Held to answer

The worst job I ever had was in the circulation department of The Oregonian newspaper, taking complaints over the phone from subscribers who had not received their paper.

This was last century when many adults considered a newspaper part of their daily routine. I was a freshman in college, and the weekend hours fit my schedule.

The first Sunday I worked, the phones never stopped ringing. I thought maybe something had gone wrong. Did the presses break down?

“It’s always like this on Sunday,” I was told.

People might ignore a missing weekday paper but not Sunday’s hefty edition with something for everybody, including ads and store coupons.

It was one call after another – “Where’s my paper? … Where’s my paper? … Where’s my paper? … When will it get here?”

Today, standing outside the locked doors of The Oregonian’s building on Southwest Broadway Avenue, it’s hard to believe the passionate following the paper once had. The paper has downsized so much, it no longer has a home of its own.

The O recently moved to Crown Plaza and now leases space in a building that also houses the FBI. The Oregonian’s new digs look like a law office, albeit one of the better firms.

A month ago, hundreds of citizens successfully railed against a Google executive who wanted to tear down a historic house he bought in Northwest Portland.  There has been no similar outrage over the virtual demolition of the city’s “newspaper of record,” a quaint concept now that we supposedly have access to everything online.

For years American newspapers, particularly those owned by national chains, grew fat on easy ad revenue, which they have now lost to the Internet. They have responded by cutting staff and focusing on cheaper online delivery (no costly paper, no tardy carriers). But The O’s owners, Advance Publications, have stood out in their incompetence.

Portland and its reputation for food, drink, drugs and adult entertainment have drawn comparisons to New Orleans. Nowhere is the comparison more suitable than in its diminishing daily newspaper. The New Orleans Times-Picayune is also owned by Advance.

“(T)he name Times-Picayune, which had stood for quality and civic constancy for decades, does not mean the same thing anymore. The vaunted Web site that was to be the lifeblood of the new enterprise remains a creaky mess, and the newsroom has been denuded of remarkably talented people,” wrote the New York Times last year.  “It’s been a jaw-dropping blunder to watch.”

You could say the same thing about The Oregonian.

Advance Publications has treated The O’s employees and readers with contempt, replacing experienced reporters with beginners and lowering journalistic standards. Reporters are expected to crank out a quota of stories, and those stories are expected to generate clicks and comments. If it turns into a feeding frenzy of insults among commenters, so much the better – that will generate even more comments and more clicks.

Had newspapers looked anything like this back when I was taking circulation complaints, I would have never gone into journalism. Instead, I transferred to the University of Oregon, and after graduating went to work as a reporter – one of the best jobs then, if you were looking for meaningful work.

Even now, with lower salaries and no job security, young people are still drawn to journalism.

“Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long,” advised famed photographer Walker Evans (“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”).

That’s a good description of what a journalist’s life can be, especially on daily newspapers where you really do get to write the first draft of history. But if you’re being asked to crank out updates every hour on a missing woman, what kind of history are you writing? (Google “Jennifer Huston.”)

Newspapers are a special kind of private-public business. They have to make a profit to stay in business, but readers look to them to provide a public service. A newspaper helps give a community an identity. As all those former callers to circulation attested: The Oregonian was an important part of their lives.

The relationship has changed. In moving to a cheaper digital edition, newspaper owners have confused computer screens with TV screens. The O’s brand of newspaper journalism looks increasingly like the rushed and shallow melodrama of TV news. It’s hard to see how this will even improve ad revenue, let alone produce the kind of journalism that brings respect and credibility to the whole enterprise.

No wonder The Oregonian has lost many fine reporters, who didn’t wait to be laid off.

It used to be an old joke that when a reporter or editor left to take a job in public relations or as a government public information officer, it was said they had “gone to the dark side,” usually to make more money or work normal hours.

You can’t blame anyone for bailing out of newspapers, but the dark side might be growing darker. How many of these PR journalists will use their skills to produce copy that reads like newspaper reporting but is really nothing more than advertising? Brand journalism, it’s called.

“In a time-challenged world dominated by click-bait headlines, tweets, gifs, video, YOLO, LOL and #tbt … does writing seem useless and ordinary? Actually, writing matters more now. Learn how to choose words well, write with economy, style and honest empathy… .”

That’s a come-on from Vocus, a marketing and PR software company that includes, among its accomplishments, “4.5 trillion media impressions managed per year.” The company has been praised as a top employer by the Washington Post.

And what of government public information officers? In a story last year, the Idaho Statesman looked at the increasing number of government PIOs and asked if they were public servants or spin doctors.

“Governments are spending more than ever to talk about themselves …,” the paper reported. All kinds of public agencies – even sewer, irrigation and ambulance districts are paying for flacks.

Idaho Freedom Foundation President Wayne Hoffman, told the paper that government agencies “are working harder to spin their message — to inflate their achievements and minimize their missteps.”

Elizabeth Fredericksen, a public policy professor at Boise State University, disagreed: Public information officers are needed to respond “to the explosion in the number of media outlets …,” she said. “I can’t even name all the media outlets. We have Twitter. We have Facebook, etc., etc.”

Buried somewhere in “etc.” are newspapers.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

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Newspapers: Nobody Knows Anything