A sign for paper school work packets at Lincoln Elementary School last week may become less needed thanks to a $60,000 donation to help buy Chromebook computers for Pottstown students.
Blogger's Note:The following was submitted by the Foundation for Pottstown Education.
The educational playing field for the Pottstown School District just became a little more level, thanks to a donation received by the Foundation for Pottstown Education.
The Foundation recently received a $60,000 gift from an anonymous donor in support of purchasing Chromebooks for the Pottstown School District. The Chromebooks would enable students in families who do not currently have access to the devices, the opportunity to work on school enrichment activities online.
After reading an article in the Pottstown Mercury written by Evan Brandt, the donor contacted the Foundation to work out the details for this gift.
According to the donor:
I recently read the article in the Pottstown Mercury about school districts having to pivot to on-line learning which would leave Pottstown behind. For years, Pottstown has held the dubious title of being one of the most underfunded districts in the state and, as a result, the playing field has always been uneven for students.
At some point, Harrisburg needs to fix our very broken school funding system so that zip code does not determine the level of educational resources for children.
But it struck me that if Pottstown couldn’t find computers for each household now, the students in Pottstown would not be on an uneven playing field — they wouldn’t be on the playing field at all. It is my hope that this donation will help the district’s efforts to get a computer into every home so that Pottstown can implement distance learning through the current crisis.
Joe Rusiewicz, Executive Director of the Foundation has been in contact with District Superintendent, Stephen Rodriguez and Acting Technology Director, Gail Kennedy regarding this generous donation.
In response to receiving word of this donation, Rodriguez replied: "This crisis has been tough on students, parents, and teachers, but Pottstown Students are getting a 'double whammy' because we are underfunded and don't have the same technology other districts do. But thanks to this generous donation, in combination with other efforts, we are on our way to filling the gap.”
There are approximately 20-25 percent of the students who are in need of these devices. The district is working hard to bridge that gap and be able to provide the Chromebooks to the families in need.
Rusiewicz reported “we have received many kind contributions which are providing financial assistance to purchase food for our students during this pandemic, and we are extremely thankful. Now, with the closure of all the schools in Pennsylvania for the remainder of the year, another urgent need arises, the need for Chromebooks. Thanks to this donor, a portion of this need is being met, but the need still exists.”
Anyone who is able to and interested in supporting this drive can send a tax deductible contribution to the Foundation 230 Beech Street Pottstown, PA 19464 or through the Foundation’s website https://foundationpottstowned.org/.
“Help us continue to level the educational playing field for the Pottstown School District.” Rusiewicz requested.
About FPE:The mission of the Foundation for Pottstown Education is to raise funds for and support life-changing educational opportunities for the students and teachers in the Pottstown School District promoting the enhancement of our community.
Visit www.foundationpottstowned.org for more information about the Foundation for Pottstown Education. You can also follow FPE on Facebook and Twitter.
Many local newspapers, including The Mercury, have been reduced
to a skeleton staff.
It should come as no surprise to any regular readers of this blog that, like other local businesses, local news is struggling to make it during this pandemic.
When you consider how many businesses have had to shut their doors, take the next step and ask yourself how many of them are advertising in the local paper?
Add to this, the fact that The Mercury and other papers in this chain have done the right thing and made our coverage of coronavirus free of charge.
That doesn't mean the print edition is free.
It means you can read about the information that may help save your life, or your flagging spirits, on our website without having to subscribe.
Needless to say, the combination of decreased advertising and "free-of-charge" is not having a positive effect on our bottom line.
It has accelerated an existing and increasingly desperate trend.
Just ask Ken Doctor. He is the "Newsonomics" columnist for Harvard's Neiman Journalism Lab and his predictions about the state of the local newspaper industry have been spot-on for the past two years. And his diagnosis is not good.
Newspaper executives are "finding themselves careening right now into a future they’d thought was still several years away."
Ask an American newspaper exec a few weeks ago what they thought 2025 would look like, and they’d tell it you it would be much more digital, far less print, and more dependent on reader revenue than advertising. Some of them would have told you they think they had a plan to get there. Others, if they were being candid, would have said they didn’t see the route yet, but they hoped to find one in time.
The COVID-19 crisis has clearly accelerated that timeline — and may have ripped it to shreds altogether, depending on how long the shutdown lasts and how deep the resulting recession gets.
Make no mistake, though: Many of the decisions being made right now and in the next few weeks will be permanent ones. No newspaper that drops print days of publication will ever add them back. Humpty Dumpty won’t put the 20th-century newspaper back together again. There can be no return to status quo ante; the ante was already vanishing.
Can you guess what comes next?
You guessed right, lay-offs.
By serendipity and good negotiating, those of us who work at the papers in Alden Global Capital's Philadelphia Cluster that are lucky enough to be in The Newspaper Guild, signed a two-year labor contract in February that limits lay-offs in the contract's first year. That includes The Mercury.
That did not stop the company from asking for "voluntary separations," or from laying-off workers at non-union papers.
Alden Global Capital, the company that owns The Mercury, is one of those hedge funds. Here is a primer on the company, put together by investigative reporter Julie Reynolds, who works for The Newspaper Guild's parent union, Communication Workers of America, and has plumbed the depths of this company like no other.
Having already strip-mined the local papers it owns of their assets, like the real estate, earning double digit profits and re-investing none of it back into the business that generated it, Alden left its papers particularly vulnerable to this latest economic shock.
Small wonder that its attempt to gain control of Tribune Company, which runs some of the nation's most revered papers like The Chicago Tribune and, more locally, The Morning Call in Allentown, has sent waves of fear through its newsrooms. So much so that in January, two Chicago Tribune reporters wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times, pleading for a local buyer to take control.
Me visiting Heath Freeman's Montauk manse
before the security fence was installed.
True to form, Alden has responded to this reduction in revenue in the same way it sought to increase its revenue, lay-offs across the country, in California, Denver, and Boston, not just in Reading.
Perhaps most galling is the March 27 letter Alden CEO Heath Freeman -- who has since put up a security fence around his $4.8 million, five-bedroom, five-bath summer house overlooking Lake Montauk at the tip of Long Islandsince I dropped by unannounced two years ago to chat -- sent a letter March 27 to Illinois senators Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin.
Too often, MNG is the buyer rescuing newspapers like The Reading Eagle, The Greeley Tribune, The Boston Herald or The Orange County Register from bankruptcy or liquidation or perilously close to that fate. Indeed, failing to equip local newspapers so they can adapt to the economic realities of the newspaper business in the 21st century would most certainly lead to more newspapers going out of business in your state and across the country.
I wonder if the 19 Reading Eagle employees laid off this week feel "rescued."
He goes on to note, accurately, that:
Heath Freeman
The digital transformation of the U.S. newspaper industry is in its early stages. And if local newspapers do not reset to these economic challenges they may cease to exist.
As you may be aware, a 2018 study from the University of North Carolina found that the U.S. has lost nearly 1,800 local newspapers since 2004, or approximately one in five. Clearly, if local newspapers fail to adapt to the economic realities they will continue to close.
We could not agree more. What Freeman's letter fails to indicate, because he can't, is what Alden has done with the profits it reaped from local papers to reinvest and adapt to those economic realities.
The answer, of course, is nothing.
My work laptop runs on Windows 7, which Microsoft stopped supporting on Jan. 14. The plan for upgrades, or new equipment? There isn't one.
Perhaps most egregious of the letter's passages is when Freeman writes: "MNG’s goal is to operate newspapers in a sustainable and responsible way (emphasis mine) so that they will
continue to exist successfully for the benefit of their local communities and shareholders over the
long term."
This is more hogwash. There is no plan for sustainability. None.
There is only a plan for profitability, for as long as it lasts.
"The current public health crisis has made the already vital role of local news even more critical," the senators wrote in the letter. "Some of the most important guidance for families and businesses during this crisis has been highly localized.
"Local journalism has been providing communities answers to critical questions, including information on where to get locally tested, hospital capacity, road closures, essential business hours of operation and shelter-in-place orders," the letter says.
The senators said any future stimulus package must contain funding to support this important industry at such a critical time. They suggested the legislation include a provision that is tailored to benefit aid recipients who make a long-term commitment to high quality local news.
There are other suggestions for the legislation as well, coming from those of us who know the business well, and know how sudden influxes of cash can sometimes find their way into the wrong wallets if further protections are not put in place.
On Thursday, NewsGuild President Jon Schleuss wrote a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
He had some pretty relevant suggestions:
News Guild President Jon Schleuss helped guide
the fledgling chapter at the Los Angeles Times
to its first-ever union contract.
A publicly financed fund to support newsrooms and media workers to prevent layoffs furloughs and pay cuts;
Requirements that news outlets receiving aid remain independent from partisan influence, demonstrate a need for the assistance, report on how funds have been spent and be prohibited from engaging in mergers and acquisitions resulting in job losses, leveraged buyouts and anti-union activity, and from using funds for executive bonuses, stock buybacks or dividends (emphasis mine);
A prohibition on job cuts by participating companies;
Requirements that recipient companies provide ongoing information on staff diversity;
Ensuring that one-quarter of seats on boards of directors be held by non-management employees at recipient publications;
A separate mechanism to establish a Small Business Administration program of no-interest loans for the creation of news start-ups, including nonprofits and employee-owned co-ops;
Tax deductibility for the cost of subscriptions to any news product;
Incentives for local ownership to encourage chains to sell to local owners and community interests;
A nationwide federal advertising program to promote public health, participation in the federal census and other topics of national interest.
"Continuing news coverage through this pandemic must be a priority in the next stimulus package. Many publications have lowered digital paywalls to provide COVID-19 coverage for free," Schleuss wrote.
"At the same time, the news industry is seeing plummeting ad revenue created by business closures. At this moment when Americans need reliable, community-focused coverage, we risk losing it all," he wrote. "More Americans will die if they cannot access this critical information."
There's also something you can do, and it doesn't even cost any money.
Sure, you can subscribe to The Mercury or the local paper near you. I can guarantee you its struggling.
But you can also lend your John Hancock to a petition supporting Schleuss's suggestions.
This has of course left all of us vulnerable to identity thieves, but in many ways, those of us who are left and who identify themselves as journalists first and foremost, have been experiencing a slow identity theft for years as profits and resources have been siphoned away from The Mercury by the New York hedge fund that owns us, Alden Global Capital.
Among those resources was the landmark Mercury building which, like the other properties it obtained when it purchased the majority of shares in what was once known as Digital First Media, it has sold off for cash that was not put to any use for the newspaper itself, but rather to fund Alden's other business ventures.
The building was sold on Oct. 22 for $440,000 to a company controlled by April Barkasi, the woman who founded and is the CEO of Cedarville Engineering Group, LLC.
She also purchased the bank building across the street at the northwest corner of High and North Hanover streets.
By all reports, she intends to turn it into a "boutique hotel" with a whiskey bar and cigar lounge in the basement where the newspaper's "vault" of old papers used to be housed.
I'm pleased to see this grand old building will get a new life and contribute to the ongoing revitalization of downtown Pottstown. (And let's face it, I never met a whiskey bar I didn't like.)
But before that happens, there is quite a bit of cleaning up to do.
Photo by Kevin Hoffman
You see, it wasn't just a few missed boxes of personnel records that were left behind,, a truly symbolic indication of the disregard the company had for the building and those who worked there.
They left everything. File cabinets, desks, old computers, furniture.
Those who have been in the building have marveled at the ghostly nature of how everything looks.
Desks with papers, chairs and staplers; used computers in a storeroom; someone even joked that there was a half-filled cup of coffee sitting on a desk.
It was as if everyone was coming back to work the next day.
Photo by Kevin Hoffman
Computer and office equipment abandoned by the management
of The Mercury in our old building at King and Hanover streets.
But of course, that's not going to happen, not here and not at dozens of local newspapers across the country, where the crisis in local news is being accelerated by private equity firms, like the one that owns The Mercury and the other local papers in Southeast Pennsylvania.
Which brings us to the second of the three.
News that Warren Buffet, who had once seemed like one of the billionaires who might save some of the nation's local newspapers, gave up and sold his chain of papers.
As Julie Reynolds, the remarkable investigative reporter for The Newspaper Guild reported, Warren Buffett’s sold his BH Media newspapers to Lee Enterprises for $140 million. That deal is expected to close in mid-March.
Alden CEO Heath Freeman
Like a shark drawn to blood in the water, "Alden Global Capital, the New York vulture hedge fund gutting Digital First Media newspapers (and owner of The Mercury), has acquired a $9.2 million stake in Lee Enterprises, siphoning money from Alden’s highly profitable and understaffed papers to finance the stock purchase," Reynolds reported.
The purchase was made through one of Alden's shell companies, some of which, Reynolds has discovered, are incorporated in secrecy-friendly Delaware and the Cayman Islands. The methodology hasn't changed and neither will the outcome.
Alden CEO Heath Freeman, Reynold's reported, “intends to engage in discussions” with Lee’s management and/or board of directors about “certain operational and strategic matters, including, but not limited to the recently announced acquisition of Berkshire Hathaway’s newspaper operations and matters pertaining to (Lee’s) 2020 Annual Meeting.”
There is no thought to investing in these papers to make them sustainable and thus sustain the crucial work of local journalism, keeping the powerful accountable.
The only motive is greed, which is a sad but all-too-familiar mindset in these times.
Gone is any sense of corporate responsibility to the community its newspapers serve.
Mercury clip files have been abandoned by Mercury management. Below, former Mercury Editor Nancy March looks through the clip files for things worth saving.
Which brings us to instance number three, which is likely my final visit to the inside of The Mercury building before renovations begin.
I accepted an invitation to join former Mercury Editor Nancy March to drop in Friday morning.
Like so many others, I went to the desk where I had worked for decades, and found a few things I should not have left behind.
But taking the seven drawers of files I had accumulated over the years was impractical. And frankly, I ceased to make much use of them even when I was still in
the office.
A greater loss is The Mercury clip files. Back when we had a staff, we had employees who would clip every story in every day's paper.
Whenever a reporter was assigned a story, the first step was to go to the clip file to get background on the subject.
At least the "bound volumes," physical copies of each edition of the paper found into annual books, have been moved to the company offices at the printing plant in Exton and are being preserved.
But that preservation is only a sliver of the region's history The Mercury has recorded.
As I walked through the newsrooms (we had two locations during my tenure there) and advertising rooms, the publisher's office, the composing room, I could not escape thinking about what is being lost; not only the history of the community, but the history of The Mercury's involvement in that community.
Photo by Kevin Hoffman
Nancy March's old office looked out onto King Street. It can't have been easy for her to say goodbye one last time.
That warehouse was storing dangerous chemicals, and doing it so badly, that former Fire Chief Rich Lengel had told me if it caught fire, he would not allow any firefighters inside because it was too dangerous.
Kevin Hoffman and I climbed up onto the railroad tracks and he took photos through the windows of chemicals leaking out of bins and unclosed containers and that lead to coverage that got the attention of the EPA, who shut the place down.
Now, it's a unique part of the community college and an asset instead of a liability.
Sure enough, as I looked through the piles of old Mercury editions strewn about the office, I found one of those front pages from 2000 when we helped to expose that danger and get it taken care of, making Pottstown a safer and more vibrant community.
This is the kind of value local journalism brings to a community, the kind that doesn't show up on a quarterly report, the kind Mr. Freeman does not seem to consider as being worth saving.
So as I left the building where I had worked for more than 20 years, and housed the people who chronicled the life of the greater Pottstown area for nearly 90 years, I reflected on the fact that its not just desks, clip files and memories that are being left behind.
Also being left behind is the value we place on community, nationally and locally; on having a common set of facts, a common starting point for discussions about what's best for the future, where we go from here.
That is the true loss, one that is only now just being recognized, perhaps too late.
I will be sure to toast its memory in the whiskey bar that replaces it.
The gist of it is that in the 1960s and 1970s, newspapers abandoned the idea of a mass audience and, driven by a desire to capture an audience most attractive to advertisers, began to target their content toward those more affluent audiences.
As a result, "newspapers pursued more upscale readers with workplace 'lifestyle' columns featuring the lives of young professionals and their concerns about office gossip, job interview strategy, expense accounts, and office party etiquette. Personal finance news also began its ascendancy in the 1970s. The focus was on individualism: people had to take care of themselves. Time Inc.’s launch of the magazine Money in 1972 helped to kick off a boom in personal finance stories, which assumed that every upscale reader had an investment portfolio," Martin wrote.
This trend away from covering the concerns of the working class also can be measured, in part, by the loss of reporters covering the "labor beat."
"Today there are just six full-time labor reporters in the top 25 newspapers across the U.S., none in network or cable news, none at NPR or PBS, and just a few at digital news organizations and magazines," according to Martin.
This new business trajectory which changed the target news audience from mass to upscale, "altered the actual news narratives about the working class in US journalism," according to Martin.
Martin tells us, "the upscale focus of the news upset the status of labor unions and upended politics through the last third of the twentieth century and beyond. The mainstream news media’s write-off of the working class set the conditions for the decline of labor and working class news and the rise of a deeply partisan conservative media that hailed the abandoned white, working-class audience. (Working-class women and people of color had no similar emergent news media platform to pursue them as an audience.) The right wing then attacked the upscale-focused mainstream news media as 'elite' and ultimately as 'the enemy of the people.' Given this politicized media infrastructure, the 'surprise' of a Donald Trump presidency seems much less of one."
I think Martin is spot on.
Mercury file photo
Pottstown was once a town where work equaled wealth.
It's not much different than how the increased concentration of national media on the coasts creates what some call "parachute coverage" of the "fly-over states" -- a New York Times or CNN reporter parachutes into St. Louis to report on unrest there using the same tone and methodology that they would to cover unrest in Kosovo -- and then beats a hasty retreat back to New York with a report on "what's happening over there."
There is little attempt to get a deeper understanding of the situation, get some context, understand the why; just report the what and get the hell out of Dodge.
Sunday's front page
Similarly, says Martin, the news media now "usually look at the working class only through the lens of a political news story, not through the lens of a labor or workplace story. Second, the news media typically consider the 'working class' not in its entirety, but just in the stereotypical white male form, which nicely serves the purposes of divisive politicians who seek to exploit this image and divide working-class people on every other dimension: race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and citizenship."
I often write in this space about the public service aspect of journalism, particularly the only kind I have ever practiced, local journalism.
But this pursuit of an "upscale" audience belies that claim.
You are not serving all the people, or even most of the people, if you are tailoring your coverage to appeal primarily to the wealthier segment of the country, the people with more money to spend on your advertisers' products.
But this was done because at the time, journalism was also a viable business and the decision to pursue a wealthy audience was a business decision, not a decision to practice better journalism.
To be sure, there are plenty of other factors contributing to the decline of newspapers.
Fat and complacent for decades, newspaper managers and publishers failed to see the threat, and potential promise, of the Internet and repeatedly failed to adapt to the assaults on longtime revenue sources, like classified ads. As Google and Facebook scooped up the lion's share of online advertising, there was little left to support the traditional newspaper business model.
But I'm left to ask if local newspapers might not have had more resilience, more time to adapt to those changes, had we continually sought to remain relevant to all the people, not just the ones with disposable income.
The business side of the business, the capitalists, not the journalists, made a business decision.
And, as it turns out, it was a pretty short-sighted one.
Perhaps that's because the late 60 and early 70s was also when local newspapers started getting bought up by chains, when Wall Street got involved.
Wall Street has ever been focused on the next quarter, not the next quarter century.
That's when making payroll, covering costs and serving your community was replaced with meeting profit projections, cutting costs and serving your shareholders.
We are now in the final, late-stage consequence of this choice.
Having abandoned the working class, they, quite understandably, have abandoned us.
And, ironically, that fickle up-scale audience we chased has as well.
They're all now getting their news digitally without realizing (or caring) that much of the digital news they read is the re-written work product of a newspaper reporter. Or, if not, that it has not been verified for accuracy or made much of an attempt at fairness.
All too often its primary characteristic is what faux conservative talk show host Stephen Colbert comedically, but prophetically, coined as "truthiness."
Dictionary.com formally defines truthiness as: "the quality of seeming to be true according to one's intuition, opinion, or perception without regard to logic, factual evidence, or the like."
Further, the increasingly fractured news audience remain largely united in one aspect, they are outraged at the idea that they should be asked to pay for news "when it's free on the Internet."
What should we expect from an audience that has never purchased a newspaper?
The bottom line here is when you let the money men make the decisions, they make decisions about money, not journalism, and certainly not community.
Hedge funds and technology have brought us from full newsrooms,
at left in the good old days, to no newsrooms and reporters who work
at home. No, my view is not nearly so dramatic.
And when the money dries up because of the decisions they've made, or failed to make, they take their stock options and put the business up for a fire sale.
And that's when the parasites show up.
Just like in the natural world, the financial world has bottom feeders, those who take what is left, what is perceived to have little value -- financial value at least -- and strip it for parts to extract what' profit they can, a process made infinitely easier if you have no intention of making that businesses sustainable for the long haul.
They cut staff and run articles from other newspapers they own in the area, filling the pages with less relevant content than readers used to enjoy; thus giving readers less reason to buy that newspaper again.
The Aug. 6 edition of The Vindicator, almost its last, comes off the press.
And Youngstown, Ohio is about to- find out what that's like.
When Youngstown's newspaper, The Vindicator, failed to find a buyer, a neighboring company bought the name, the masthead and the subscription list after it went under.
The Vindicator's final edition.
They certainly won't employ any of the journalists who know the town best.
Instead, they will continue to publish a "Vindicator" that is filled with stories about other towns, not Youngstown.
Yesterday, the day after the final Vindicator was published, the Tribune Chronicle took over publishing The Vindicator in Mahoning County.
“It’s going to be The Vindicator edition of the Tribune Chronicle,” Charles Jarvin, publisher of the Trib told WKBN News. “It will have The Vindicator masthead on it. It will be of the style of the Tribune Chronicle, however, as we go forward but it will be the Vindicator edition of the Tribune Chronicle.”
For a time, The Mercury was somewhat insulated from this trend.
The front page of the Aug. 13, 1948 edition.
Pottstown was always a working town.
Whether it was Bethlehem Steel, Firestone, Flagg Brass, Doehler-Jarvis, Gudebrod, Dana or Mrs. Smith's Pies, the business of Pottstown required labor.
Lots of it.
So covering Pottstown meant covering the lives of the people who worked at those plants.
When I arrived here from New York in 1997, I was amazed at how much Pottstown still resembled a community from the 50s or the 60s.
And like those communities, the local newspaper was still a vital part of life here.
But about a year after I arrived, word came that Mrs. Smith's Pies had been sold. It was only the latest in a long string of closures.
The Bethlehem Steel plant had been closed for years and the Doehler-Jarvis, Stanley Flagg Brass and Gudebrod plants soon followed suit.
As the paying jobs fled for lower-paying shores, local businesses fell one by one to the national chains who could sell it for less. Never mind that the money spent there did not re-circulate in the community like with a locally owned business.
The Mercury building at 24 N. Hanover St., Pottstown
It was only a matter of time before Pottstown's local newspaper got caught up in what is happening all across the country.
According to Montgomery County property records, Goodson Holding Company sold The Mercury building at 24 N. Hanover St. on April 2, 2013 for $1.2 million.
The buyer was a company called 24 N. Hanover St. LLC whose address is 885 Third Ave. in Manhattan.
By no small coincidence, that is the address of Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that owns MediaNews Group, which owns The Mercury and all the other newspapers in the 50-mile radius.
So the company that bought the newspaper, purchased the newspaper building through a shell company with the same address, and extracted the value of the real estate by charging itself rent which, as many know, did not go into maintaining or repairing the venerable, but leaky old building.
The building has been on the market for more than a year, although several local sources have told me it has been sold. The transaction has not yet appeared in the county's property records so the final entry in that particular account book remains blank.
What should we do?
It would be nice to suggest that this Labor Day we newspaper people re-dedicate ourselves to covering all of our communities, not just our advertisers' customers, but I think it is already too late for that.
No one likes being taken for granted.
It is also probably too late for the wave of unionization that is sweeping those decimated newsrooms that remain as we try desperately to hold our ground against the final parasitical flood of hedge funds, mergers and buy-outs.
When Hurricane Agnes struck in 1972, we were there to tell the story.
I remain a proud member of the Newspaper Guild. I know I would not have earned a living wage all these years without them, and that allowed me to raise my son, buy a home for him to live in, send him to college and become a stakeholder in the community I cover.
And I believe that unionizing will provide some protection to those newsroom employees who remain.
But unless there is a major shift in the local news business (should it even be a business?) and a sustainable model for paying us a living wage can be found, it won't be nearly enough.
The writing's on the wall. And then who will tell Pottstown's story?
The front page of the Annapolis Capital-Gazette on the day after a shooting in that paper's newsroom killed five. Despite the tragedy, they "put out out a damn paper" the next day. It's what we do.
So at this point, I would imagine that some of you are getting tired of all the goings on about journalists and community newspapers on this blog.
But you must admit, it hasn't been a banner week around here or in my business.
Although, and apparently I can't repeat this enough, the Pottstown Mercury may have re-located out of Pottstown, it will continue to publish. I'll be working out of my nifty little home office right here in Pottstown, which I spent the hot part of the weekend setting up.
Still I will miss the company of my co-workers, dwindling though their number may be.
But my loss is nothing compared to that experienced in Annapolis. As I said, not a banner week for newspaper newsrooms.
One of my former co-workers, Michelle Karas, sent me a column by Miami Herald and Pulitzer Prize winning humor columnist Dave Barry on the subject of that shooting.
I've been a huge fan of Barry for a long time, particularly when I used to read his columns to my wife while she was pregnant. Then I found out he graduated from my high school, Pleasantville High School, the year after I was born and his first job was at the Daily Local News in West Chester, where he was paid $93 a week. (I'm not sure the pay has increased much since then....)
Anyway, my attachment grew, the fewer our degrees of separation became.
There was a line in his column that caught in my throat when I read it to my wife Sunday night.
Since that first job, "most of my friends have been newspaper people. No offense to any other profession, but these are, pound for pound, the smartest, funniest, most interested and most interesting people there are. They love what they do, and most of them do it for lousy pay, at a time when the economic situation of newspapers is precarious, and layoffs are common."
And I began to think about what a small extended family we newspaper people are and getting smaller all the time.
Michelle is working for The Gazette in Colorado Springs now, and Chris Six, whose column you hopefully read yesterday in this space, is now running two weeklies in Virginia. Caroline Sweeney is out in Kansas now as a TV reporter and the irrepressible Brandie Kessler is still at the York Daily Record.
Dan Robrish is running the Elizabethtown Advocate and Joe Zlomek, the former publisher of The Mercury, is running his growing empire of digital Post publications, which began with The Sanatoga Post -- this despite the fact that the guy already has a full-time job.
Michelle didn't know this when she sent Barry's column, but I applied for a job at The Capital many years ago.
Shortly after The Mercury was purchased by the then-dreaded-now-long-gone Journal-Register Co., once known as the champion of cost-cutting until the current owner, the rapacious Alden Global Capital, showed us all how it's really done, the late Walt Herring, the departing editor, advised me to find another job.
"Don't dawdle here," he said.
This was before Pottstown fully had its hooks in me and it seemed like good advice, so I snagged an interview at The Capital. No job offer came and the rest is history, well, at least family history anyway.
But it did get me thinking this weekend about "what if?" Had I gotten a job there, would I be among the dead? Would I have been like crime and courts reporter Phillip Davis, live-Tweeting from under his desk that his newsroom was under attack? (That's where my wife put her money.)
Would I have been one of the many who came back to the office to do what they always do, gather the facts and share them? I like to think so.
Journalism is certainly under attack these days, from economic forces, political forces and, as seems to have been the case in Annapolis, by people who have a grudge they want to settle with a gun.
But despite the glamour of being occasionally threatened, or being called "an enemy of the people," it gets harder and harder to make a living, raise a family and pay a mortgage working in a newsroom these days.
Many, like Frank Otto, Rosemarie Ross, Eileen Faust, Cheryl Thornburg, Eric Devlin, Chuck Pitchford, Pat Sommers, Kim Toth, Kaitlyn Foti -- the three horsemen of the photographic apocalypse, John Strickler, Kevin Hoffman and Dan Creighton -- and particularly my boss of nearly 20 years Nancy March, have left the business, mostly for aforesaid economic reasons.
I heard from many of them Friday on the last day in the newsroom at The Mercury building before it was shuttered, sharing memories and regrets. Tom Hylton, former editorial writer and one of our two Pulitzer Prize winners, came in to have a last look around.
All because while some of them may have left the business, the business has left its mark on them.
By way of example, some of you may know March still does some part-time paginating work for us but is primarily focused on her new passion, "Pottstown Works."
Nancy was particularly interested in Cedarville Engineering, which moved here from Chester County and is taking over the upper floors of the bank building at High and Hanover streets.
"We've got to get them into the paper" she said to me intently, completely forgetting that she no longer decides who gets into "the paper." This was not hubris, it was habit.
I just smiled, and agreed. She read my face, grimaced, and told me to shut up.
It is like any other family of un-related people who all love the same thing, don't always love each other, but always drop what they're doing to make deadline.
We don't do it for the money and fame, although some of us do it a little bit for the adrenaline (I'm looking at you Frank and Brandie). Barry had it right again when he wrote:
"The news people I know are still passionate about what they do, and they do it remarkably well. And here's the corny-but-true part: They do it for you. Every time they write a story, they're hoping you'll read it, maybe learn something new, maybe smile, maybe get mad and want to do something."
And so although I didn't know any of them, I'll risk an accusation of presumption and say it's not hard to imagine that I knew something about what those killed in Annapolis were like; what they thought was important and the passion they had for the vocation, because it is so, so much more than a job.
And I know I know why those who survived, those 10 bylines that appear on the next day's front page of The Capital, did what they did in the immediate aftermath.
As some of you might imagine, Friday, the last day I wrote for The Mercury inside the building where I have worked for 20-plus years, was a day that will stand out in my memory for a long time.
And what with the newsroom killings at The Capital-Gazette in Maryland the day before, you might understand feeling a bit beleaguered.
But given that the Capital-Gazette newsroom still put out a paper after being shot up and five of their co-workers killed, I don't see how I can justifiably say that I'm too wiped out to offer any more insights into the closing of The Mercury building, even though I am.
So as a compromise, I'm going to offer somebody else's insights.
Chris Six worked at The Mercury as a graphics editor for several years, then at Stars & Stripes for many more and now runs two up-and-coming weeklies in Virginia, the Fauquier Times and the Prince William Times. He and I have remained friends throughout the years.
For as long as I can remember, they’ve been telling me newspapers were in trouble. But of my former employers, only the small daily where I started my career in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, no longer exists.
The circulation was 6,000. I was the “full-time,” 30-hour-a-week sportswriter. That meant they could work you 38 and not pay benefits. If I didn’t live with my parents, I couldn’t have made a living. When it rained, water came pouring through the ceiling of the “sports annex” into an industrial-sized Rubbermaid next to my desk.
I loved it. So much so that I changed my college major from broadcast to print. Why? Because community journalism matters.
But this column isn’t about that newspaper.
It’s about where I’m at now, almost 30 years later: The Fauquier Times. And it’s about a daily that still holds an important place in my heart: The Mercury, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
The Mercury was facing the same difficulties every newspaper faced when I arrived in 1998: shrinking ad revenue, shrinking circulation, what to do with the internet. But good journalism was still happening. And boy, did we have fun. In many ways, I think it was the last of the good old days.
Christopher Six
Three photographers, a half a dozen reporters, two copy editors, a five-person sports crew. Multiple editors. From 4 in the afternoon until midnight, it’s where the action was.
These were people who cared about the community they served. Working all hours. After deadline, going for burgers and beers together. We loved what we did, who we did it with and the community we were doing it for. I look back on those days and curse the foolishness of youth that led me to chase dreams elsewhere.
A handful of those good journalists remain, as recent coverage of the YMCA’s attempt to leave Pottstown proves. But as a friend who continues to fight the good fight assured me, I would have been axed years ago. You see, the newspaper’s parent company, Digital First Media, is owned by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that has very different goals for its properties.
You might have heard of Alden and Digital First. They have been in the news lately:
• Niemanlab.org: “Newsonomics: Alden Global Capital is making so much money wrecking local journalism it might not want to stop anytime soon.”
• Bloomberg: “Imagine If Gordon Gekko Bought News Empires. The reality is even worse: This raider sinks decimated newsrooms’ revenue into bad investments.”
• Philadelphia Inquirer: “Philly’s Digital First papers face harsh cuts, potential ‘lights-out scenario’”
• Denver Post editorial: “As vultures circle, The Denver Post must be saved”
• MPR News’ NewsCut: “Newspaper employees wonder who will cover their plight”
Digital First recently made news by purchasing the Boston Herald.
• Boston Business Journal: “Digital First lays off Boston Herald managers, workers”
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Alden has done something besides strike a blow to community journalism: They’ve profited from it. For years, we have heard journalism is not profitable. It seems we have been proven wrong.
Quoting the NiemanLab story:
“Today we can reveal some key financial numbers from the very private company that shows just how successful Alden and DFM have been at milking profit out of the newspapers it is slashing to the bone. DFM reported a 17-percent operating margin — well above those of its peers — in its 2017 fiscal year, along with profits of almost $160 million. That’s the fruit of the repeated cutbacks that have left its own shrinking newsrooms in a state of rebellion.”
News came Friday that The Mercury is being kicked out of its historic home. This isn’t a surprise; the building should probably be condemned. I understand parts of it have been left to rot to a point that it is uninhabitable. Workers have been told they can work remotely or at the centralized plant in Exton. Unfortunately, that’s 30 minutes away, not in Pottstown.
The newspaper is being physically removed from its community. Now, good reporters will still be present, but think about it for a minute. Think about access this community enjoys to its local newspaper. Think about stopping by to subscribe, pick up a copy, drop off a letter to the editor, plan an ad or talk to a reporter or editor. Imagine that gone.
The Fauquier Times offers something different than disinterested corporate entities or hedge funds: local ownership comprised of investors who want to be proud of their newspaper. Who thought so much of that cause, they went and bought it.
I saw a lot of promise in that. It’s what drew me here from a relatively stable job at Stars and Stripes. I saw possibilities for the future of community newspapers, and a model for how it could work that others could follow. I wanted to be a part of that.
It hasn’t been easy. There have been challenges along the way. But exciting things are happening. We’ve redesigned. Added section fronts. Expanded coverage. Branched out into new mediums. We are learning and we are growing. The possibilities are endless.
To me, community journalism is a sacred trust. We are uniquely positioned to tell the stories of this community in ways no other organization can. We believe in this community: its people, its businesses, its causes. That means sharing the good things that are happening, as well as serving as the community’s watchdog.
I’ve shown you how easily that trust can be betrayed. You and I each have an investment in this cause. By buying a newspaper in print or online, or subscribing, you invest in our future. And through our work and dedication, we invest in our community. It’s a symbiotic relationship. All of us. Together.
Chris Six is the Editor-in-Chief of the Times. Email him at csix@fauquier.com. Follow him on Twitter @christophersix1
WHAT'S IN A BUILDING?: Journalists, sales reps, circulation workers, business office workers, publishers (sometimes), drivers and a whole lot of history.
It's no secret to many of you in the greater Pottstown area that I am a bit of a smart-ass.
But I will confess to being truly humbled by the actions taken in the past two weeks by the elected bodies I have spent more than 20 years covering and, in more than one instance, criticizing.
It takes a large measure of character to step outside oneself and see the greater good in an institution whose function is to tell you, and thousands of people, that you're screwing something up.
Certainly, that is not all The Mercury does in its coverage of local government. Like the elected officials and staffs themselves, we want to see Pottstown and the surrounding municipalities thrive and succeed. After all, that affects our health too.
But as I have said many times before, perhaps to the point that some of you are tired of hearing it, the First Amendment was not added to the Constitution just so the local newspaper would have the right to cover car crashes -- no matter how much people like to read about them and shake their heads over the photographs.
Our purpose for being, other than making money, is to hold government and the powerful accountable or, as E. K. Hornbeck once said "Mr. Brady, it is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
So to have the people whom we so regularly afflict stand up and say "we need you here," is not only humbling, but reflects, at least in my opinion, a measure of their broader vision about the rolls we all take on.
Without any request from us, both Pottstown Borough Council and the Pottstown School Board took it upon themselves to vote (unanimously I might add) to send letters to the company that owns The Mercury in what will likely be an unsuccessful attempt to reverse the decision to close-up the newspaper's long-time home at King and North Hanover streets and move it to the printing plant in Exton.
Here is the borough's letter, authorized by a vote on June 11:
It's a little hard to read, so, at the risk of seeming self-serving, I'll quote the key sentences: "The award-winning, Pultizer Prize-winning journalists are the backbone of Pottstown, its community and its residents, providing stories and information each and every day. Local news, local government and school information allows officials and the public to remain transparent and accountable to its fellow-constituents and fulfills the mission and goals of true journalism."
And here is the school board's letter which the board members agreed to sign at the June 21 meeting:
Also a bit hard to read, so again here are some salient sentences: "Shuttering of the building will have serious negative economic effects on our community's efforts to revitalize our downtown business area. In a small community of 5.2 square miles with a population of 22,000 people, the loss of every physical asset has a tremendous negative economic and psychological effect."
Here is a video of the discussion had by the school board prior to the vote. (Apologies in advance. Like my photos, my video skills remain stubbornly rudimentary):
Sadly not caught on camera were comments by Board Vice President Katina Bearden, a lifelong resident of Pottstown, who talked about what The Mercury has meant to her over the years.
(How odd that I got something in both eyes at just as Bearden began speaking that made it hard to see the controls on my i-Phone through my watering eyes...)
Katina Bearden
When the school district was in the process of deciding whether to desegregate its buildings decades ago, due to the fact that a high concentration of minority students lived in the attendance area of the former Jefferson Elementary School, it was The Mercury, she said, who gave that effort voice.
"The Mercury was on the forefront of desegregation. That was the first time I saw minority faces on the front page, in a big spread, that were not there because they had done something wrong," she said.
"The roots of The Mercury are deep in this town and we need an entity which keeps people accountable," Bearden said.
My sincere thanks to both council and the school on behalf of The Mercury staff, none of whom look forward to this re-location.
However, it is time for a reality check.
Appreciated as your letters are, the council and board members need to know they will not change the decision to re-locate The Mercury's operations to its printing plant. It has already happened to The Daily Local News in West Chester, The Times-Herald in Norristown and even to The Denver Post -- all owned by Digital First Media.
Remember, all those newspapers are still publishing every day and so will The Mercury for the foreseeable future. For the average reader, there will be no change. It will still be there in the driveway or the corner store every morning.
I will continue, for the most part, to operate here in borough, mostly from my attic office which, if I can get my act together, may soon have an air conditioning unit. No doubt, occasional visits to Exton will be necessary.
It is also incumbent on us all, as we wrestle with this question of how to keep local news sustainable, to recognize the relocation is better than the alternative.
Newspapers across the nation are struggling and, with the exception of the
The JRO printing facility in Exton, will be the new official home of The Mercury operations.
occasional billionaire who buys up a local publication and is willing to except meager or non-existent profits to keep it alive, there are not a lot of buyers out there.
The Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News is experimenting with a non-profit model. We all wish them luck in hopefully blazing a new path for the business that others can follow.
So yes, the owners of Digital First Media, the New York-based hedge fund Alden Global Capital, is not in the business to invest in their newspapers to make them grow. That has been proven difficult to do and that is not their business model.
They are owners of newspapers not to build them, but to "right size" them, as they recently told the Denver Post newsroom, and primarily to extract profits and yes, the evidence suggests they are doing so rapaciously. Welcome to the capitalist system.
But, as one well-placed source put the question to me recently, "when you have to choose between death today or the death of a thousand cuts, which one keeps you alive longer?"
It's a fair point.
This is not a new, or terribly energy efficient building and its upkeep requires a lot of money.
So if The Mercury can save $300,000 or $400,000 or $500,000 a year in overhead by not operating a building that is too large for its needs, is it not the prudent business decision to take that savings and live to publish another day?
And will some of the profit from those savings go to the owners with high profit demands? Most likely. But without a buyer for the paper, there are no other options.
In truth, we three entities are not much different.
Did the school district not just outsource its entire transportation department and close its copy center to save money?
Did the borough not ask the state to conduct a complete audit of its finances and operations to find every savings possible to prevent another 12 percent tax hike?
Much like The Mercury is battling reduced advertising (and subscription) revenues due to a splintering of its audience on the Internet, the borough and school district are trying to compensate for reduced tax revenues from dwindling property assessments -- and the loss of Pottstown Hospital from the tax rolls -- and are making savings everywhere they can.
So must we.
It's an emotional thing to leave a place you worked for 20 years, particularly when you will still see it every day.
But times change.
And so while I recognize that the shuttering of The Mercury building may be an unavoidable financial decision if we want to continue to publish, it's gratifying to be able report the "official" recognition of the elected officials I am paid to oversee and, when warranted, expose or criticize, that such work is necessary in the service of democracy.
In the meantime, see you on Twitter. Speaking of which, here are the Tweets from Thursday's school board meeting:
