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Front Page Blues

In a spiraling economy and changing media landscape, The News Journal and other local papers, like every paper in the country, have had to cut expenses and re-orient themselves. Fair enough. But how much can you cut while remaining a viable news source?

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Two weeks before Christmas, Kevin Noonan sat down at his home in Arden and began assembling his resume for the first time since 1977.

That’s the year he went to work for the Wilmington Morning News and Evening Journal as a part-time sports reporter. Back then, he would crank three sheets of copy paper separated by two sheets of carbon into a Smith-Corona manual typewriter, then tap out stories about high school football and basketball games. He quickly progressed into meatier assignments, first covering UD sports, then the Philadelphia 76ers. In 1980 he began a 25-year stint as Eagles beat writer. And in 2005 came his final promotion—sports columnist.

“I did a lot of local stuff [in the column], which I really liked doing,” he says. “It had much more of an impact than when I wrote about somebody like Donovan McNabb. I don’t think Donovan McNabb cared what I wrote about him, but when you wrote about a local kid, that went in somebody’s scrapbook.”

 Noonan speaks about his News Journal career in the past tense because it’s over. On December 2, he and 30 other employees—15 of them from the editorial department—were told their jobs had been eliminated by the paper, one of 85 dailies (including USA Today) owned by Gannett Co., Inc. Their severance package: one week of pay and benefits for each year of service, capped at 26 weeks.

Noonan is 55. He is not ready for retirement. He has a son in college and a daughter who will marry in June. By then, his severance pay will have ended. A newspaper lifer, he sees no place to apply his considerable skills.

The News Journal cutbacks are the most local manifestation of a national trend. In the past few months, the Tribune Co., publishers of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, filed for Chapter 11. The Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger laid off about 40 percent of its newsroom. The Christian Science Monitor announced it would print weekly instead of daily, and beginning this month, the Detroit Free Press—a Gannett property—and Detroit News will cut home delivery to three days a week.

A cratering economy, rising production costs and the Internet have created a perfect storm that threatens to sink the “dead tree” segment of the newspaper industry. Faced with the need to cut expenses, advertisers have reduced space buys. (Gannett’s third quarter 2008 report showed that advertising revenues for its publishing segment were $977.1 million, down from $1.19 billion in the third quarter of ’07.) Newsprint prices have skyrocketed during the past year. (The News Journal claims they jumped 26 percent.) And perhaps most significant, the Internet has become the go-to instant news source for many Americans, especially those under 30.
 

Page 2: Front Page Blues, continues...