John Miller, before he became a Ryerson j-prof, toiled at 1 Yonge St, home of the (once mighty?) Toronto Star. He's mortified by the paper's apparent plan to outsource its editing and page production work.
As part of a plan to cut costs, it is looking to contract out newsroom jobs, including copy editing and page production. The aim is to get the newsroom, which once bustled with 450 reporters and editors, down to a core group of under 300.
His timing was unfortunate and darkly symbolic -- he chose the paper's 117th birthday to announce it, the third layoff notice this year.
If death by a hundred cuts isn't bad enough, the paper doesn't seem to have a clearly thought-out strategy for its survival. Spokesman Bob Hepburn said "we're moving to transform the Star into a multiplatform content organization and we want to reduce costs." What in the world does that mean? Is it something I can hold in my hand? I thought we decided that convergence -- the folly that sank CanWest -- won't work. It sounds like the Star plans to build an Olympic diving tower, and the only question now is which height they'll have to jump from.
If the leaders of the biggest paper in Canada cannot even articulate a clear vision for the future of news on newsprint, what hope is there for the rest of the newspaper industry?
For the Star, which was always an editor's paper, it will have to do it without any in-house copy editors. They evidently now fit Cruickshank's definition of "non-core functions."
Will we as readers notice the difference? You bet we will.
He describes copy editors as a newspaper's foot soldiers and says it is from their ranks that future leaders emerge. He then outlined his own career path at the paper to show his point.
The question Miller doesn't tackle is whether newspaper revenue declines are permanent, and if so, does that justify drastic measures to reduce costs?
Others have noted that copy-editing centralization and/or outsourcing has been done at other Canadian media companies, including CanWest and Sun Media.
It may well hurt the paper, but so does a drying up of the revenue well.