(CN) — As the coronavirus outbreak intensified in the San Francisco Bay Area and other locations around the United States in mid-March, many editors in community newsrooms probably had a similar experience to that of Deborah Peterson, editor-in-chief of San Francisco Media Company.
The publishing company prints the San Francisco Examiner and the SF Weekly, both popular print newspapers in San Francisco — one of the wealthiest cities in the nation and the entire world.
Peterson looked at the statistics and noticed that news stories related to the raging pandemic afflicting the entire globe were getting 6,000 times the normal hits. Such an increase in readership during normal times would likely mean a windfall in advertising revenue, as the company’s salespeople could easily convince advertisers that the best way to get eyeballs on their product was by having it appear alongside some of the news website’s most popular stories.
But these aren’t normal times.
Instead, advertisers fear the nation stands on the precipice of another recession and they are therefore keeping money allocated for advertising back as they batten down their financial hatches.
“As a journalist, I know that ‘cruel irony’ is often an overused phrase,” Peterson said in a missive to the community last week. “However, it is the best one I can find to describe the situation the San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly are facing at this moment.”
While the product is as popular and indispensable to the community as ever, the journalists who produce it, including Peterson, will have to accept reductions in hours and ultimately in pay.
“Due to the deep declines in advertising and because fewer people are in the city every day to pick up the print version of our publications, we have temporarily stopped producing SF Weekly and SF Evergreen in print,” Peterson said.
Peterson and the dedicated journalists at San Francisco Media may even be lucky compared to others in the news business. Furloughs look like a blessing to those who have been laid off, as papers slim even further or go out of business altogether.
On April 3, Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Tim Warsinskey announced he was letting go of 22 reporters, photojournalists, and other members of the editorial team at Ohio’s largest daily.
“It is devastating for each of those we had to let go, and it is the hardest thing a newspaper editor ever has to do,” Warsinskey said.
In journalistic circles, there is less sympathy for the editors wielding the hatchet than for reporters losing jobs.
“Cleveland is losing too many talented journalists,” said Henry Gomez, a national reporter for BuzzFeed who got his start at The Plain Dealer. “People in northeast Ohio deserve more from companies that have gutted newsrooms at the expense of robust local coverage.”
Gomez’s comment hits on another important element of the decline in newsroom throughout the country: citizens of cities, towns, counties and states stand to receive significantly less information about the operation of institutions that significantly affect their daily lives.
“There’s that old saying that integrity is what you have when no one else is watching, but with politicians, you always have to watch them,” said Chuck Champion, interim director of the California Newspaper Publishers Association.
Champion said the only way newspapers can pay for professional journalists to provide critical coverage of public institutions and other aspects of society is through a radical reconfiguration of the business.
“On the other side of this thing, we are going to see a newspaper industry different than the one we see today,” he said.
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