz Fitzsimons' desk and seeing pictures of her beloved Natalie growing year by year. Or handpainted works of something or other from Miranda Barfield to her father, Chet, that underscored a daughter's undying love for her father. Or the smiling photos of Alex Roth shortly after he met a wonderful woman who would beccome his wife. Or the endless supply of almonds on Ray Kipp's desk, in an office surrounded by whimsical, um, art. Everyone has their little space, and how each person decorated that space, from Terry Rodgers to Cheryl Clark to Mark Sauer and Ruth McKinnie Braun, told you something about them.

I really miss that.

Listen to this...

Sometimes it's better to let others tell it like it is. Like David Carr, who wrote this in The New York Times today...

By DAVID CARR
Published: November 16, 2008
In March 2007, Circuit City came up with a plan to confront softening sales and competition from online and offline retailers: fire the most talented, experienced employees.

Of course, those workers were the retail chain’s single most important point of difference from the legion of Internet retailers and general merchandisers, but in a single stroke, Philip J. Schoonover, the chief executive of Circuit City, wiped out that future.

As a pal of mine used to say when I described a particularly boneheaded course of action I had pursued, “How’d that work out for you, buddy?”

For Circuit City, not so great. The “wage management initiative” erased morale, both for employees and the folks who shopped there. Sales sank after the one-time gain from the layoffs. And last week, the company sought bankruptcy protection.

Mr. Schoonover joined his former employees in the discard box in September, a nice bit of symmetry until you factor in his $1.8 million in severance, $50,000 in outplacement services and a two-year cushion on health benefits. (The clerks axed in Wichita and Tucson got a bit less.)

In the digital age, we’re told, the critical difference between success and failure is human capital — those heartbeats and fast hands that can make a good business great. So are newspapers reacting to their downturn as Circuit City did?

Every day, Romenesko, a journalism blog at the Poynter Institute, is rife with news of layoffs at newspapers, most of the time featuring some important, trusted names. It is not the young fresh faces that are getting whacked — they come cheap — but the most experienced, proven people in the room, the equivalent of the sales clerk who could walk you through a thicket of widescreen television choices to the one that actually works for you.

Using clerks as an analogue may not be the most flattering comparison, but I have always thought of journalism as more craft than profession and tell students that it is the accumulation of experience and technique that makes a journalist valuable, not some ineffable beckoning of the muse.

Right now, the consumer has all manner of text to choose from on platforms that range from a cellphone to broadsheet. The critical point of difference journalism offers is that it can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio and provide trusted, branded information. That will be a business into the future, perhaps less paper-bound and smaller, but a very real business.

Newspapers, which began the race with a huge lead in terms of human assets, may end up just another part of the underinformed commodity of clutter.

“Circulation declines were deeper in the last period, and I have to say that I think it has to do with the quality problems from cuts,” said Ken Doctor, a media analyst at Outsell Inc., a market analysis firm. “It is not just the cutting, but the cutting of more-experienced staff, a kind of slow-motion suicide. Circuit City cut its own throat by not realizing what their competitive advantage is, and newspapers are doing the same thing.”

Last week, Media General, a company that owns newspapers, television stations and Web sites in the Southeast, eliminated 80 positions in Florida, including a prominent columnist and the editorial page editor at The Tampa Tribune. “The Book of Ruth,” a long-running wiseacre feature by the longtime columnist Dan Ruth, will be missed, now and then. He and the editorial page editor, Rosemary Goudreau, follow a political columnist, Joe Brown, the movie critic Bob Ross and the classical music critic Kurt Loft to the exit.

Readers, especially the ones cranky and serious enough to still be buying newspapers, have not missed the trend.

“Fire your best employees and watch your business go out of business, just like Circuit City is finding out right now. Who wants to read old news when one can find quality articles outside of the TampaTribe. Bye Bye TampaTrib, you have fired one too many of your excellent personnel and now I am firing you!” said a reader, Bob, in a comment posted to The Feed blog at TampaBay.com, a media blog by Eric Deggans, a media and television reporter at The St. Petersburg Times.

Yes, the revenue picture is grim and growing grimmer. The biggest outlay besides putting the printed artifact on the street is salaries. And journalists tend to get a lot more indignant when the sheet cake and goodbye speeches are being served up on behalf of people who have the same job as they have.

But there is a business argument to be made here. Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.

“Newspapers are aimed at the movers and shakers in a community — the car dealers, the retailers, the restaurant owners,” said Alan D. Mutter, a technology and media consultant who blogs at Reflections of a Newsosaur (www.newsosaur.blogspot.com). “When they get together and realize that they are looking at the paper, that it is less compelling than it used to be, it creates a vicious cycle of weaker readership and weaker advertising.”

Last week, Sam Zell, a one-man newspaper wrecking crew running the Tribune Company, was interviewed at the FourSquare conference, the annual conclave of media moguls put on by Steve Rattner. I was not there, but I spoke to two people — neither of them journalists — who listened and were appalled by his disregard for his newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times.

Based on my conversation with those attendees, Mr. Zell, who, through a spokesman, declined to comment, suggested that newsrooms were just so much overhead and that what was ailing the industry was overweening journalistic ambition. I’ve read Mr. Zell’s products since he took over. I’ve seen his handiwork, including laying off Lynell George at The Los Angeles Times and Jeffrey Meitrodt at The Chicago Tribune, just two of the many veterans I happen to know he has sacrificed on the altar of debt service.

Newspapers confront tall, menacing seas in the coming year, but it is a sure bet that the ones that dump the ablest hands on deck will be among the first to sink below the waves.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com

What do I know?

The rumors have been swirling on the blogoshphere for weeks. Sam Zell. Dean Singleton. The Black Press. Those are but three of the suitors who are the imminent new owners of The San Diego Union-Tribune -- if you believe what you read in the media.

But the intensity of the talk, and the concern among people associated with the paper, has picked up in recent days, and the ongoing uncertainty has been more than a bit unsettling. The most persistent discussion is that someone has bought the paper and the sale will be announced on Friday. Then the ax will fall, and a whole lotta people will be laid off.

The fact that the country is suffering through what is arguably the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression doesn't give folks who eschewed the most recent round of buyouts much confidence.

Me? As Micky Sach's father says in Hannah and Her Sisters, `What do I know? I can't even figure out how to fix this damn can opener!'

But plug on I must. I'm getting paid a decent salary to help produce three sections of the paper and manage a team of six reporters and news assistants, not to speculate on something I cannot control. And I'm pretty damn proud of my work. Perhaps, in a few weeks, Sam Zell, Dean Singleton or some other schlub will conclude the paper could do just fine without me, thank you very much, but until then, I know of only one way: never cheat your employer.

It sounds corny, and it no doubt is, but my mother always said that whatever happens, happens for the best. She said it when I separated from my first wife, and I ended up later marrying someone I love and care about more than I could ever imagine. She said it when my Lakers got beat by an inferior Celtics team in the 1984 NBA Finals, and L.A came back with a vengeance the following season, beginning a run of three championships in four years. She said it when I screwed up on my SAT, and I ended up taking the ACT instead, ranking in top percentile in the country and getting accepted, honors at entrance, at every school I applied to.

So I'm sticking with the old Russian lady's sage advice, secure in the knowledge that whatever happens, happens for the best.