I will admit - I have been a fairly vocal critic of the Dallas Morning News, the paper of record for my city. But I've never really talked about why, but today - upon learning something that left me with that day-after-four-Mambo-Taxis feeling - I feel as if I must.
Every young journalist (well, at least in the past) dreams of moving up to a large metro daily. You toil in smaller cities. You even do some time in community journalism, at some small-town paper, but eventually, you think, you'll get that call-up.
Think of it as slogging away in the farm team before Ron Washington calls you and asks you to come play short stop for the Rangers.
Well, when I got that call, I was excited. I'd worked hard my entire career to work at a big daily. Granted, it was a editing a weekly section that everyone was mocking at the time, but to me, that was a challenge. If I could get my coverage area to buy in, if I could turn it around, I'd consider my venture a success.
The pay was infinitesimal. I wagered that with my savings I could survive a year. After that, I'd re-evaluate. Within a year, I had another job, won in part because of that DMN experience on my resume - and I'd like to think that I did accomplish my goal of making my section less mock-worthy.
It's no secret that the DMN - along with the rest of the industry - is hurting. As I've said before, I think that it has less to do with any perceived political leanings and more to do with the negligence when it came to being early adopters of the Web. If newspapers - singly or collectively - had worked harder in the beginning to monetize online news, perhaps this slump would be a different story all together. People at that time were used to paying for a newspaper to get their news, or waiting for the local television news - likely, they'd be comfortable with paying for news online, too. Instead, newspapers by and large treated the Internet as a fad for basement dwelling nerd herders.
And now they flounder, trying to tread water in quicksand while simultaneously figuring out how to get online readers to pay for something they've been getting for free for decades. Some newspapers have been more successful than others at doing this. But since there's no cohesive effort to monetize sites, it's like running down to Wal-Mart for milk because it's cheaper than Target. Why pay for content from newspaper A when I can look at newspaper B and get that information?
But the Dallas Morning News' latest restructuring effort, where sales staff are named GM's of sections and oversee senior editors, makes me wholly uncomfortable. I frequently yell at the dead tree product as if it was a live person, but never have I had a visceral reaction to a decision like I had today.
I literally wanted to puke.
I know times are tough. I know newspapering appears to be a dying art. But this? This is rearranging deck chairs at the most obvious level. Instead of looking at the issues pulling the paper down, the powers that be create more bureaucracy, and more ways for their readers to question their ethics.
Instead of this, why not rid yourselves of employees that refuse to pick up more than one oar? You have a whole passel of Metro columnists that don't do much or any reporting. You have a bloated editorial staff that could be shuffled to cover things people care about. You can't decimate a newsroom without a gut check, and I do not think that gut check has been performed.
I worked for a guy who was in sales once. When it became obvious that he felt ad sales should dictate content, I was eventually faced with three choices: Battle every day, give in, or quit.
I tried number one for a while, till it landed me in the hospital. After that, number three became my choice.
I just hope that my former co-workers at the DMN aren't faced with the same three choices.
