I started my career in journalism with a very small weekly newspaper, whose offices were housed in a historic building on Main Street in Mora, Minnesota. The floors were heavily scuffed linoleum that never really came clean; they were swept, but not often washed. Angled layout tables with banks of bright lights flanked a bustling back room, and the back door opened into an alley, where the pressman went to take smoke breaks after turning out stacks of flyers, postcards and other small print jobs. Every Tuesday at 5 p.m., a white panel van picked up our perfectly key-lined pages and took them to a large, commercial press in a Minneapolis suburb. We were owned by family-run company with a decades-old reputation for turning out high quality community newspapers – and a penchant for underpaying and overworking the staff.
As I later learned, this is not uncommon with small, privately-owned newspapers. I didn’t much care. I loved every minute of the 16 hour days I put in. Stumbling upon a career in journalism, for me, was like coming home. It wasn’t dedication so much as obsession. I can think of no other reason to work so hard for so little pay.
When I came to work for Hometown Communications here in Michigan, I finally earned a paycheck equal to my efforts, benefits I had only imagined. In a union shop, the bargained level of compensation raises the bar, so when I became an editor, my check and benefits followed suit.
I was living my dream: Running a small town newspaper, with main street offices and a satisfying level of compensation that allowed me to spend time with my family and friends, as often as my obsession allowed. I was the happiest journalist in the world – right up until they moved us off main street and started shuffling reporters and duties on the advice of management consultants.
The rest of the story you know – from the creep of other-than-local news onto the pages of the Farmington Observer to the completely non-local editions that surfaced at the end of the year, and now to the realization that any day, our longest-standing community newspaper could be shut down by its corporate owner.
I’ve taken this rambling and nostalgic journey because of a recent notice sent out by the Michigan Press Association, listing jobs available in journalism. Yes, even in the industry’s darkest times, some newspapers are hiring, and they are of the same mettle as the Kanabec County Times, where I built my journalistic skills covering the birth of triplet calves and the opening of deer season.
My friends who are still journalists tell me people don’t read newspapers any more, nobody’s interested in local government or the school board or seeing a kid’s Eagle Scout project detailed in a front page story. I think they’re wrong. I think nobody wants to read the kind of newspapers being churned out by corporate owners more interested in the bottom line than in getting to the bottom of a school district’s budget. I think nobody wants to read a newspaper that can no longer be intensely local, because the company has let go all but one reporter and one editor, and left them an ever-shrinking amount of space to fill.
They’re hiring in Big Rapids and Ionia and Ithaca. And not long ago, 44 people who work for the Observer & Eccentric newspapers lost their jobs. You’d think somebody at Gannett would at least wonder why.
–Joni Hubred-Golden
Publisher, The Enterprise
