The voice of reason

You ever notice that whenever anyone agrees with you, he or she becomes "the voice of reason?" People who disagree, are, of course, idiots or at least severely misguided.

Anyway, I have been ranting for years that cutting newsroom budgets to try to stanch the downward spiralling circulation figures and attendant financial bleeding is seriously wrongheaded. This past week, Kathleen Parker, a Tribune Media Services columnist, wrote a column that supports my contention that, in Zen-like fashion, worrying so much about the bottom line ruins the bottom line.

"By cutting newsroom staffs, the corporate suits are reducing the likelihood that papers can do what makes them necessary," Parker said. "Instead of cutting where it counts to satisfy shareholders, corporate honchos should be infusing newsrooms with more money to hire more staff. . . ."

As I have said before, cutting staff from the newsroom is like taking people off your production line and then wondering why production numbers are down.

Parker: "When revenues go down, the calculator crowd reasons, you cut costs. But to those in the trenches, cutting staff is exactly the wrong decision, more like a self-inflicted wound trending toward suicide than a remedy."

I would really love to see a publisher have the guts to say to shareholders: wait for it, this investment will pay off handsomely in the long run, even though immediate numbers might not look good. Other businesses do it all the time.

Why won't newspapers listen to the voice(s) of reason?