No. 5 - New reporters in town

One of the most discouraging things I heard this summer at my internship at my hometown paper was that there had recently been multiple rounds of layoffs at the paper I was working at, and hearing speculation that younger reporters were laid off under the assumption that they could fall back on their parents. A fun topic of conversation for a lady’s night after work dinner.

Layoffs were something that I was already aware was happening, but it is still shocking to hear people talk about it actually occurring.

On the brighter side of things, after being purchased by Forum Communications, three new positions were added to the newsroom, two of which I found very interesting.

One of the positions that was created was for a regional health reporter. While this person worked in our newsroom they produced content for Forum Communications, which my newspaper, the Post-Bulletin, had access to once it went through the Forum Communications editors.

This concept I found very intriguing. It was similar to the concept of sharing content between papers that overlap in coverage area, but instead they were basically setting up their own wire service. Forum Communications also had a reporter stationed at the state capital who would write stories to be used across Forum Communications papers. This allowed for our local reporters to focus more on local topics instead of trying to write other important stories that were happening an hour and a half north of our city.

As I tried to look into how often an entire system of newspapers had their own correspondents and regional reporters I was not able to find much on the topic. I was able to see how national wire stories covering the federal government are used by local papers. I also read about the discontent of the coverage of West Virginia that has been provided by larger media outlets which has lead to independent reporters taking it upon themselves to give coverage they view as just.

On this search I also found some maps from an article on Newspaperownership.com

that show where media ownership is taking place, which is pretty much everywhere, and it seems very likely that there is this possibility of regional correspondents used by all the papers that exist in a coverage area.

I know that ownership by investment companies is one of the types of media ownership that people in the journalism industry are the most concerned about, but I thought this served as a good visual of the clustering of ownership. If there are many papers owned by one company is there a possibility for one reporter to work on a beat that covers an entire region.

The other newsroom position that was created was one that reinforced the importance of learning to report as a convergence reporter. One of the photographers was promoted to digital editor, and the editing staff decided that to replace him they would want a reporter that could also take photos. They actually already had a dual-purpose reporter, although he never went out to just take photos of anything.

It was promising to see that play out, because it reassured me that I am actually seeking out a skillset that employers want. I had heard many times that it was something they were looking for, but I never saw it when I had to do any type of journalism career search activity for classes at MU.

From this article on Knight Lab, I was amused by the author's description of young journalism students struggling to be a one-man band and older reporters struggling to get by. However, I don't think as many older reporters are struggling to adjust to the new way of reporting as they may think. Which I will go into more in a future blog post.