Here’s a dispatch from inside the newsroom:
Everybody is disgruntled, to put it mildly, over the newsroom reorganization making editors answerable to ad sales people. It sucks. How could you not hate it? The problem is that a lot of us sit around complaining how bad everything is, but nobody has an idea about how we can save the newspaper. Personally, I think this is a bad idea, but if you ask me to come up with a better one, I can’t, and I doubt any of my colleagues can, either. ..It’s not like any of us can point to a newspaper somewhere else and say, “Look, they’re doing it right — let’s copy that strategy!” My guess is that the Mong memo will convince more writers and editors to get their resumes out there, because they’re not going to want to work in that kind of journalism environment. I get this, but we shouldn’t have any illusions about the situation that the newspaper industry is in. We’re at the brink. Newspapers that want to survive are going to have to start doing things they never imagined they’d be doing in healthier times. Don’t get me wrong, I hate this new strategy. But I prefer doing something bold to sitting back and doing the same old thing, and hoping that things will get better if we just sit tight.
That makes me reflect. You know, it’s easy for the rest of us to react with shock and outrage. But we don’t work there.
