Carolyn Mary Bauman - Fort Worth Star-Telegram
I was inspired to write this diary because I’m always getting emails from Daily Kos talking about the layoffs in media, and I don’t see a lot of personal stories about what it’s like.
I started working for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1994, right after graduating from college. I started there part-time and became full-time in 1997. I was laid off in November 2018, 21 years later. In that time I made good friends, lost coworkers, had countless potlucks and meetings and award ceremonies. And did a LOT of designing.
At the time, we had a huge graphics department. Classified, Retail, Real Estate, Special Products, Mac Direct… We didn’t get Web Design until much later. Holidays came with huge potlucks and catered dinners, usually with some sort of gift giving. We had so many people that we had a night and a day shift (I was on night shift — I never overslept.)
I cried with my coworkers when we lost somebody. Daisy the security guard, who had a brain tumor. Charles St. Germain, who dropped dead of a heart attack at age 35. Ray Williams, who fought non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and eventually passed away from leukemia. Paul Wagner, who was hit by a car while crossing a street in his wheelchair. Viola Rodriguez, who had liver cancer. Mark Perkins, who had bowel cancer. I know I’m forgetting somebody and I’ll add them later if I remember.
The Fort Worth post office at W. 7th St.
I was in the parking garage at the Star-Telegram on a smoke break with Ray and Paul, when the tornado hit in 2000 and tore through downtown Fort Worth. The sirens started up, and before we could take cover, the tornado touched down. If you’ve never been in the parking garage during a tornado, it is an experience. The wind sucks at your ankles like a strong tide. Ray and I ran to the stairwell and up the stairs, and then I looked back — to my horror, I realized that we left Paul in his wheelchair at the door and he was trying to hold on to the rail with his one working hand. We came back down the stairs, and then things started rolling down the street. Heavy things, like the Fed Ex box. Cars took shelter in the garage. The staff photographer (Carolyn Bauman) ran up to the roof and took the picture at the top of this diary, then came down and took pictures of the tower. The tornado broke all the windows in the Bank One building, and it took several years for them to be fixed. The storm bent a billboard near the old post office, so when they built a new office, they used the I-beams as a sculpture. One of the best reuses of storm damage I’ve ever seen.
I learned on the job, as we all do. I started as a classified ad designer and paste up artist, worked in retail for a few months, then Special Products, then as a spec artist. As the company shrunk everybody’s responsibilities became less specialized, so I moved back to retail, learned Adobe Animate on the job, and eventually joined the Web Design group. When I was laid off in 2018, I was one of two designers working for the Star-Telegram, and one of only two web designers working for McClatchy. My coworker was responsible for packaging jobs and sending them to the ‘studio,’ which was our euphemism for the outsourcing group in Chennai, India. I was supposed to send web jobs to the studio, but honestly I could do them faster and I needed something to do.
I knew my layoff was coming. It seemed like we were laying off ten people every other month. We were hemorrhaging employees, and there was no fresh infusion of more people. So for a little while I was too busy, and had too much to do. And then two weeks of not enough to do. And then we would lay off more people. When I was laid off, I was one of two web design people in the whole McClatchy company, and we were grabbing the jobs and knocking them out as soon as they came in.
I cried when everybody else was laid off. When it was my turn I was ready. I tossed my twenty years of plastic awards (keeping the one with a typo because it was funny, and keeping the Designer of the Year awards,) made sure my portfolio site was updated with all the most recent HTML5 ads I had done, and I was out of there.
The severance package padded the blow. One of the benefits of working for an old company that has weathered the existence of unions, is that there are quite a few protections for employees that are laid off. It gave me plenty of time to think about what I wanted to do next. I did some applying to jobs, but nothing really clicked. Perhaps I’m too old, or perhaps I’m overqualified. My biggest problem is that I’m unwilling to work in Dallas.
Many people have tried to analyze exactly where newspapers started having issues with their cash flow. Part of the problem with newspapers is that they’ve been run as a profitable business for a long time, and there’s an expectation that the business will continue to grow, expand, and become more profitable. Newspapers do better when they have a smaller profit margin, and aren’t expected to be more profitable every year. Newspapers don’t need shareholders, what they need are subscribers and communities.
Every salesperson at the Star-Telegram was expected to sell as well or better than their previous year. When they provided more incentives, such as bonuses, they were able to keep good salespeople. But when they cut those incentives the salespeople fled to greener pastures, and revenue declined further. The Star-Telegram started cutting content providers, like writers, photographers, and editors, and the quality of the content got worse. Then the salespeople had a harder time selling ads, so they were either laid off or they quit, and the Star-Telegram made less money. So they laid off more people. Most of us stuck it out until we were laid off, because we knew the severance package was worth it.
I think specifically running a newspaper as a corporation is harmful to the product being produced. When I started working for the Star-Telegram, they were owned by Capital Cities. They were sold in 1997 to Knight Ridder. McClatchy purchased Knight-Ridder in 2006 and paid too much for it, in the process acquiring the Star-Telegram. At the time it was one of the top performing newspapers in the Knight-Ridder portfolio. But revenue was rapidly declining. They shedded poorly performing newspapers first, then started cutting at their more profitable papers. You might think that this was a deliberate destruction of news media, but I personally think that this was just poor management. I saw many decisions made at the top that required a lot of work on everybody’s part, only to be scrapped when the entire team was laid off ten weeks later. The pivot to video didn’t help. Facebook’s faked numbers for videos really hurt a lot of news organizations who relied on that metric to drive up their page views. The classified section generated a lot of revenue, and Craigslist made a real dent in that. There was also a decline in inserts and special publications. There’s a low return from junk mail, and it’s gotten worse.
A month after I was laid off at the Star-Telegram, I got a message from a former coworker and good work friend. I had helped him get his job at the Azle News. McClatchy was rehiring former employees and putting them to work at their hub in Irving. So I went to work for the Azle News, and my coworker went off to Irving. Better him than me, I have no desire for a 45 minute commute.
The Azle News is a small newspaper for the city of Azle, which is about 10,000 people. The town’s getting larger because properties inside the Fort Worth city limits are so expensive. I’m one of eight employees at the company. The publisher sells advertising and creates community involvement/reader engagement, along with the editor. Obituaries are free under a certain word limit (more goodwill for the community.) Classifieds are relatively cheap. The subscribers are (just at a guess) about 60% seniors.
I do all of the advertising design, build both papers (Azle News and the Springtown Epigraph) and special sections (about 12 a year.) I also end up doing special projects for the Chamber of Commerce and other civic organizations that the Azle News participates in. I am incredibly busy, and I love it. I get paid a little less, but what with all the furloughs I probably don’t make much less, and I pay a little more in health insurance, but it’s better insurance.
When I first started working at the Star-Telegram 25 years ago, I had no idea I would still be working at a newspaper today. It’s weird how things work out. Today my main creative outlet is making masks. I play music for fun and I’m currently trying to raise a 4 soon to be 5 year old child. When I turn 65 I have a 401k that will mature, and perhaps it will be his college fund.
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