Conserative Newspapers Lay Off Staff

Newscorp has started the layoffs at The Wall Street Journal.

The Wall Street Journal is to cut 50 journalist posts in a restructure to centralise the editing of the paper in print and online, its managing editor, Robert Thomson, has revealed in a memo to staff.

Thomson does a lot of spinning in the article. He claims the 50 layoffs aren't really layoffs. "Staffers with the highest skill levels and the enthusiasm to acquire new skills will have a distinct advantage in the selection process, Thomson said.

Thomson also claimed that 95 new jobs will be created from the WSJ's online and international operations. He does not say when these staffers will be hired.

In Florida, The Tampa Tribune laid off 11 reporters.

Janet Coats pulled up a chair in the middle of her Tampa Tribune newsroom to deliver the news to her staff in early July, explaining why 11 reporters (including the newspaper's Florida State Seminoles sports beat writer) were hitting the bricks.

For Coats, the paper's executive editor, cutbacks and financial losses mean wholesale changes in the way a now-smaller newsroom will gather and present news for consumers. She started outlining a new journalism plan without traditional beat structures or titles, a model that relies first and foremost on "audience interaction."

What saved the Wall Street Journal was standout reporting. Journalists at the WSJ were hostile to Rupert Murdoch take over of the paper. Their fears were that Murdoch is going to journalisticly and financially run the respect daily into the ground. Murdoch's The New York Post has lost money for years and is known for sensationalism.

The Tampa Tribune can't boost the WSJ's record of journalistic excellence. Sports writer Tom McEwen was forced out because of his business ties with local teams and George Steinbrenner. The Trib has cited the disgraced Steven Emerson as a terrorism expert. Emerson's plagiarism and fabrication of facts are well-documented.

As Emerson's fame mounted, so did criticism. Emerson's book, The Fall of Pan Am 103, was chastised by the Columbia Journalism Review, which noted in July 1990 that passages "bear a striking resemblance, in both substance and style" to reports in the Post-Standard of Syracuse, N.Y. Reporters from the Syracuse newspaper told this writer that they cornered Emerson at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference and forced an apology.

A New York Times review (5/19/91) of his 1991 book Terrorist chided that it was "marred by factual errors…and by a pervasive anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias." His 1994 PBS video, Jihad in America (11/94), was faulted for bigotry and misrepresentations--veteran reporter Robert Friedman (The Nation, 5/15/95) accused Emerson of "creating mass hysteria against American Arabs."

Emerson was wrong when he initially pointed to Yugoslavians as suspects in the World Trade Center bombing (CNN, 3/2/93). He was wrong when he said on CNBC (8/23/96) that "it was a bomb that brought down TWA Flight 800."

The Trib's prep sports reporter Rozel A. Lee was fired for manipulating the voting for an award. Brad Smith was fired for fabricating parts of a news story he was personally involved in.

We read about conservative papers always having these journalistic and financial problems. The New York Times and Washington Post have to compete just as hard for readers in the internet age. No one seriously thinks those two publications are going out of business tomorrow. Those are the papers of record. Unsurprisingly, two recent NY Times and Post scandals came from neoconservative Judith Miller and plagiarist Republican blogger Ben Domenech.

The conservative Trib can not compete with the more successful St. Petersburg Times because it doesn't have the same standards of excellence. Conservative news junkies don't want investigative reporting or unbiased media coverage. They distrust the media and turn to Fox News, talk radio and conservative blogs. The echo chamber tells conservatives what they want to hear. Not what they want to read.