The entire town has watched with incredible sadness as the quality of our town’s only daily newspaper plummets with incredible speed. Recently published articles -- and sometimes, total lack thereof -- speak volumes as to the weakness of this paper and its lackluster management.
Mr. Baldwin, a town’s newspaper has a unique opportunity to be completely unlike any other business around: its sole purpose is to seek and report the truth. Run properly, it would be a sovereign entity, free of opinion and favor, and inaccessible to cajoling. Ms. Taylor, you have allowed the Journal to completely fail in this regard, making it bedfellows with large local corporations and important family names. Dollar amounts have been prioritized over serving the public. And that’s the crux: The town newspaper is its biggest and most relied-upon public servant. With our town expanding so greatly, our newspaper ought to be at least twice the size it currently runs. AP wires and lifting stories from USA Today should be few and far between. Reruns of the same stories year after year would stop in favor of news: the root of the word being, after all, “new.”
You must insist that home-grown journalists and sports nuts are put to work for their community, instead of non-locals who couldn’t possibly have the same connections inside our area, possibly know the local history, or possibly have the finger on the pulse of this community. Were you to make a few changes, and expand your editorial staff with local reporters, your subscribership would increase dramatically, and fast.
Ms. Taylor, you’ve made investigative reporting a thing of the past. Big stories go unpublished. Community reporting has fallen by the wayside. Some stories publish days after they hit the national news.
Shame on both of you.
[Image: today's paper, Newseum]
Ah, the conflict...quality local paper vs. squeezing every last little nickel of profit out of it. Guess who wins that struggle?
ReplyDeleteWhich brings up this dollar-spending question...how much money has Gannett spent on lawyers with their current lawsuit against the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association and, if Gannett wins, how long will it take to recoup that money?
Wonderful letter, but I wonder if things were so great under Thomson, which had a reputation for shaving nickels and dimes.
ReplyDeleteI love this letter! Gannett has destroyed many publications in Wisconsin, and I never hear positive comments about news or advertising in those newspapers. Luckily, we have other newspapers in Wisconsin -- not owned by Gannett. One of them, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, even won a Pulitzer this year.
ReplyDeleteAnon 4:12, the Stevens Point Journal was family owned until 1997, when it was sold to Thompson. Most of the original owners helped put together the competing Portage County Gazette (http://www.pcgazette.com/)
ReplyDeleteThomson. Not Thompson.
ReplyDeleteDonnellyC's comments can be applied word for word to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
ReplyDeleteEverybody is an expert on what would grow circulation.
ReplyDeleteEverybody is an expert on health care reform, TARP, the deficit, getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, paying for schools, how to get the Packers in the Superbowl, and why the Brewers have the worst home game record in baseball.
And everybody anonymously tells us how frickin brilliant they are in the forums.
When 'the family' owned the Journal they had a lousy press and people fell over themselves kowtowing to the 'right' folks in town. Thomson ownership drove capital improvements.
If SPJ had to cover the carrying costs of its own press, finance, circulation, prepress, IT and copy desk departments, it couldn't have survived the last two years. Sharing those costs with the other Central Wisconsin sites means that Marshfield, Wis. Rapids and Point could continue serving their communities in some capacity.
We don't do a great job, obviously. Whose newshole doesn't suck? But if the baby bears had been owned by separate families the last two years, only Mama Bear Wausau would be publishing today.
"I love this letter! Gannett has destroyed many publications in Wisconsin, and I never hear positive comments about news or advertising in those newspapers. Luckily, we have other newspapers in Wisconsin -- not owned by Gannett. One of them, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, even won a Pulitzer this year."
ReplyDeleteActually, Appleton has won WNA's best newspaper award four out of the last five years - and Green Bay won the year that Appleton missed. Those awards are judged by various other states' newspaper groups, both for advertising and editorial quality. Action Advertising in Fond du Lac continues to churn out awards for their publications.
Biggest telling facts are that our circ, our readership, and our revenue in Wisconsin can be favorably put up against anybody.
We aren't printing the paper we printed five or ten years ago. We're evolving just as our customers are.
To 5:23AM: What you fail to mention is that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel doesn't participate in the WNA so they aren't eligible for any awards. How many times would Green Bay and Appleton win if the Journal Sentinel partcipated?
ReplyDeleteI really don't see how a Wisconsin Newspaper Association (WNA) award compares to a Pulitzer Prize. Action Advertising only wins awards for their ads, which are now going to be produced in Iowa or Indiana. Looks like the days of Gannett papers winning awards in Wisconsin are over!
ReplyDeleteMark Baldwin is an intelligent and mostly kind man, who just didn't have the leadership in Wausau to make things work. He'd be better served to take his Northwestern education and be a teacher. Even worse, he ran off talented journalists, and brought in guys like Chris Schulte, who is about as notorious a journalist as there is after he had major run-ins at his previous stops. It's all really sad at what could have been.
ReplyDelete