Less is Less

The Times-Dispatch is doing things. Maybe not the right things, but it's doing things.

It's pretty obvious why certain reporters were laid off (names were named on various blogs and tweets, if not in any of the "official" media stories). You can see the perimeters of coverage being pulled in as the farflung reporters were dismissed. Just a few weeks ago, the Washington bureau was closed and those people (was it more than just Marsha Mercer at the end?) sent home.

I had heard that Douglas Durden opted to finally retire from her enviable job as a TV critic when she was switched to a particular irksome beat like Chesterfield County schools or something similar. An insider at a seminar I attended said when the beat assignments came out that year, it was like the suits were daring the reporters to quit by jet-propelling them out of their comfort zones.

Durden had been at the paper since I was in college a thousand years ago and never had to function as a beat reporter. But TV stuff could be pulled off a syndicate cheaper. Daniel Neiman should have seen the handwriting on the wall at that point, and probably did. After richmond.com was acquired, there were two movie critics, but I don't see that Mike guy listed on the staff of richmond.com now. (Is he gone, too? When will all these people surface on rvanews.com to tell us what the trip to the guillotine was like?) Movie reviews can be pulled off a syndicate wire. There's thousands of them online anyway.

Rumors are flying that the food and real estate sections will be cut next. I can see the reason for food, but even in a bad housing market, you would think real estate would attract some advertising support.

What we aren't seeing yet is what the T-D plans to offer us instead. There's got to be an instead. You can't just provide less and raise the price, too, which they did last week.

And how many of the layoffs were executives who do nothing related to producing a daily paper, but go to meetings and think thoughts...thoughts that aren't translating into increased advertising revenue or circulation. What do they do?