I join the chorus of dismay over Carpenter Media Group’s decision to cut half of The Herald’s newsroom. “Readers won’t notice” is more than laughable. It already rings false, because readers have already noticed the effects of an understaffed newsroom. Prior cuts ate into the bones. This sucks at the marrow.
As a former Herald reporter, I remember the “good old days,” when I was hired in 2004 as a second education reporter, joining veteran Eric Stevick. We explained testing data. Shone a human light on dropout rates. Showcased our area’s many Super Kids.
Twenty years on, we only have more students in a county that’s grown 35 percent, but there’s no education reporter — and no Olympia reporter, and no Boeing reporter — and under those Friday night lights there will now be just one photographer. Yet the wage Carpenter proposes is maybe $1 more than what I was hired at. They ask fewer reporters to do more work for an insulting sum.
You can’t cover a large county with a small newsroom. You can’t cover 18 cities with one hand’s worth of reporters. You can’t tell the visual stories that emerge across this beautiful region with one photographer. And you can’t give anything that true final polish without a single local copy editor.
Carpenter makes promises; business promises. We got a glimpse of where that leads during the brief newsroom strike. No bylines? Press releases? Transparency and accountability are missing. That’s not journalism.
So maybe it’s time we stop thinking of the newspaper as a business.
It’s been gratifying to see so many readers write in to support our local reporters and photographers. Your work is valued! Subscribers put their money behind that. Now it’s time for Carpenter to do the same and give our community and its journalists what they deserve.
Melissa Slager
Everett
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