Saving TDN from Lee's 'expansion' plan

Owner masquerades cuts as improvements; to survive, Longview newspaper must boost staff, become 'hyperlocal'

I have mostly refrained from criticizing The Daily News since retiring in August 2020 after a 41-year career as a reporter and editor there. But — in the interest of saving what is left of the newspaper’s importance to the community — I can no longer hold back my pen.

The announcement in Sunday’s paper that TDN’s print editions will be “expanded” is Orwellian doublespeak meant to mask the fact that changes will make the paper less relevant.

To review: Lee Enterprises, the Iowa-based owner,  announced it will reduce print circulation from six days a week to three days  — Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. It will be delivered by mail — not carrier — further eroding timeliness.

In her column announcing the switch, editor Penny Rosenberg says each remaining delivery day will be an expanded publication, much like a traditional Sunday edition.  

Oddly, though, there will not actually BE a Sunday edition. And news that occurs after mid afternoon Friday (such as high school football) will not get in print until Tuesday —  at the earliest. Coverage of elections,  which occur on Tuesdays — won’t appear until Thursday — maybe. 

There apparently will not be any expansion of the reporting staff, which now numbers four “cityside” reporters who cover basic news like police, health, political and environmental matters.  The truth is that the staff is not large enough to dramatically expand local news coverage. It merely will be concentrated into fewer days, and it will arrive later than ever.

Lee can counter that breaking news can be read on tdn.com, but the newspaper’s corporate-managed web site has little emphasis on local news and is often tortuous to navigate. Local stories seem to be displaced constantly by wire news from elsewhere.

This is just the latest in a steady number of decisions that have weakened the paper during Lee’s two decades of ownership.

To review, Lee did away with the local features department, cut the news writing and editing staff by well more than half, and eliminated popular news features of record, such as police blotter.  (Its excuse — that police agencies’ computer systems could no longer send them to the paper — is lame. Dispatch reports are public documents that can be printed out, which is how we obtained them for decades.)

Toward the end of my tenure Lee shut down the Longview press, making the paper, now printed in Albany, Ore., less timely because daily deadlines moved up from midnight to 6 p.m. The building is no longer open to the public, and classified advertising and circulation functions have been centralized outside the community. Print circulation has plummeted. Advertising has collapsed with it. And online circulation has not made up for it.

TDN now charges for vital news like death lines. Letters to the editor are printed sporadically and infrequently.  Most of the design team, which once produced beautifully paginated pages that ranked with the best in the business, was laid off in favor of a “design center” in the Midwest that produces prosaic-looking pages.

All these changes are driven by several factors: One, the changing nature of the retail economy and aging readership substantially reduced advertising revenue and newspaper profitability. While revenues declined, profit expectations rose to unrealistic levels. Lee, a publicly traded company that is one of the nation’s largest newspaper publishers, expects profits much larger than former Editor and Publisher Ted Natt found acceptable. 

Finally, Lee’s purchase of the St. Louis-based chain of Pulitzer newspapers — a deal that closed shortly before newspaper values and profits tanked — caused more than a decade of belt-tightening and scrambles to avoid defaulting on more than $1 billion in loans.

The sum of all this made staffing cuts inevitable across the Lee’s many dozens of newspapers, and it has driven down the relevance of TDN. Good news coverage cannot occur on the cheap. You need enough people with talent to report and write it.

If you think this is all sour grapes over Rosenberg’s November decision (never fully explained) to discontinue my twice-a-month column,  remember this:  My concerns about Lee’s management go back decades and often were expressed to company managers. I care deeply about that place and its value to the community.

We need to find ways to maintain The Daily News as an important source of news and community cohesion.  I’ve said this many times: I can’t imagine the Kelso-Longview area without The Daily News.  Having a vital and reliable source of local news is key to informing the public and defending democracy. It also is essential for creating a sense of community.

This was borne out to me many times over the years, including on one particularly memorable occasion: A new arrival to the community told me that the thing she liked best about the town was its newspaper. “If I don’t read it,  I don’t know anything about what people in town are talking about,” pediatrician Faith Wilfley told me when we first met. (She and her family have since moved back to Wisconsin.)

So here’s a blueprint  for preserving that vital news source — and perhaps even playing into Lee’s profit needs. 

Shut down the print edition entirely or reduce it to once a week. Revamp the web page to make it more immediate and programmed to continually highlight local stories. Institute a true “web first” policy, which is talked about but fails in practice.

Take all the printing, layout and distribution cost savings and put them into hiring more reporters to expand news coverage. While you’re at it, eliminate much of the wire services except for Associated Press’ sports feed and use that money to hire extra news staff, too. Readers don’t look to TDN for national or international news. (Reducing AP wire is a long shot, of course, because Lee CEO Kevin Mowbray also is a member of the AP board of directors.)

Find a way to get readers to self-report and submit their own stories about visiting relatives, vacations and other “chicken dinner” news like the late This Day editor Agnes Staggs decades ago used to present in a column called “Stagglines.”

You get the idea: make the new product “hyperlocal” — journalism parlance for emphasizing local news. As Bill Nangle, an editor I worked with years ago,  used to say: “Local drives the bus.”

Lastly, TDN needs a greater presence in the community. This includes local leadership.  Rosenberg, who also is editor of the Lee paper in Albany, Ore., only is in Longview a day or two a month. It’s all part of Lee’s cost-cutting and centralizing effort. It leaves TDN without real local leadership and leaves it detached from the community.

It might take time for this transformation to lead to profits, but web-only publications can be successful. It takes guidance, staffing , vision and commitment to telling the news. For the community’s sake, let’s hope that Lee finds them.