Part of me always thought that I’d return to The Peoria Journal Star someday. Maybe after the kids were done with school, when I’d had my fill of bigger cities, I could go back to where my newspaper career began to be some kind of department head or columnist as I go gentle into the dotage of my golden years.
It might never have happened, but it was always fun to think about. Now, even that fantasy is all but gone. Operations at the Peoria Journal Star, along with the other 97 papers of the GateHouse chain, are now subject to being slimmed down and centralized at so-called publishing hubs outside Chicago and Boston. The same thing recently happened at my previous stop, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which had its copy and design desks outsourced to hubs in Dayton, Ohio, and West Palm Beach, Fla., as part of a centralizing program by the Cox chain.
From the sound of it, the desks in Peoria are safe for the time being. Its guild is in the midst of negotiating a new contract, which should keep the copy editors and designers in town for 18 months. After that, though, it’s a near certainty that people will lose their jobs. That has already been the case at some of GateHouse’s other papers in Central Illinois, where staffers in Galesburg and Springfield will be affected as soon as April.
Copy editors and page designers, a veritable family on nights and weekends, are being scattered to the wind by either relocating, finding other jobs or, more common these days, getting out of the business all together. And these are people who truly love print journalism, who love the image of the ink-stained wretch, who will work themselves within an inch of a coronary every night just to get one more high-school basketball box score in before deadline. It’s a true foxhole situation, the production side of newspaper work, when you hunker down in the slot and the rim as the last line of defense against mistakes, watching each other’s backs and diving on a hundred hand grenades a night. And when the paper is finally put to bed, you slump out in a tired, miserable pack to a late-night watering hole, where you bitch and complain about it until four in the morning. Then you wake up the next afternoon and do it again.
To work the copy desk on a small-town newspaper – or even a big-town newspaper – is to foster a protectiveness of that community, a sense of guardianship over the values and priorities of the people who live there. The word “stewardship” is used a lot in describing a copy desk’s handling of a local story, conveying a sense that it will be shepherded through the process with a hand that is sensitive to even its smallest details. I have a hard time believing that a universal desk outside of Boston will have that same sense of stewardship over issues that concern Eureka, Illinois. It helps to have to drive home through the town you have just written something about.
I asked somebody who might affected by all this what the process might look like, and this is what they said, although it was somewhat of a hypothesis: “Someone in Galesburg will edit the story, which gets sent to a central design desk somewhere. The designers will put together certain pages, like ‘national news’ and ‘national sports’ and ‘national agate.’ The page will be sent back to Galesburg for proofing before it's put on the press. Sounds like the page in Galesburg will be identical to the page in dozens of other GateHouse papers. I guess copy-editing would follow. From what I've heard at a couple of other places that already outsource, the editing and design eventually could be/would be handled by people who have never set foot in the community whose news they're editing.”
I'd like to hear your opinions on this subject, particularly my journalist friends, and I’ll touch on it a lot more in the coming weeks and months, but I just wanted to offer this quick gut reaction to this news. Friends of mine will lose their jobs — jobs that are thankless and have brutal hours and intense pressure and pay for shit and that they love with an intense dedication nonetheless. A community that I lived in for 10 years will have its local paper cut up into pieces and assembled like a piece of Ikea furniture by strangers hundreds of miles away. “The happy quotient is in the red,” one friend of mine in Central Illinois said of newsroom morale.
There’s no denying the economic pressures on the industry; things have to adapt. But that doesn’t negate the sense of loss we feel every time a hometown paper is homogenized by its chain ownership.
It might never have happened, but it was always fun to think about. Now, even that fantasy is all but gone. Operations at the Peoria Journal Star, along with the other 97 papers of the GateHouse chain, are now subject to being slimmed down and centralized at so-called publishing hubs outside Chicago and Boston. The same thing recently happened at my previous stop, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which had its copy and design desks outsourced to hubs in Dayton, Ohio, and West Palm Beach, Fla., as part of a centralizing program by the Cox chain.
From the sound of it, the desks in Peoria are safe for the time being. Its guild is in the midst of negotiating a new contract, which should keep the copy editors and designers in town for 18 months. After that, though, it’s a near certainty that people will lose their jobs. That has already been the case at some of GateHouse’s other papers in Central Illinois, where staffers in Galesburg and Springfield will be affected as soon as April.
Copy editors and page designers, a veritable family on nights and weekends, are being scattered to the wind by either relocating, finding other jobs or, more common these days, getting out of the business all together. And these are people who truly love print journalism, who love the image of the ink-stained wretch, who will work themselves within an inch of a coronary every night just to get one more high-school basketball box score in before deadline. It’s a true foxhole situation, the production side of newspaper work, when you hunker down in the slot and the rim as the last line of defense against mistakes, watching each other’s backs and diving on a hundred hand grenades a night. And when the paper is finally put to bed, you slump out in a tired, miserable pack to a late-night watering hole, where you bitch and complain about it until four in the morning. Then you wake up the next afternoon and do it again.
To work the copy desk on a small-town newspaper – or even a big-town newspaper – is to foster a protectiveness of that community, a sense of guardianship over the values and priorities of the people who live there. The word “stewardship” is used a lot in describing a copy desk’s handling of a local story, conveying a sense that it will be shepherded through the process with a hand that is sensitive to even its smallest details. I have a hard time believing that a universal desk outside of Boston will have that same sense of stewardship over issues that concern Eureka, Illinois. It helps to have to drive home through the town you have just written something about.
I asked somebody who might affected by all this what the process might look like, and this is what they said, although it was somewhat of a hypothesis: “Someone in Galesburg will edit the story, which gets sent to a central design desk somewhere. The designers will put together certain pages, like ‘national news’ and ‘national sports’ and ‘national agate.’ The page will be sent back to Galesburg for proofing before it's put on the press. Sounds like the page in Galesburg will be identical to the page in dozens of other GateHouse papers. I guess copy-editing would follow. From what I've heard at a couple of other places that already outsource, the editing and design eventually could be/would be handled by people who have never set foot in the community whose news they're editing.”
I'd like to hear your opinions on this subject, particularly my journalist friends, and I’ll touch on it a lot more in the coming weeks and months, but I just wanted to offer this quick gut reaction to this news. Friends of mine will lose their jobs — jobs that are thankless and have brutal hours and intense pressure and pay for shit and that they love with an intense dedication nonetheless. A community that I lived in for 10 years will have its local paper cut up into pieces and assembled like a piece of Ikea furniture by strangers hundreds of miles away. “The happy quotient is in the red,” one friend of mine in Central Illinois said of newsroom morale.
There’s no denying the economic pressures on the industry; things have to adapt. But that doesn’t negate the sense of loss we feel every time a hometown paper is homogenized by its chain ownership.
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