The Milwaukee Journal Sentinelhas begun to seem like the incredible shrinking daily newspaper: In July, it sought buyouts from as many as 50 people, aiming to cut the staff by more than 20 percent. Yet the story is even starker for the company’s suburban weekly Community Newspapers Inc., where 19 people were dismissed in May, insiders report.
This leaves the decimated CNI news staff at just 20 people, down from more than 100 just a few years ago. A separate suburban unit of Journal Communications, Lake Country Publications group, has also been cutting jobs.
The end result is far less coverage of Milwaukee’s suburbs. In June, no reporters showed up to a meeting of suburban officials angry that the state budget, then on a fast track to final passage, would further squeeze their already strapped governments.
“There’s no coverage of local government,” Greenfield Mayor Michael Neitzkecomplains. And local government, as the old maxim goes, is closest and has the most impact on people. “We’re the most accountable to the local public,” Neitzke contends. But increasingly, these officials are not being held accountable by the media.
The decline in coverage has come with brutal speed. For 50 years – 40 as an independent chain of suburban papers and 10 since Journal Communications bought CNI in 1997 – nearly two dozen CNI newspapers blanketed the suburbs, from Oak Creek to Mequon and West Allis to Brookfield. They covered city halls, police and fire news, schools and local sports.
But three years ago, the Journal Sentineltightened connections between the daily paper and the CNI weeklies while dropping some of the suburban titles. Coverage was merged into 11 weeklies with the common last name of Now,and they were wrapped inside the JS instead of being sold independently. Meanwhile, CNI developed community NowWeb sites, offering a mix of JS suburban articles, stories from Nowstaffers, and reader-submitted press releases, announcements, photos and blogs.
Now that approach is being cut back, with just eight Nownewspapers. (A ninth weekly, WaukeshaNow, is produced by Lake Country Publications.) Meanwhile, the online version of Nowhas grown to 25 “hyperlocal” Web sites.
In announcing the latest cuts toNow staff, JS Editor Martin Kaiserpointed to rising readership for the 26 individual community Web sites – which is approaching 2 million page views a month – suggesting the print coverage was migrating online. Perhaps. But whether CNI is online or in print, it can’t possibly offer as much news coverage with just a sliver of its former staff.
Reader-generated fare is helping to fill the gap. Still, Now’s reliance on amateur content persists even as its parent paperhas gone the other way, dropping once-touted experiments with putting non-journalists behind a keyboard. A series of political blogs by state legislators and education blogs by teachers and school activists were quietly dropped in a Web redesign of jsonline.comlast year.
Now’s evaporating coverage of suburban government dismays even Journal Sentinel staffers. Suburban reporters haven’t been replaced as they’ve left the daily, one JS journalist notes. “It seemed like the theory was to let the weeklies do the routine stuff” – municipal and school board meetings, for instance – “while we looked for the big trend stories. But now, the weeklies no longer have the resources to cover all of the day-to-day action, either. If nobody’s watching, some of these local governments and school districts could get away with who-knows-what.”
Ironically, public officials don’t welcome a lack of scrutiny. “We have no way of getting news out about the city,” says Oak Creek Mayor Dick Bolender. The NowWeb site and publication that are supposed to cover his city are so weak, “we might as well not even have it,” he adds.
When CNI was at its peak, says Franklin Mayor Tom Taylor, he’d hear from the reporter assigned to his city hall two or three times a week. Now, almost nothing.
Bolender, a conservative, sees an ideological bias in the CNI cutbacks, but liberals are just as upset. John Michlig, a left-leaning blogger who serves on the Franklin Economic Development Commission, deplores the situation. “Because Nowonly has one or two reporters who cover this entire five-community (southwestern area),” he says, “they have a problem doing what newspapers – or any legitimate news operation – are supposed to do, and that is provide context.”
The option of uploading their own city news bulletins to the Now Web site leaves city officials cold. They simply don’t have the time or resources, several said. More telling, though, is that they know this sort of self-coverage is less credible to readers – and to voters.Indeed, the decline of the Journal Sentinelis dramatically demonstrating the value of the coverage suburban officials once enjoyed. Pressroom asked Taylor how he’d rather see the paper cover a controversial issue in Franklin – with dueling blogs by opposing sides, or a balanced story by a probing reporter. The choice was simple: “A reporter who tries to find both sides of the story,” he says. “That’s really in the best interest of the public.”
