Robb Montgomery

As a nation that prepares to celebrates independence and summer fun tomorrow it has to be said not many U.S. journalists will be thinking about such lofty ideals. For more than few of them independence will mean liberation from their newspaper jobs, and quite possibly journalism as well.

I have been trying to keeps tabs on the journalism layoff phenom here in the States where newsroom leaders are struggling to reorganize their operations around the realities of consumer demand for news and the methods they will use to match their audiences.
Mostly this has taken the form of lopping off large sections of the editorial staff. Many other bloggers are saying that this is not leadership at all, but rather butchering.

I have been tracking these stories on my del.icio.us account for probably 18 months now and at the bottom of this post is the list of the last 30 items in that feed. (Subscribe to the RSS feed)

It has to be stressed that this ‘work force adjustment’ for newspapers is not a global one but largely a North American one and seems to be affecting regional U.S. newspapers that are not family-owned. True, regionals in the UK seem to be caught up in it now as well - but to classify this meltdown as an industry-wide phenom is not accurate. It is just not happening in many other regions of the world.

When Editor and Publisher calls - you answer the iPhone
I talked with Editor & Publisher’s Editor-at-large, Mark Fitzgerald the other day about what is happening in the Chicago newsrooms and Tribune papers as they go after their T-6 plan to remake all the papers into quicker-reads with 50-50 ad/editorial ratios.

Mark called me and we chatted for a long time. I told him that I had had an exchange recently with Ann Marie Lipinski (Her Blackberry, my iPhone) about her plans for the summer redux and that I had requested a few minutes to talk with her and film some documentary footage for a film I’d like to make about this historic shift in U.S. newspapers. I have interviews in the can with other editors-in-chief from my recent world travels and plenty of footage inside U.S. newsrooms and with print journalists facing big changes.

Could be an interesting documentary film project, no? Someone other than Martin Gee has to visually account for this story unfolding in plain sight in U.S. Newsrooms. If I knew how, I would nominate Martin for a Pulitzer Prize for his photography essay of the impact of changes in his California newsroom. Martin believes he paid the ultimate price for publishing his honest visual journalism. On Friday he lost his job. If his termination was punishment for truth-telling, and only the editor-in-chief of the San Jose Mercury News knows for sure, then he deserves the Pulitzer. Truly. Brave.
Merc editor David J. Butler declined to comment on Gee’s termination when E&P’s journalists came calling.

Meanwhile, back at the Chicago Tribune . . .
Tribune editor Lipinski politely declined my requests for what will amount to only a few minutes of scenes in a larger film documentary. And, I told Mark that I have to wonder ‘why is that?’ She’s a reporter, she knows a good story, She knows she can’t tell it herself. So what is it? I appealed to her journalism, promised to embargo a report until after the paper relaunched but could not persuade her that this was a story worth covering.

I know it’s painful what she has to do and it is not her initiative, but this summer represents what could be her finest hour in leading change in trying times for her newspaper. How could she stand for enterprise documentary quality and independent journalism and be unwilling to have her act in that history independently recorded? I am still editing footage in my Chicago studio this summer if she changes her mind.

Mark told me he was trying to reach Lipinski for a comment and then asked me to pass along my advice for Sam Zell. (Free consulting for a billionaire?) I relayed to Mark what I though were some of the key challenges in redesigning a company and in refocusing the culture and after that I wished Mark well on getting Ann Marie to talk on the record about her project.

A Florida editor has a plan . . .
An editor-in-chief in Florida has a bold plan and is reshaping her newsroom as a web-first enterprise.
I found this hopeful and interesting item - A reporter intern in Tampa blogged something fresh about the changes happening in her newsroom. Metro Intern Jessica DaSilva posted details of the candid talk her editor-in-chief had with the staff.

One wonders if this intern will suffer retribution for publishing closed door comments from the floor of her newsroom. Nah, all she wrote was words . . . If she took pictures she could be in real trouble. Just ask Martin Gee.