IL's Stephen George asks: "Has The Courier-Journal lost its way?"

What is journalism now?

IL's Stephen George has written a very frightening glimpse into daily affairs at the once mighty C-J. This one's a must-read, folks.

With more staff cuts and a newsroom reorganization driven by market research, has The Courier-Journal lost its way? by Stephen George (Insider Louisville)

The executive editor and publisher of The Courier-Journal called the news staff of about 40 into a meeting on Tuesday afternoon, ostensibly to talk about the future.

That future, they soon learned, would start with all of them reapplying for their jobs. It’s a particularly dehumanizing part of an ongoing process driven by parent company Gannett and embraced by C-J executives to incorporate more market research and demographic trends into the paper’s reporting.

Journalism -- it's the perfect place for marketing professionals, rather like the best time to smoke cigarettes is while you're pumping gas.

The extraordinary contraction of the newspaper industry during the past decade has prompted round after round of layoffs and shrinking page counts. As ad revenue has declined, newspaper executives at the C-J and up the Gannett chain have scrambled to figure out what’s wrong, devoting increasingly more time and money to market research. Reporters and editors at the C-J have been subjected to various initiatives — driven by marketing professionals and often carrying goofy corporate rhetoric — designed to better connect them with their audience, a goal most media companies strive to achieve.

Uh oh ... it's the "profit motive" thingy again.

The memo is an explicit indicator of the change in approach C-J executives are pushing. Traditionally, reporters have been protected from the market pressures affecting their newspapers. It’s as old as newspapers themselves: Profit motive can corrupt the pursuit of news and investigations that aren’t exactly sexy but remain essential to the public discourse.

Now, reporters at all Gannett publications are being equipped with technology to monitor the performance of their online stories in real time. This might seem like useful information, but the implication has been clear: Write stories that people want to read. Never mind the traditional role of newspapers as keepers of the public trust.

“I don’t think they’re ignoring (the strong journalistic tradition at the C-J),” said one staffer. “I think they’re trying to obliterate it. It’s how can we get the most metric hits.”

It's a depressing and necessary read. I'm fond of reminding the uninformed that they're entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts, but as should be painfully obvious, we've already entered a protracted period of fact elimination. Then what?

You can depend on the Courier-Journal ...

... because it ALWAYS will let you down.

Belatedly, I've noticed the many broken links in my various blogs, these being because the C-J has instituted for-pay archiving. I'm not sure how long ago, and for which content, but the verdict is the same: Henceforth, either I'll not link to the C-J, or if I do, the entire text will appear here until the toll-loving Gannett dweebs issue a cease and desist order against me.

Wankers.

If it's a Gannett newspaper, that's gah-NET ...

... as in net irrelevance pursuant to the hurried abandonment of journalism in favor of pandering to a vanishing readership as a glorified advertising circular. If anything about this smells like the C-J's bridge envy, and its shameless advocacy of this region's all-time great transportation boondoggle, you're free to draw perfectly appropriate conclusions.

Cincinnati Enquirer abandoning city interests, by Randy A. Simes (UrbanCincy blog).

The answer to that may lie in the conversation I had with a content editor at the Enquirer three years ago where he said, “We tell the stories our readership wants to hear.” Encouraging right? The Enquirer does not care about providing fair/balanced news coverage, they care only about their bottom line and telling the story they feel their readers want to hear.

More on the C-J's layoffs from LEO's Stephen George.

LEO’s Stephen George considers the week’s layoffs at the Courier-Journal, and provides much needed context in the newspaper’s continual decline during the Gannett era.

Guillotine day at the C-J

My fundamental antipathy to Gannett notwithstanding — from USA Today to the C-J and its ancillaries, this company has perpetrated some unspeakable atrocities on the Fourth Estate — I really do feel bad about this, not only because some good people will lose their jobs, but because a dying newspaper suggests so many bad things for a city.

As Bluegill previously noted, Floyd County beat reporter Dick Kaukas is numbered among the voluntary layoffs. I learned yesterday that another of them is my old friend, high school classmate and former Public House bartender Buddy Sandbach, who departs the newspaper with just under 30 years of service. He gets a half-year's pay a benefits in return for cleaning out his desk.

Buddy saw this coming some years back, so it isn’t as if he re-enters the job market entirely unprepared. He recalls the very first company meeting under Gannett control, circa 1986, and the new management’s response when asked how to pronounce the name: “Gan-NET – as in NET profit.”

The thing that struck me while reading the timely coverage of the layoffs provided by the The ‘Ville Voice blog was the sheer number of comments from people doing a Hitlerian victory jig because the accursed left-wing liberal newspaper finally is sinking beneath the waves.

That’s profoundly odd, if not entirely unexpected given the propensities of the region. After all, most of what Gannett has done in its two-decade-long clearchanneling of the C-J has been for the benefit of the fascist fringe's carnivorous demand to be spoonfed material that reinforces preconceived superstitions and bile, not news in any sense of journalism.

If anything, my complaint would be that the C-J’s not been liberal enough since, say, 1985.

Then again, I'm an atheist, and not to be trusted.