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Richard Aregood: Every time you look, there are buyouts and layoffs at newspapers

TO PARAPHRASE myriad deejays, the hits just keep on coming. We're not talking about yet another playing of "Stairway to Heaven," or even "Seasons in the Sun," however annoying you might find that prospect. For people who work for newspapers, the last 15 years or so have been an unrelieved and seemingly unending chain of disasters.

TO PARAPHRASE

myriad deejays, the hits just keep on coming.

We're not talking about yet another playing of "Stairway to Heaven," or even "Seasons in the Sun," however annoying you might find that prospect. For people who work for newspapers, the last 15 years or so have been an unrelieved and seemingly unending chain of disasters.

I just finished a column for a North Dakota paper about the sudden early retirement of the editor of the Bismarck Tribune, who cited unrelenting personal attacks from bloggers and Internet commenters as his reason. I suspect he wasn't telling the half of it. His newspaper wasn't much before the cutbacks started, but the economic climate has made trying to cover the news a frustrating ordeal, especially after Bismarck suffered a catastrophic flood. Personal insults are a nasty icing on that cake.

It's more dramatic at a smaller paper, but it's happening everywhere. I marvel at how well papers like the Inquirer, Daily News and Minneapolis Star Tribune have somehow kept up quality as advertising and circulation losses chip away at them. Last column, I praised the local reporting in the Daily News, reporting that stands up for every Philadelphian, reporting that has even won a Pulitzer Prize for standing up for the powerless.

Some of my fellow Daily News alumni took exception to my remark that the reporting has "never been better," citing the great tradition of the DN and its consistent performance over a very long time.

They're right - and so am I. As Mike Sokolove, once a reporter at both the Inquirer and the Daily News, now a writer for the New York Times Magazine, put it in a Facebook message, "The reporting might be better than ever, they just won a damn Pulitzer, but the truth is there's so little of it because even before the redesign the paper was decimated."

Get ready for some new challenges. The paper you're reading has been very attractively redesigned. It also has less space for news than it had before, part of the rationale behind the redesign that sacrificed the Harry Gross column many of us miss. But just as we get used to that (we Daily News readers love our paper and have shrugged off rumors about its health since 1925), come the events of the last couple of weeks.

First, another round of buyouts of union-represented staffers was announced, just after editor Larry Platt sent out a memo praising the staff for some impressive accomplishments. Headlines are better, he wrote, the reporting remains excellent, circulation edges upward and Philly.com is growing exponentially. Generally speaking, he's right.

Buyouts are the gentlest way of cutting staff. I took a remarkably generous one at the Newark Star-Ledger a few years back. In short, what it means is they give you money to go away. The Star-Ledger, by the way, is currently advertising for an editorial page staffer who sounds remarkably like me. The people may go away, it seems, but the jobs still need to be done. And the buyouts get less generous as time goes on.

Then came the even scarier memo. Layoffs:

"Philadelphia Media Network has alerted the Newspaper Guild of the following reductions in force:

3 Inquirer Photographers

3 Library Classifiers

2 Advertising Layout Clerks

1 Advertising Account Planner

3 Advertising Salaried Outside Sales Representatives

2 Graphic Designers

5 Computer Operators"

That's 19 people who will be unemployed by Nov. 1. It's not the end of the world for the papers (although it's awful for 19 people), but it's yet another piece of misery that deepens the frustration and makes it amazing that the good people who report the news, package it and sell the advertising that supports it keep doing the impressive jobs they do.

Alvah Chapman, CEO of the late Knight-Ridder, which owned the DN and the Inquirer, had a litany that was absurd back in the day, and is laughable now. "We have to do more," he said, "with less." What you do with less is less. The fact that declining ad revenues are forcing necessary but unpleasant moves doesn't make them hurt people and the product any less. Personally, I'm buying my next car from a Daily News advertiser because he's supporting my newspaper. I'll drive it back to North Dakota.

In the meantime, pause to admire the people who put out this newspaper. Have compassion for the editors, who sometimes must feel like George Custer watching the 7th Cavalry dropping all around him. It's a cliché that newspapers are a "daily miracle."

These days, it's up there with the loaves and fishes.