Another round of layoffs at the ‘Sentinel’ leads to tough questions

That said, as editor Don Miller put it, “People don’t pay for the web. And we have a paid staff here.” So it was that a further two jobs were lost in the Sentinel newsroom lat week, and whispers began again about the demise of the local daily, which in the past year has abandoned its downtown home for an office park in Scotts Valley and seen its reporting staff cut nearly in half. As a town of 60,000 people with an active university and no local television presence, could Santa Cruz really survive without a daily newspaper as well?

“It makes me very happy that people are nervous,” says Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews, the Denver-based newspaper conglomerate that purchased the Sentinel and instigated the cutbacks mentioned above. “It means that people recognize the value of a daily newspaper,” he explains. “You can’t pick up the newspaper without reading about our own problems. We love to cover ourselves. And I would be concerned if the difficulties of our industry were being ignored. Our job is to make sure that we keep our newspapers economically strong.”

Miller echoes the sentiment, although in a more concrete way. “We’ll find out how much people need us,” he says. “You’ve got to support this, too. If you want to support it, you will. If you don’t, you won’t.”

While it’s true that living and dying by readership has always been the guillotine blade over a newspaper’s head, the rise of the internet has created a specific challenge. Radio and television made changes to the news climate, but each had distinct methods of delivery that were unlike print—radio lacks a visual component, television lacks the ability to provide depth, and both real-time media enforce a pace of digestion that’s geared to the most common attention span. The internet, however, combines the audio and visual components of broadcast media with the at-your-own pace, in-depth delivery method of print. Add in the fact that it’s worldwide, user-controlled, and virtually free, and it’s not hard to figure out what the revolution is all about.

By the same token, newspapers are often in the best shape to take advantage of the internet, having a staff that’s already in place to churn out high volumes of well-researched typewritten content based on contextual research and expert sources. And, to a large part, newspapers have ruled the web. “The traffic that newspapers are generating online is phenomenal,” says Singleton. “In almost every market, the newspaper has the biggest web traffic for local news and information, and that’s a really good thing because it means most of our markets have the largest audience we’ve ever had. We’ve not been able to appropriately monetize that audience, although we’re doing better every year. It’s just not generating enough growth to offset the losses in print.”

Singleton blames, in particular, a downturn in real estate advertising (the erosion from Craigslist is fait accompli—he’s referring more to home sales display ads than classifieds). “California has been hit worse than any state except perhaps Florida,” he says. “After many years of solid revenue growth, the bottom dropped out of advertising last year and has continued to be down this year.”

Is the Sentinel bleeding red? Surprisingly not, according to Singleton. “The growth days of the past are probably behind us, but the revenue picture will improve when the economy and real estate and auto sales bounce back. The Sentinel is still a very profitable newspaper with a very high readership, and [publisher] Dave Regan has done an excellent job of maneuvering in the current climate.”

MediaNews was at the center of an unusual merger between its Denver Post and the Scripps-owned Rocky Mountain News in early 2001. At the time, Denver was one of only five U.S. cities with competing daily newspapers (the other four continue to be Boston, Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.), and MediaNews was widely seen to be the big fish in the pseudo-merger. Both papers continue to operate separate daily editions during the week (the News gets Saturday to itself, while the Post owns Sunday), but advertising and circulation operations were combined into a separate entity known as the Denver Newspaper Agency.

Because MediaNews now owns three major area dailies (in addition to the Sentinel, it runs the San Jose Mercury News and the Monterey County Herald), the question is whether similar pseudo-mergers, or even outright combinations, are in the future.

“That’s preposterous,” Singelton says. “We still compete for circulation in Santa Cruz,” he says of the Sentinel and Mercury News. “They combined delivery to be more efficient, and with gas at $5 a gallon I’m glad they did, but they still have different competitive strategies for filling new subscribers, and continue to solicit from the same subscriber base. Additionally, they’ve never competed for advertising and still don’t today.” The two papers do combine on national advertising purchases, but apparently Mercury News sales reps will not be trawling Santa Cruz anytime soon.

Singleton also argues that the two papers are “still totally separate in content,” though the Sentinel is allowed to take any MediaNews story for its pages, and has done so with more regularity as its staff has decreased. “There are stories that Santa Cruz never covered before that they have access to now,” Singleton says. “The decision to run those is up to the local editor. We think they add value because Santa Cruz has never had a Sacramento bureau, or a San Francisco bureau, but there’s no mandate to use those stories.”

He concludes, “Santa Cruz is a good solid local daily newspaper, and that’s the way it will stay.”

The cutbacks have made solidity difficult, however. Upon taking GT’s call, Don Miller is less than thrilled that layoffs at his paper are still news. “Do you ever lose people?” he asks. “Do we call when you do?”

Still, he agrees to answer a few questions. “It’s not true that we’re going down,” he says. “We hate laying off people. I wish we had some magic answer to stop it. We hate it for the people who stay as much as for the people we lose. I hope things turn around, but we’re at the bottom of the feeding chain. We can’t come up with the kind of revenue to support a business on our own. It’s not just here. But we do news coverage. It’s what we’ll continue to do.” 

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