The elephant-in-the-room story in Virginia media today involves the Richmond Times-Dispatch and sportswriters David Teel and Mike Barber.
Word started circulating Tuesday night that the RT-D, owned by the perpetually money-drained Lee Enterprises, had laid off the veteran duo, and Barber, Wednesday morning, confirmed the news, in a post on Twitter that came across like a career obituary.
This is sad news on multiple levels – starting with the guys, Teel, the 15-time Virginia Sportswriter of the Year, and Barber, who was the 2020 Sportswriter of the Year, breaking, at the time, a nine-year streak of Teel wins.
There’s no good time to lose your job, but this is about as bad a time as there has been to lose a sportswriting job, with the pool of jobs in the sector, day by day, getting more and more shallow.
Next level up, this news is yet another bad sign for Virginia newspapers, with the backdrop there being, this Lee Enterprises outfit owns, count ‘em, 11 daily papers in the Commonwealth, including the T-D, The Roanoke Times and The Free-Lance Star in Fredericksburg, three of the five biggest papers in the state.
The Lee Enterprises-owned papers have been shedding staff for years now, but when it gets to the level of guys like Teel and Barber, you’re far past cutting fat and even muscle – this level of cut is to the bone.
It’s not like we haven’t seen this coming.
The issue isn’t that people aren’t reading the news, because we are reading the news, more than ever before; it’s that the money isn’t there like it used to be.
The last Virginia Press Association awards banquet that I attended, I think it was in 2012, featured a rather depressing speech by a retiring publisher who, that far back, was already lamenting the advertising money drying up, with a story about how the toughest decision that he had to make in the good ol’ days was who to play golf with on Wednesday and who to play golf with on Thursday.
That was back when car dealerships needed newspapers, back when retailers were still largely local, and would pay for pricy inserts, when classified ads could bring in big dollars, small text ad by small text ad.
We’re more than a decade past that depressing speech at the VPA banquet, and the response from the legacy media has been to charge money for subscriptions, on the revenue side, while at the same time, on the content side, cutting staff, to try to save money.
A third-grader could tell you why this isn’t working.
The paper where I got my start is The News Virginian, here in my home base of operations, Waynesboro. I remember the weekly all-staff meeting with the publisher at the time, a hard-to-like fellow, always angry about something, that was highlighted by his weekly rant about how we were losing the circulation battle with the other local paper, The News Leader, based in Staunton.
My first year at the NV was in 1995, and us losing the battle meant the Leader was getting around 12,000 readers a day, and our NV had dipped to 11,000 a day.
The most up-to-date numbers on their circulations will tell you how far things have fallen: the Leader, according to data from the VPA, was at 3,980 per day in 2023, and the NV was at, gasp, 2,352.
The toilet has been flushed; the water is circling the bowl.
And it’s only going to get worse, with talented writers like Teel and Barber just the latest among the many talents in our business being given their pink-slips.
It’s not good for them, because the market is flooded with talented journalists trying to figure out a way to pay the bills, and it’s not good for readers who want to read in-depth articles about their local college and pro sports teams.
Where this is going for society is even more not good, if you can excuse my garbled syntax there.
I’ll share here what I shared with a colleague who called me today to gossip about the news involving Teel and Barber: that my big concern is, when Lee Enterprises announces its next round of layoffs, what does this mean for the people who are served by the 11 newspapers that Lee owns when it comes to coverage of, say, the local city council, the local board of supervisors and school board?
Who do people go to if the police department or sheriff’s office is doing things that are out of bounds?
I saw, in a discussion thread on the Teel-Barber news, a question from one observer to the effect that, who attends the postgame press conferences at UVA Football and UVA Basketball with those guys gone?
Bigger there, to me, is, who pushes back against the party line on the recent issue roiling UVA Health, or on the effort by a conservative alumni group to remake the University in their version of the image of Jefferson?
Barber labeled me “fringe media” for the series of stories that I wrote in the spring about the contract status of UVA Basketball coach Tony Bennett, and I embraced what I assumed he’d intended as a slur, because, let’s be honest, as much as I get a kick out of writing about the day-to-day stuff, society needs a “fringe media” that builds on the work of those in the media who keep tabs on what’s going on day-to-day.
I can do what I do, and do well, because, one, I figured out a long time ago how to make money as an interwebs journalist, and two, there are other journalists out there covering press conferences and city council and school board meetings, the vast majority of which are utterly uneventful, but still, somebody needs to be there, with a pen and notebook, just to let folks know, we’re watching.
The last thing I want to have to do is scale up to be able to hire people to sit in a city council chambers for the purpose of keeping tabs, or to ask Tony Elliott about why he ran the ball on third-and-5 on the edge of the red zone, pretending like it matters.
Basically, I want to keep being “fringe,” so today’s news about two top-notch sportswriters losing their jobs, yeah, it impacts me, too.
Video: Richmond Times-Dispatch layoffs impact Virginia sports
Share
Chris Graham
