NJ Media - NY Observer - Ledger, Record, Gannett Woes

Published in the New York Observer, Wednesday, August 12, 2008

Welcome to New Jersey, Media Wasteland
What if a big juicy scandal happens
and there’s no one to cover it?

by John Koblin | August 12, 2008
This article was published in the August 18, 2008, edition of The New York Observer.

Is New Jersey really that uninteresting?

Since the start of summer, The New York Times emptied out its two New Jersey bureaus in Trenton and Newark; in June, The Record of Bergen County announced it would shut down its headquarters and its reporters would be homeless; in July, The Star Ledger announced that it was cutting about a third of its newsroom, and its owners said they would consider selling the paper.

It’s becoming reasonable to wonder if, at this rate, there will be anyone left to cover the state soon.

“Can you cover the big stories that really mean something to people—how taxes are spent, projections for jobs, stuff you just need to know if you live here—if you have too few journalists?” said Frank Scandale, the editor of The Record. “That’s a concern I have now as a journalist and as a citizen of New Jersey.”

As usual, it all comes down to money. The Record’s publisher said it would save $2.4 million per year by shutting down its Hackensack home; Donald Newhouse, president of Advance Publications, which owns The Ledger, said the paper is losing $30 million to $40 million and needs to cut 200 jobs in order to stay afloat; The Times eliminated its bureaus amid larger job cuts.

So what caused the problems?

“The Ledger has been very badly hit by the real estate downturn,” said Mr. Newhouse in a phone interview with Off the Record. “New Jersey was a very strong real estate economy, but it soured. It is much more serious in New Jersey than in any of the other markets that we are publishing in.”

But even if the housing market is crashing, that’s cyclical. Those things don’t last. Newsday, the Long Island daily newspaper, is battered by the same things that are affecting Jersey papers, and yet it makes money—last year it had an operating cash flow of $88 million, according to its publisher, and it sold for $650 million in July.

Like Newsday, The Ledger caters, in theory, to a populous, affluent market rich in potential advertisers.

And yet it would be a stretch to imagine that The Ledger could be sold for anything like that number, since it loses so much money. (Mr. Newhouse declined to discuss precise financials.)

One reason The Ledger, or The Record for that matter, could never be the Newsday of New Jersey is simply that there’s competition.

“Those papers aren’t surrounded by water, which, believe me, helps Newsday a lot,” said John Morton, a newspaper-industry analyst. “It sort of insulates the Long Island market and Newsday owns Long Island. New Jersey, in the overall market, is one of the most highly competitive markets in the country. If you look at a map and see how many daily newspapers are in that part of New Jersey, it’s astounding.”

There are 18 daily newspapers in the state that are members of the New Jersey Publishers Association, a trade organization. A retrenchment, in retrospect, was only a matter of time.

It’s been grim.

“It almost happened overnight,” said State Senate President, former governor, and all-around Jersey cheerleader Richard Codey.

The smaller papers haven’t fared much better than the big ones. Gannett, whose stock price recently hit an 18-year-low, eliminated 55 jobs this year at four of its six Jersey papers including the Asbury Park Press, the Home News Tribune in East Brunswick, the Courier News in Bridgewater and the Daily Record in Parsippany. This came just weeks after it extracted 83 buyouts from the Press, the Home News Tribune, the Courier News, the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill and the Daily Journal in Vineland. The Record’s sister paper, the Herald News, recently collapsed its sports department into the Record’s since it wasn’t sustainable to run both independently. The Ledger’s sister paper, the Trenton Times, is absorbing 25 buyouts.

But Mr. Codey seemed particularly shocked at the rapid dissolution of The Times’ presence on the other side of the river.

Shortly after The Times announced it would cut 100 jobs earlier this year, the paper began to unroll plans to remove reporters from its Newark and Trenton bureaus. Ever since The Times eliminated most of the original content for its Sunday New Jersey section two years ago in favor of consolidated material shared by all its regional supplements, its presence in the state has been dropping. Now, it’s pretty much all gone.

“Fortunately, when I was governor, The Times did really good stuff,” said Mr. Codey. “I miss it. Now I go to the metro section and when I see a Jersey story, I go, ‘Whoa! This is unbelievable—a story!’”

In a July Q&A with Times metro editor Joe Sexton, a reader asked why the paper had abandoned the state. Mr. Sexton wrote: “Dude, ouch! But Jersey? Love Jersey.”

He said that The Times was leaving behind David Kocieniewski, an accomplished reporter who is well regarded by the masthead. He added that The Times was indeed planning to “concentrate more on New York City,” but pledged that the paper would continue to send reporters to Jersey to cover “major news” and trends on the regular metro beats. Also: Peter Applebome’s twice-weekly “Our Towns” column.

But the numbers speak for themselves. The dozen or so reporters and editors that The Times had covering the state two years ago are gone, farmed out to cover areas still of interest to the paper. David Chen, the former Trenton bureau chief, is the New York City Hall bureau chief; Andrew Jacobs, who covered Cory Booker in Newark, is now in Beijing; Newark reporter and published poet Tina Kelley is, according to an internal memo sent out by Mr. Sexton, “spending more and more of her reporting life online, busting rhymes here and there along the way.”

The cost-saving measures that The Times has taken in Jersey, however, aren’t much more dramatic than what The Record has done. In order to stay afloat, the Hackensack-based daily is actually shutting down its offices and sending reporters onto the streets.

“We have two counties we focus on—primarily Bergen and Passaic—so our reporters will be in these counties and they’ll be running around with their cell phone, a laptop, a camera, and he’ll be writing a story in the lobby of a building and he can shoot and file a picture,” said Mr. Scandale, the editor of the paper.

The Record will keep a small office in West Paterson, but Mr. Scandale said the vast majority of its reporters wouldn’t have office space there, and only some editors would have some.

“People will be coming in and out all day long,” he said. “They can touch base, or not come in for three or four days because there’s no need to.”

Job cuts notwithstanding, The Ledger, under the leadership of Jim Willse, is acting with relative restraint.

It has always been regarded as a good-paying place to work—interns are paid $700 a week, according to one source—and Mr. Willse raised the salaries company-wide. In addition, The Ledger still generates stories out of fully formed suburban bureaus. As a result, it is a good editorial product, but it is expensive to produce.

That, with the combination of the loss in real estate advertising, seems to have taken its toll on the paper.

“It is a perfect storm of economic problems,” said Mr. Newhouse. “It is a very bad year, there’s no question about it. I don’t think there were any forecasts that would predict how serious the downturn would be.”

The Ledger will do it the old-fashioned way: job cuts. The paper will cut 200 non-unionized employees, and one newsroom source anticipates that will mean about 100 newsroom jobs—a little less than a third of the newsroom’s body count of roughly 350. In the course of announcing the cuts, Advance Publications said in a memo that if the cuts couldn’t be achieved, they would consider selling the paper. (Observer publisher Jared Kushner was cited in news reports as a potential buyer.)

Mr. Scandale is confident that The Record will remain a good paper, even without a newsroom. But when asked what the general decline means for the state, and if things will actually get far worse than they are right now, he didn’t offer much.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It remains to be seen.”

jkoblin@observer.com.

Online story here. Archived here.

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Elections - Courier - Storch endorsed for Council

Published in the Courier News, Friday, October 26, 2007

[Editorial Endorsement]
Storch in Plainfield

Plainfield has two City Council seats up for election this year -- and only one contest. Incumbent Linda Carter is running unopposed for an at-large seat representing Wards 1 and 4 after the withdrawal of her Republican opponent.

That leaves Democratic Councilman Cory Storch defending against Republican Deborah Dowe in the 2nd Ward.

Dowe is a sharp, fresh thinker with an extensive volunteer background in the city who ran unsuccessfully for City Council a year ago. She is also an eloquent champion for social reform, advocating for new approaches to engaging youth and providing incentives for achievement.

Dowe actually seems best suited for a school board position; she was recently appointed by Gov. Jon Corzine's administration to serve on the New Jersey Mathematics and Science Coalition promoting improvements in those subject areas. We believe, however, that Dowe would also provide a strong and welcome voice on the city council. She is a quality candidate.

Storch, however, is one of the best of the incumbent council members and deserves re-election.

Storch rode into city government on the New Democrats wave spearheaded by the late former mayor, Al McWilliams. He retains much of that independent spirit while reminding everyone that much of the city's progress was set in motion under McWilliams, such as greater attention to roads and infrastructure.

Storch has emerged as one of the City Council's more hawkish fiscal watchdogs, and believes the city should continue with McWilliams' vision to focus economic development on bringing jobs into the city. He also brings some practical environmental sensibility to the table; he explains, for example, that any transit village development near the train station must heed green design initiatives to remain competitive in the long run with similar projects in other communities.

We endorse Storch.

Online story here. Archived here.

(Note: Online stories may be taken down by their publisher after a period of time or made available for a fee. Links posted here is from the original online publication of this piece.)

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Race Reporting - Ledger - OpEd

Published in the Star-Ledger, Sunday, July 15,2007

[OpEd]
Race reporting 40 years ago, and its legacy today

BY LINDA OCASIO

On July 13, 1967, as the Newark riots began to unfold, The Star- Ledger's lead story described "carloads of Negroes" surrounding City Hall, and "large roving bands of Negro youths." Three days later, the newspaper's analysis focused on "unrestrained marauding teenagers," restless youths who "came forth with the muscle and manpower to transform a localized inci dent into a rampaging riot."

It was loaded language, convey ing threat and intimidation. There was a palpable mix of fear, anger and bewilderment in the reporting -- a lot of heat and very little light.

The Star-Ledger wasn't the only publication to take that tone. Magazines such as Time and Life -- still-powerful players in a long-ago media environment, before cable news and the Internet -- devoted cover stories to the riots. Reading their coverage of the Newark un rest is revealing of how race was discussed back then.

Time magazine's July 21, 1967, cover carried the banner, "Anatomy of a Race Riot," and featured Newark cab driver John Smith on the cover -- the man whose ru mored death at the hands of the police was one of the factors that ignited the riots. Inside, the text and picture captions treated the mayhem as beyond comprehen sion, and took a dig at the social programs launched by President Lyndon Johnson.

Under a picture of a gutted store, a caption read: "After -- not before -- the Great Society." Another caption, below pictures of Gov. Richard Hughes and Newark Mayor Hugh Addonizio, read: "Even the improvements fueled the grievances."

Time's writers concluded that events in Newark unfolded for reasons "not fully foreseeable before hand nor easily explicable afterward."

Interestingly, Life, Time's sister publication, on July 28, 1967, had the exact opposite viewpoint. Its cover headline was "Newark: The Predictable Insurrection." On the cover of Life, a black child laid in his own blood on a street. The child, Joe Bass, 12, of Newark, was caught in the crossfire as a National Guardsman took aim at a looter.

Analysis by writers like Shana Alexander and Hugh Sidey begins to slowly connect the dots: the growing gap between white afflu ence and the black ghetto, the ascendance of a more militant approach to civil rights in the North, and prescient questions about Great Society programs.

"Some $30 billion ... will be poured into the cities and their people in one form or another this year," Sidey wrote. "And yet it may not be enough or it may not be properly directed."

Many readers might attribute the uneven coverage and analysis to the make-up of most newsrooms 40 years ago: They were overwhelmingly white and male. But many white reporters and editors distinguished themselves with their coverage of segregation in the South and the nonviolent resistance of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. Somehow, the press dropped the ball when it came to racial unrest in the North.

"I had this feeling that some (editor) high up had to say, 'Why didn't we see that coming,'" said Hank Klibanoff, the managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We were looking at the South so intently."

Klibanoff is the co-author with Gene Roberts, a former top editor at the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, of "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation." Their book, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for history, documents how the press brought the injustice of the segregated South to the forefront of public consciousness. But when Watts exploded in 1965 with six days of rioting, followed by Newark and Detroit a few years later, none of that experience in the South mattered.

In fact, the newspapers of the North had already failed to note a related story, one of the most im portant of the 20th century -- the great post-World War II migration of African-Americans from the small rural towns of the South to the big cities of the North, just at the moment when those cities were starting to lose their industrial muscle and political clout.

The Northern press simply had not done its homework, and had no meaningful and reliable sources to draw on when people took to the streets.

It took the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders -- more popularly known as the Kerner Commission, after its chairman, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner -- to lay out the indisputable facts that the media was not equipped to fully grasp at that point. The Kerner Report found the uprisings in Watts, Newark, Detroit and other cities was evidence that "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal."

"What the rioters appeared to be seeking," the report stated, "was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens. Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it."

And the Kerner Report included a scathing critique of the news media, both print and broadcast, for sensationalizing riot coverage, even hyping damage and in jury estimates in some cases. The Kerner panel called on the news media to diversify their ranks, and to commit resources to covering black communities on a regular basis.

Anyone picking up a newspaper today can see evidence that the in dustry heard the panel loud and clear. "The presentation of the diverse culture we live in is much more of a mainstay in newspapers," said Klibanoff. "The prominent role of African-Americans in our lives manifests in the media in a more ordinary way." We're "absolutely" more aware of the importance of inclusiveness, he said. "Not just African-Americans, but the whole melting pot."

Still, even today, newsrooms must guard against complacency. A good question in any newsroom, said Klibanoff, is "Who aren't we covering?"

"And not just a one-hit," Kliba noff added, "but capturing and freeze-framing the world around us, the impact of those people on our culture, being curious about the world around us."

In "Race Beat," Roberts and Klibanoff note that "Watts coverage read as if it were written from a distance, from outside the ghetto looking in."

The same could be said of the coverage that followed the Newark riots. For the media, the greatest legacy of 1967 might very well be how events in Newark and other cities forced the news industry to examine its own practices, and to embrace the intrinsic value of diversity, both for the people who staff the nation's newsrooms and the communities they cover.

Linda Ocasio is a New Jersey freelance writer.


Link to online story.

(Note: Online stories may be taken down by their publisher after a period of time or made available for a fee. Links posted here is from the original online publication of this piece.)

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)