Employees poured their hearts into local papers

Low pay, long hours characterized newsroom jobs

This week’s Glens Falls Chronicle features a brief opinion piece by Mark Frost that criticizes the Local Journalism Sustainability Act and blames the decline of local papers on their own arrogance.

“I say, let the marketplace decide. It is deciding,” he writes.

Mostly, what the marketplace has decided is that people would rather get their news for free than pay for it; and those who are willing to pay will often choose a digital subscription to a national paper — the New York Times or Wall Street Journal — over their local paper; and advertisers have followed readers, mostly to free online sites like Facebook but also to free print publications like the Chronicle.

After pouring my effort over many years into a career in local journalism, sustained by a belief in the value of what I was doing, it bothers me to read Frost’s caricature of what he calls “corporate newspapers.”

I started in the business the summer I was 14, working at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in Saranac Lake as the editor’s assistant, rolling tape from the teletype machine and writing headlines.

The paper was a family business — my dad bought the Enterprise and the weekly Lake Placid News in 1970, and my mom and all four of us kids worked there at various times. 

In 1980, Dad sold the papers to Ogden Nutting, CEO of Ogden Newspapers, a family-owned newspaper chain, but stayed on for several years as publisher.

In the mid 1980s, I returned to Saranac Lake from college and went to work as a reporter at the Lake Placid News, then as a reporter and editor at the Enterprise.

In 1991, I took a job as editor of the Malone Telegram, owned by the Johnson family of Watertown. The Johnsons were known for their uncompromising approach to news gathering, refusing to bend to outside pressure from anyone.

You could say they were arrogant, but I saw their insistence on their independence as integrity.

In the fall of 1993, I came to the Post-Star as the night editor, working a 3 p.m. to midnight shift, Tuesday through Sunday. I did just about every job in the newsroom over the next 29 years, retiring in 2022. My salary never reached $60,000, and I worked without a raise for the last decade or so.

Wonderful people came and went at the paper. A great thing about the business is the way it requires a variety of different departments and different sorts of people to put out a paper each day. The newsroom, backshop, copy desk, circulation, advertising, press room — each had its own environment and its workers their own personality.

Corporate ownership has destroyed the cooperative aspect of newspaper work by consolidating printing and layout in offsite locations and making deep cuts to other departments. Inside many papers, including the Post-Star, offices are largely empty, spaces that were crowded and bustling filled with unoccupied desks.

No one yelled louder than the employees at what we saw as short-sighted, profit-driven decisions that came at the expense of our customer service and news coverage. Readership declined even faster than it already was. Mark Frost is right about that.

“So what do you do when multitudes jettison your product?” he writes. “You could change your attitude, develop humility, commit to regaining people’s trust.

“Nah! We’re right, they’re wrong, we’re not changing!”

What annoys me is the way he ignores all the good people who worked at the Post-Star who never felt that way. Employees cared deeply about the work, which is why so many of us stayed with it for so long despite the lousy pay.

Over the years, Mr. Frost aimed a lot of barbs at the paper. He used to refer to the Post-Star as “the chain daily,” as if being part of a larger corporation, as many local businesses are, is reprehensible in itself.

The paper has always been staffed by local people who own homes here and send their kids to school here. No one shrugged when layoffs were announced. I saw stunned faces and tears.

I assumed the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which would have helped local papers and their subscribers through tax breaks, would not end up in the state budget. Other businesses that serve vital roles in communities — banks, for example — receive help from the government, but newspapers have always stood apart.

Journalism is going to have to find its own way back to relevance, if not prosperity, in local communities. I’m guessing that will not happen in print but through online ventures (like this one!).

People still want the nitty-gritty news of their communities — the police reports, obituaries and school board and city council write-ups — and they want to know what people who have thought a lot about local issues have to say about them. 

Papers like the Post-Star used to have the staff to bring together each day an overflowing smorgasbord of news, from which readers could choose. It was fun to put out a paper, and it was satisfying, because we felt it mattered to the community in which we lived.

It bothers me to read Mark Frost’s generalizations, even though corporate owners like Lee Enterprises (parent company of the Post-Star) deserve criticism, because the Post-Star was not put together by Lee Enterprises executives.

It was produced each day by the people in the office at the corner of Lawrence and Cooper streets, working hard, with humility and hope that they could keep the paper going and hold onto their jobs.