It’s hard to know what Digital First Media’s end game is for the Monterey County Herald because the hedge fund-owned media behemoth is resolutely not talking about it.
On Friday, Herald staff were told via email that Editor Royal Calkins was out – was he pushed or did he jump? – and the paper was going to be run out of Santa Cruz by the editor at the Santa Cruz Sentinel. (Because the two communities have so much in common. There’s the ocean, and… give me a minute, I’m sure I can come up with something.)
Since word of Calkins’ ouster, I’ve called or messaged everyone from Publisher Gary Omernick to Steve Buttry, Digi First’s director of “community engagement & social media,” who’s apparently leading the company’s creepily named and recently announced “Project Unbolt” (tagline: to wrench newsrooms free from print workflow).
Nada. Nilch. Nechevo. So let’s look at some facts and draw some conclusions.
Fact: The Herald and the Sentinel now share four top executives: a publisher, an editor, an advertising director and a circulation director. Meanwhile, 11 of Digital First Media’s papers (including the Herald) are now produced at a massive operation housed at the Chico Herald-Enterprise. The sharing of an editor – and one based an hour away – is enough to conclude that news at the Herald is going to get less local and more regional. The production issues, meanwhile, are already causing embarrassment in the two weeks since the pending elimination of the Herald’s production team were announced: Monday’s paper carried a photo box that was supposed to feature Olympic gold medal snowboarder Jamie Anderson; it was empty. A headline from last week morphed the name Google into Goggle.
Fact: Royal Calkins is an old-school journalist who ticked a lot of people off and engendered a great deal of loyalty among much of his staff. He ticked off California American Water, the Board of Supervisors and the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, to name a few. (He ticked off members of the Weekly’s staff during annual media basketball tournaments.) He ran an award-winning editorial page that often hammered on the local power brokers in a way that made me say, “Crap, why didn’t I do that one?” One less voice to afflict those power brokers is not a good thing.
Fact: Daily newspapers might not be making any money – blame the economy, blame a broken model. Even blame my 16-year-old, who says, “Why would I pick up a newspaper when I can read anything I want online?” – but then again, neither are most digital-based news operations. Witness the epic saga of Patch, AOL’s effort to develop a web-based news model. In January, AOL announced it had sold its majority stake to Hale Global, an investment company that specializes in troubled assets; the last remaining Patch editors were fired this week.
Digital First Media, meanwhile, is majority-owned by Alden Capital, and specifically, Alden Capital’s Distressed Opportunities Fund. One analyst said buying a distressed asset makes it cheap to milk that asset to death. Examples abound for Digital First. Ad production is now done in India. The International Typographers Union was dealt its death blow when it was announced printing would be done by a Bay Area commercial printer instead of at the Herald’s headquarters. And that 60,000-plus-square-foot facility is on the market for $7.25 million.
Fact: In January, Digital First Media announced “Project Unbolt,” part of a strategy the company calls “Thunderdome,” which is described as DFM’s “solution to providing content, support and coordination to its network.” Unbolt hasn’t yet launched at the Herald. Staffers say Unbolt will have them doing massive amounts of social media, while editors will pull that content into stories.
There’s no mention of in-depth reporting or investigative journalism. What is mentioned: “Stories are live (when possible), interactive, visual and relevant.”
That the Herald will no longer be run by a local editor is tragic, but it’s more of the same from a company seems to have no idea what business it’s in.
MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com
UPDATE:
I reached out to Steve Buttry, whose title has been "director of community engagement and social media" via his Facebook page at 11am on Oct. 10 on the premise that someone whose title included director of social media for a major media enterprise would naturally check his social media accounts on a regular basis. He responded on Oct. 13 at 6:18am with an apology for his slow response, saying he'd been busy on a project and hadn't checked his Facebook account in several days. He also gave me his phone number; since it was well past our print deadline, I did not immediately respond. Then 14 hours later, after this column appeared online, he sent the following email:
Mr. Buttry is correct in that his post, on his Wordpress blog, does describe how an unbolted newsroom works. However, on an introductory post titled "DFM's Project Unbolt will wrench newsrooms free from print workflow" on Digital First Media's "Inside Thunderdome" website, there is no mention made of in depth or enterprise reporting and how Unbolt will facilitate it.
A subsequent post titled "This is how an unbolted newsroom works," contains the following paragraphs about enterprise reporting and reflects process:
The biggest and best enterprise stories are planned as digital packages with elements such as video, interactive graphics and databases, published at optimal times for digital audience (perhaps not all at once).
We don’t publish these stories digitally on Sundays or Saturdays, but publish sometime during the week, with a print version publishing Sunday after digital publication. Publication might stretch over multiple days, starting Wednesday or Thursday with 2-3 days of new digital content, followed by a Sunday print story, followed by a live chat Monday. Sunday stories reviewing a week’s big news story publish digitally before noon on Friday, unless new developments Friday morning demand the reporter’s attention for timely digital posting.
We may not develop a single standard way to publish enterprise content, but possibly multiple standard approaches and occasional special methods. Our efforts to refine our processes for enterprise stories will be guided by digital tools and opportunities and a sense of experimentation, rather than by our need to fill the Sunday newspaper.
(2) comments
I, too, applaud Ms. Duan article,,,She ponders the right questions... But on the local level, don't think for one hot minute that it isn't that totally furious BOS and Cal Am that hasn't threatened the paper in some form to stop the investigative reporting on them...I can tell you that Hennessy and Johnson have a ton of info as does your paper just waiting to be told...And eventually, the truth will be told...That miscreant bunch have screwed the public something terrible, and now they have delved into the press...
I applaud Ms. Duan on an excellent, well reasoned, thought provoking article. A robust press is a corner stone to a free democracy and I agree Mr. Calkins was able to irritate with regularity; that is a good thing. By the way Ms. Duan, you are quite good at it yourself.
The Herald was once the hallmark of the local press, and Livernois was excellent, followed by Calkins, who never failed to give me pause and force me to consider, or reconsider my position. This is strictly my opinion, but I suspect your statement that Calkins "ticked off California American Water, the Board of Supervisors........." played a bigger role in this termination than one might suspect. I have no doubt that the Herald has not been a profitable enterprise for its corporate masters and that consolidation was integral to the decision, but if the Herald editor and the Sentinal editor were in a flat footed tie, Calkins running the story on February 1, 2014 showing the Board of Supervisors have perjured themselves may have cost him dearly.
Ask yourself one simple question, in the markets that Digital First has ownership and readership, does any American Water affiliate also operate therein? How many advertising dollars are poured into those local papers coffers by American Water? People have lost their jobs for less.
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