http://janefifthestate.blogspot.com/2010/10/al-getler-and-eagle-tribune-purveyor-of.html

Copy editors have been rendered pretty much powerless to make any meaningful changes, and there’s often just one or two of them building an entire edition. So there’s no one left to call bullshit when the proposed front-page centerpiece is on drivel like a lost dog or some kids’ cute school project — stuff that wouldn’t have made it onto the front page of one of the group’s weeklies a few years ago.

The incessant dilution of product quality in the name of meeting the chain’s debt-service payments is incomprehensible considering the high education and income demographics of the local markets, particularly the Eagle-Tribune’s.

Heartbreaking, in fact, when you consider the quality of the reporting and writing that won the paper’s second Pulitzer for spot news less than a decade ago. Staffing is so skeletal at this point that pulling off an effort like that would be pretty much impossible.

While putting out a just-good-enough product filled with utterly inane stories and unrewritten press releases might satisfy advertisers and readers at some remote CNHI outpost like East Mousebutt, Oklahoma, I’d say that the ET’s constantly falling numbers indicate that it’s not working to hold readers here.

And though they’re putting more and more resources into web features like slideshows and videos, the conceptual quality of that content is no higher, so I can’t see how it’s going to make up for the print slide.

It’s hard to see where it’s going to end. Every time it looks like the bottom has been reached, they come up with something like this latest furlough move and lower it a couple more rungs.

The quality of the group’s papers has declined. The E-T was forever reluctant to cover “process” stories, with the result that it missed a lot until the mud had already hit the fan, but the paper was willing to get its teeth into things that weren’t necessarily sexy. Now, however, the papers in the chain have the manpower to cover little more than quick and dirty police blotter stories and public pronouncements of politicians. To the detriment of the product, beats seem to be covered by an assortment of people

Scariest is the clear breakdown behind the scenes, in the editing process. Stories often have questions left unanswered when they should be addressed before the story sees the light of day, a sign that a) the copy is needed NOW due to production schedules mandated by cost cutting or b) the reporter is overworked and off on something else so th at the story either can’t be kicked back to fill in gaps. The gaps may exist because was no time for the reporter to chase down loose ends because s/he is off on another journalistic adventure. Follow-ups are rare. Many folos are the product of editors looking at stories from a step back, but when editors each have to worry about content, copy-editing and layout, something gets lost — and what gets lost isn’t going to be layout, since words and fotos are needed on the page; it isn’t going to be rudimentary copy editing, since avoiding embarassment is vital in a lean newsroom; what is lost is attention to content.

The people who work there, however, clearly work against increasingly difficult corporate obstacles to get a paper out, even if they don’t seem to have time to develop stories and sources. Increasingly it seems “the paper” is the product of a production line on which journalism is sacrificed.

What some are implying is that because the owners made “mistakes,” the owners should be the ones who pay. And that line of thinking ignores that owners have over time also made (many) good decisions that allowed the business to develop and earn profits.

The E-T used to have a profit-sharing plan when the Rogers family owned the company. I believe that plan was discontinued when CNHI bought the company, and the money employees had accrued in it was rolled into a 401K.