The California newspaper that has no reporters left
When brown water overflowed the banks of the Salinas River in January, flooding thousands of acres and throwing an untold number of farmworkers out of jobs, the leading newspaper in this agricultural mecca did not cover the story.
Candidates in the November race for mayor also went absent from the pages of the 152-year-old news outlet. Ditto non-coverage of a police staffing shortage so serious that the police chief said the department might not have enough cops to respond to all complaints of theft, fraud, vandalism, prowling and prostitution.
The Salinas Californian missed those stories, understandably, because it employed only one journalist until December. That's when the paper's last reporter quit to take a job in TV. The departure marked the latest and perhaps final step in a slow-motion unwinding of what used to be the principal local news source in this city of 163,000.
Owned by the largest newspaper publisher in the nation, Gannett, the venerable Californian now carries stories from the chain's USA Today flagship and its other California papers. The only original content from Salinas comes in the form of paid obituaries, making death virtually the only sign of life at an institution once considered a must-read by many Salinans.
The lack of local reporting has drawn complaints from the mayor, a county supervisor and everyday citizens who say the public life of their community has been diminished by the lack of a dependable source of local news.
"As a subscriber, seems like they are all gone & all local news has vanished from its pages! The end of an era??" Monterey County Supervisor Luis Alejo recently wrote on Twitter, adding in another tweet: "Hoping they were hiring others soon instead of giving up on serving our community."
Trish Triumpho Sullivan, owner of Salinas' Downtown Book & Sound, said the newspaper's retreat feels especially ironic in the hometown of John Steinbeck, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who once worked as a war correspondent.
"He understood the power of a story to create positive change," said Sullivan, who has lived in Salinas for more than 40 years. "Without a local paper in our city, we've lost the power to tell the stories of people in our city and the city itself. We've lost the power of storytelling."
An editor who previously helped oversee the Salinas paper from another Gannett newsroom 300 miles north referred questions to the company's corporate office in McLean, Va.
"The Californian has deep roots in Monterey County and the greater Monterey Bay area," Lisa Strattan, senior director of the company's Center for Community Journalism, said in a statement. "And we remain committed to providing resources to our newsroom while relying on our USA Today Network to ensure continued coverage."
The company's corporate PR office acknowledged "staffing challenges in certain newsrooms" but pledged that Gannett is "developing strategies to support these markets, including communities such as Salinas." None of the 57 reporting jobs recently listed on the chain's online hiring board were for work in Salinas.
The emptying of the Californian's newsroom epitomizes the ongoing struggles for the American newspaper industry, a shift felt acutely at small-town papers. Newspaper revenue nationally plummeted 52% from 2002 to 2020, with much of the income from advertising shifting to Internet giants such as Google and Facebook. In the dozen years after 2008, newspaper newsroom employment fell 57%.
Gannett's downsizing accelerated after the company's 2019 merger with GateHouse Media to form a company that owns roughly one-fifth of all daily newspapers in America. Gannett employed 11,200 people at the end of 2022, regulatory filings showed, a 47% decline from three years prior.
It took years of layoffs and dispirited resignations for the Salinas Californian staff to finally tick down to zero.
The Californian's newsroom buzzed with about 35 journalists in 1999 — and not just hard news reporters but writers specializing in sports and features and a separate opinion department, a former editor recalled. The paper staffed the major beats and looked after the public's business, from the City Council and local schools to crime and downtown development.
When President Clinton made an election-season stop in 1996, for instance, his campaign did not pick up the $50,000 in overtime for Salinas police and sheriff's deputies. The paper dogged the White House until the president's reelection campaign coughed up the money, recalled then-editor Catharine Hamm, adding: "That was such sweet justice."
With advertising, production and other operations included, the newspaper employed about 120 people. But when the Great Recession hit, ad sales swooned and the staff shrank by about a third. By 2016, the paper had gone from six days a week in print to three. The following year, it moved out of its historic downtown building, graced to this day by a mural of Steinbeck superimposed over the Californian's front pages.
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