Wednesday, February 18, 2009

A small paper, a big dream and a bigger crash.

Back in 1992 I was hired out of college (actually left college to take the offered job) to become the graphics editor at a small newspaper. It was a local paper serving an oceanside community which was half fishing-town, half wealthy summer-home resort. Several of us who had run the college paper pretty much on our own (very little guidance from the teacher) were offered jobs at this paper which promised to grow into a county-wide newspaper. Our little newspaper had previously served the tiny community for decades, but had gone out of business. It had been bought by a thirty-something woman who had a small inheritance. Her dream was to run a newspaper, but she had no knowledge whatsoever of the industry. She made herself publisher, and then hired us to make it happen. We took it seriously. Collectively, with our heads and experience put together, we had the knowhow to run a serious newspaper that could take on the longstanding paper which had a monopoly on the county's newspaper market for generations. We busted our asses. I remember many times working overnight. Sometimes I was the only one there, and would take a brief break at 2 a.m. to walk alone across the street to look at the pitch-black Pacific Ocean from the empty, dead-silent beach. Eerily beautiful. We worked to transition the paper away from fluffy small-town news and turn it into a serious newspaper that would do serious local journalism. One early clash -- and a sign of things to come -- happened when we put a story about a fatal automobile accident on the front page, albeit below the fold. The woman who owned the paper called us to a lunch meeting. "That story was a real downer," she said, "I don't think people want to see stuff like that when they get their paper in the morning." She urged us to find happy, positive stories to run in the paper. Daryll (the Editor in Chief and a good friend of mine) planted his face in his palm with an audible groan, and the rest of us just shook our heads in disbelief. Still we plugged away at it, working far more than eight hours a day because we believed in it and wanted it to happen. We were filled with passion and dedication and belief. The business decisions were abysmal, however. The owner kept throwing lunch-parties. At first it was "Hell yeah! Fancy hamburgers and fresh fish -- count me in!" But after about three of these lunches, all of us were starting to worry. We couldn't see all the figures, but we all knew the paper was only just starting out, and was not yet making a profit. She hired an experienced local businessman to make some hard business decisions in order to "turn things around." He came in, worked with us all for a few weeks to see how everything operates, and then he made recommendations on sweeping changes. He then left, and all of the recommendations were summarily ignored. Then she found new talent for the newspaper in a way that could save money: unpaid interns. A couple of local high school students were brought in to intern, being given course credits in exchange for office work. Nothing like student slave labor. One day the owner started calling us up to her office for important one-on-one talks. Word got out quickly that she was asking us all to take 50% pay cuts. Since I wasn't one of the first to be called in for the talk, I had the chance to do some quick math: I took the value of my last pay check (I was paid a flat salary) and then divided it by the number of hours I had actually worked. When it was my turn, I listened to her make her statement about the need for pay cuts, then I said, "I have something to show you." I repeated the math I had done. "This is the size of my salary... and this is how many hours I worked in the last month. Divide one into the other, and here's what we get..." Then I asked her, "Do you know what the minimum wage is in Washington State?" Yes, I was making less than minimum wage. I did not get my pay cut. Things got more and more tense. We knew very well how to run a successful newspaper, and various staff members kept urging -- sometimes begging -- the owner to make various essential changes. One day she and Daryl disappeared for the afternoon, leaving the rest of us buzzing with concern. Daryl returned that evening and told the rest of us that he had laid it all out to her, telling her all the changes that needed to be made if the paper was going to remain afloat. He urged her to let us, the people with newspaper experience, make the decisions and do what we have to do to make the paper a success. Do I even need to say that she flatly ignored all pleas, including Daryl's? To the woman who had bought the newspaper, it was just her way of living out her fantasy of owning a newspaper, and nobody else was going to tell her how to do any of it. After Daryl confronted her and she made it clear that nothing was going to change, the members of the original team started jumping ship. It was a classic, definitive example of rats leaving the sinking ship. I'm a loyalist, sometimes to the point of stupidity; I was the last one of the original group of talent to leave. I trained a few kids she hired to replace us, and then left at the very end of 1992. The paper continued to publish my comic strips for a few weeks in early 1993, but then the checks for the strips stopped showing up, so I put an end to that as well. In spring 1993 I noticed that the paper's vending machines were empty, and new issues stopped turning up. I dropped a line to one of my old friends and found out what had happened. The brilliant new team running the paper had done an April Fool's Day edition. The front page of the paper contained fictional stories about a major earthquake devastating the area. But the real damage was the back page of the paper: a fake ad for the local supermarket containing coupons with the decimal places all moved one place to the right, so instead of 50 cents off various items it offered $5 off, etc. The ensuing lawsuit shut the newspaper down. This is what happens when somebody gets more money than they have basic common sense, and don't know when to leave things to the people with the expertise and the experience. Should anybody reading this ever start your own business, I hope you'll have the acumen to hire people who know how to succeed in that business, but also the wisdom to step back and let THEM run the show.

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