Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The nation’s flagship newspaper, The New York Times … is getting smaller, here and here.

Meanwhile, the Orange County Register, circulating 300,000 papers per day in the suburbs of Los Angeles — “citing a 14% drop in revenue and a 38% drop in profit from the year before” — cuts more staff.

Yet one more wailing NewsBiz analyst sums up one essential problem — as corporate chains take over family-run papers, they lose their sense that news reporting is a “civic duty.”

And Steve Smith, the editor of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, gets frank about the impacts of cuts, in a memo to his embattled staffers.

Smith tells his journalists, for instance:

None of us should hold any illusions here. A smaller staff means a lesser paper. There is no “working harder” or “working smarter” rhetoric that can hide the impact of staff reductions. Doing more with less is corporate-speak BS and you won’t hear it from me. There is no way to make this pig look like anything other than a pig. As we reduce staff we will have to make very tough choices and some of what we do now simply won’t survive the process.

Any of you who follow the industry know we are not alone in this pain … now we have to confront the realities of this period of revolutionary and unsettling change.