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Newspapers around the country are struggling to survive. Some are cutting back on staff and shrinking the size of paper itself. Other papers have closed altogether after more than a century of publishing. Newspapers in the Lone Star State are not immune to the recession. Texas Public Radio’s Terry Gildea spent some time inside the San Antonio Express-News to see how one of the state’s major newspapers is retooling itself to stay alive.
August 14, 2009 · The past several months have been difficult for the Express-News, and Bob Rivard says people are wondering about the health of the paper.
“People all the time, they’ll ask me, and I can just tell what they really mean. They go, ‘Are you okay?’ I’m talking about community leaders, neighbors and other people. ‘Are you okay?’ What they’re really asking is the paper going to survive, and are you going to survive with it,” said Rivard.
In the decade plus that Rivard has held the post of Editor and Executive Vice President for the San Antonio Express-News, he’s seen a newsroom of 300 journalists cut down to less than 200. In February the paper went through a difficult layoff – cutting a third of the staff and shrinking the physical size of the paper itself.
“I mean, it was massive. This wasn’t about cleaning out the dead wood, or letting the least talented go. What we did was say going forward, what’s our core mission going to be and who are the people best equipped to do that, in print and online?” said Rivard.
Many talented and vital members of the newsroom got a pink slip on that day. The newspaper’s transportation reporter who had several decades of institutional memory walked out the door, and the reporter covering the water beat was also laid off. Scott and Martha Stroud were one of several couples at the paper depending on it for their household income. Scott was working on the Metro Desk as an editor on that fateful day in February.
“A lot of us were just sitting around the newsroom waiting to see who was next, and then Martha came up with her sheet of paper,” said Scott Stroud.
Martha Stroud had worked at paper for more than five years as a page designer for the features section. She and her colleagues began to worry about their jobs when rumors surfaced that some design operations would be transferred to Express-News sister paper, The Houston Chronicle. That February morning, the newspaper’s management team called Martha into a small conference room.
“It was a room I’d never been in before, and it had a sofa and a coffee table and a couple of chairs and a big box of Kleenex, just in case. And I was shaking, even knowing that it was coming,” said Martha Stroud.
Martha was asked to stay on for another month or so, until her design job and other operations could be transferred to the Chronicle. But now with nearly fifty percent of their household income gone, the Strouds are making some tough choices about how to retool their lives to survive. When Martha’s unemployment runs out the family might have to sell their house, but Martha is confident they can get through this difficult time.
“One of us still has a job. Our children are in good schools, and we could probably find a place to rent that we can afford and still keep our kids in these schools so they wouldn’t be uprooted. That’s a luxury that a lot of families don’t have right now, even a lot of newspaper families don’t have,” Martha Stroud said.
Scott Stroud’s recent promotion to Metro Columnist has given back some of the families’ lost income, but the layoff has also given Martha more time to spend with her kids.
“It’s worked out really well. My kids are so happy. We get to go to the pool and I there to take them to the library, which I never did before, just never had time,” said Martha Stroud.
The Strouds’ say that despite the hardship they’re enduring, they know others are having a more difficult time. Martha hopes her twenty years experience in page design will yield some job opportunities in the future. Until then she’s focusing on honing her talents as an artist and illustrator. Meanwhile Scott and many other journalists at the paper are still coming to terms with the aftermath of the layoffs.
“Some of the people that walked out the door, you just shake your head and say how can that be? At some point you stop asking those questions and just go forward in your own career and do the best you can and hope it doesn’t happen to you but it can happen to any of us,” said Scott Stroud.
The downsized staff is struggling to produce the same product it used to with thirty percent more people. The workload has doubled for many reporters. Tracy Idell Hamilton covers City Hall for the paper, but after the layoff, she also has to cover CPS Energy.
“Every week I have to make a decision about what to cover and what not to cover or what to try to push off, and so it becomes a matter of what’s the most pressing daily story, and what can be pushed back and then honestly what is going to go uncovered. There are definitely stories that have gone uncovered because we just simply don’t have the time,” said Hamilton
The management team had a difficult time deciding what kinds of coverage the paper could do without, but everyone agreed that investigative reporting had to remain part of the paper’s core mission. As a result, none of the special projects reporters were let go. John Tedesco is as an investigative reporter for the Express-News, and, even after the layoffs, he’s still able to focus on only one beat, but he thinks at some point he might be assigned another beat.
“Yeah, I’m basically expecting that to happen at some point. I mean, something’s got to give. You only have so many bodies in the newsroom and these stories have got to be written. So it will probably happen,” said Tedesco.
He hopes the Express-News will continue to focus on the kinds of investigative reporting that sets newspapers apart from other media sources. Tedesco has worked on dozens of watch-dog stories, but a piece he co-authored earlier this year with fellow projects reporter Karisa King made a tangible difference. It was the story of Raquel Padilla, a mental patient who was discharged from a state hospital and given a bus ticket, only to be found dead three days later.
“When that story finally ran, it took several weeks, but it sparked outrage and State Senator Carlos Uresti wrote a bill that would attempt or attempt to prevent that kind of thing from happening and that bill is now law. That’s a good thing. Good things happen when you give reporters time and resources to dig into stuff,” said Tedesco.
The newspaper is physically smaller and Bob Rivard says the price for patrons will continue to go up, but it’s important to point out that the paper’s parent company, the Hearst Corporation, is debt free and that the Express-News continues to make money. The layoffs were necessary to help sustain that profitability, but it’s unclear how long that model can be sustained when readers are asked to pay more for less content. The paper is also competing with a generation of readers who get most of their news online – for free. But Rivard believes the Express-News is a more focused paper and that the stories inside its pages matter to local residents, now more than ever.
“Let’s defend what we built. Let’s preserve it. Let’s convince the community with yet more good journalism that we’re essential to community and that we’re not going anywhere,” said Rivard. |
