Dwindling staffs hurt meeting time: editors and advocates are changing the way they do business.(SYMPOSIUM: Facebook or face tim

Downsizing had left our newsroom looking blighted. All those vacated desks and darkened computers troubled Spokane Spokesman-Review editor Gary Graham, so he had the abandoned cubicles replaced with chairs and couches.

Who needs a constant reminder of the grim conditions plaguing our industry?

They exist, though, and professional journalists should wrestle with the question posed on the NCEW listserv in February by member Jane Nicholes of The Press-Register in Mobile. What do you say to readers when staff cuts limit what you can do for them?

How indeed do editorial boards in particular respond to endless requests for meetings about more issues than our thinning ranks can accommodate?

Nicholes posted her inquiry after a community group visited her newspaper wanting more attention to civic issues. She didn't think troubling industry trends were a satisfactory explanation.

"The least we can do is look them in the eye and hear them out," she wrote.

While many of us are committing to shorter meetings and asking for email overviews, the demands still overwhelm. Even so, we want to be there for the community members who depend on us to get an issue before the broader public.

The juggling act is stressful, and our contacts have noticed.

Sam Mace is the Inland Northwest project director for Save Our Wild Salmon. In a region where love of nature clashes with an expectation of cheap hydroelectric power, restoring salmon runs destroyed by dams is a touchy issue that requires Mace to spend lots of time with reporters and editorial writers throughout the Northwest. On a recent round of visits in the Seattle area, she sensed the journalists were "beleaguered."

Now Mace is adjusting her methods. Fulltime environmental writers are rarer, and those that remain no longer have time for leisurely conversations over lunch. Editorial board sessions are more likely to be with a single writer than the full board. "You now have to make fewer asks because you know what else they have on their plate," she says.

Public relations professional Chris Carlson puts it this way:

"If anything, it does put more of a burden on those of us public affairs practitioners still standing to make sure when we approach ed page editors now that we have to be more discriminating and more sure that we really are pushing solid, legitimate news as opposed to what one might once have considered to be more spin."

But Carlson, a principal in a PR firm and a one-time press aide to Interior Secretary Cecil D. Andrus, recognizes the new limits. "I think the bigger challenge for folks in our business," he says, "is to dive into and master the world of blogs, tweeters, and YouTube."

Mace and others are making the same shift, partly because technology leads them there and partly because newspapers are a less reliable conduit to the public.

Yet the printed page's tangible quality still means something.

"We know that if it's in the paper and you can hold it in your hand and you can read it and reread it, you retain a lot more than you will with that transitory story that you'll see on TV," says Hugh Imhoff, public information officer for an investor-owned utility based in Spokane.

To Tim Church, past president of the National Public Health Information Coalition, it's a matter of credibility.

"It's rare that someone shows up at a public hearing citing a story on radio or TV," observes Church, communications director for the Washington state Department of Health. But a printed story or editorial gives an issue legitimacy, he believes.

Such words are naturally comforting to those of us in print.

But the answer to Jane Nicholes' question still rests at least in part with us and whether we can solidify our link with readers.

After Hurricane Andrew hammered Florida several years ago, David Lawrence, then publisher of The Miami Herald, described how the shared emergency underscored a connection between journalists and their neighbors in the community. We're weathering a different kind of storm these days, but Lawrence's words apply:

"Whether a community's bonding agent is a disaster, a hot issue, or the celebration of a sports team's title, a good newspaper ought to be in the center of things, helping to apply the glue."

Doug Floyd is the editorial page editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. Email dougf@spokesman.com

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