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Journalist’s TradeCutbacks. Lay-offs. Buyouts. Early retirement packages. Offered under different names andcircumstances, the bottom-line objectives are similar: trim the staff to keep the enterprise afloat.Few journalistic homes have been spared cuts in staff during this economic slump, thoughnewspapers, especially those belonging to the Knight Ridder chain, are experiencing deeper andmore rancorous downsizings. We ask, in this issue, whether such cutbacks mark the correct pathto long-term survival and what effect they have on the content and quality of the journalism beingproduced.Thrity Umrigar, who writes for the Akron Beacon Journal, a Knight Ridder newspaper, takesus inside the newsroom during this year’s second round of staff cutbacks. She writes of its funerealatmosphere: “And, indeed, something had died—that naive and idealistic belief that the folks whoran newspaper companies realized that theirs was more than a business—it was a sacred charge.”Jim Naughton, president of The Poynter Institute who held numerous editor positions at ThePhiladelphia Inquirer (a Knight Ridder paper), tallies up the losses from cutbacks at his old paperand shares concern about how they jeopardize that paper’s high-quality journalism. ChuckLaszewski, a projects reporter at the St. Paul Pioneer Press (a Knight Ridder paper), reports thatthe corporate decisions to reduce the newshole size, cut sections, and remove bodies “to keepprofit margins astonishingly high, won’t leave much of a newspaper for our readers to use.”Deborah Howell, Washington bureau chief for Newhouse Newspapers, describes Knight Ridderbudget seminars she attended as an editor at the St. Paul paper. Though she knows more abouthow journalism is financed, “it’s not the reason I got into it. It’s not the reason I stay in it,” shewrites. Working now for a privately held company, she reports that “I am lucky. I haven’t had to doanything this year that I think is wrong or long-range stupid….” William W. Sutton, Jr., a deputymanaging editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, urges corporate medialeaders to keep the value of staff diversity in mind as cuts are considered.Media analyst John Morton examines how newspaper owners react to the tug of Wall Streetpressures and the consequences that decisions made today might have a few years down the road.McClatchy Company president and CEO Gary Pruitt explains why pleasing shareholders at hiscompany has meant neither newshole nor staff cutbacks. And Jay Smith, president of CoxNewspapers, describes how a privately held company reacts to economic hard times with freshapproaches to news coverage. Michigan State journalism professor Stephen Lacy links changes insocietal trends—public ownership, decline of newspaper competition, societal diversification, andgrowth of electronic media—to the financial decisions that confront newspaper executives today.Gilbert Cranberg, co-author of “Taking Stock: Journalism and the Publicly Traded NewspaperCompany,” suggests workable ways that issues of journalistic quality can be become central to thedecisions made by corporate directors. Joseph Bower, professor of business administration atHarvard Business School, describes the special strengths of newspapers and writes that decisionmakingby corporate leaders should never imperil newsgathering that lies at the heart of itsenterprise’s unique mission within its community. “Credible news presented to attract readers isthe golden goose,” he writes. “For that reason it should be at the core of any sensible economicdecision-making about the newspaper business.” ■Nieman Reports / Fall 2001 65