After some pain, we’ll ‘reset’ with a slightly smaller staff

It’s not a great week when you begin by announcing 13 percent of the company’s employees will be leaving.

And so it was at The News Tribune last week, where both voluntary buyouts and layoffs are reducing the staff for two reasons – because a small part of our revenue stream has permanently gone away, thanks to the Internet, and because of the economic downturn the whole nation is experiencing.

The newsroom fared relatively better. About 8 percent of the newsroom staff is being cut. That’s significant, but won’t stop us from doing strong public service journalism (investigative and accountability stories) and providing a relatively comprehensive local report (news, business, sports and lifestyle).

We still have more than 100 journalists dedicated to covering the South Sound. No competitor has more than a handful. And the total audience for daily newspapers continues to grow, which is the best indicator I know of future success.

But it was still a tough week. And staffers reacted in the ways you would expect.

Monday a lot of folks were stunned. You learn that people you’ve worked with your whole careers won’t be here after a few weeks. Where life in the newsroom once seemed solid and certain, things now seem more tenuous.

Each day of the rest of the week was slightly better, sort of like a radioactive half-life: 50 percent better than the day before, but never likely to be completely the same.

One of the newsroom editors baked every day and left her work on the meeting table in the middle of the newsroom. Brownies. Apple pie for breakfast one day. Cheesecake on Friday.

The people who will be leaving at the end of this week aren’t leaving because they’re unnecessary, or because they weren’t good at their jobs. They’re leaving because our revenue base is smaller, and insufficient for the larger enterprise we were 10 years ago, or even five years ago.

The only good thing I can think of about the departures is that they end the looming anxiety about whether such cutbacks would come.

Most every other media company in the nation – broadcast and newspaper – has had multiple rounds of layoffs over the past several years. This was the first for McClatchy, our parent company, and we hope the last.

This week we’ll say farewell to our colleagues and friends and start the task in earnest of deciding how to move on with a slightly smaller staff.

As the week wore on, you could hear conversations begin about how the work will be different – how each of us who remains will have to shoulder a slightly bigger load to fill in the gaps left by the departures.

We’ve already done some of that work. Beginning in January we started a process we call “reset” (as in pushing the reset button on your computer) to rethink how we cover the news as the Web grows ever more important (it now accounts for more than 10 percent of our revenues with more than 857,000 unique visitors to our site in May) and as the staff shrinks slightly.

And while the way we do our jobs will continue to change, I believe – as our combined audience demonstrates – the interest in local news still promises a strong future for The News Tribune.

Mark Twain, a former newspaper editor himself, perhaps said it best when he opined that he’d probably always find work: “I figure even the people in the north of hell will be curious about what the people in South Hell have been up to.”

Dave Zeeck: 253-597-8434

david.zeeck@thenewstribune.com

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