from NYObserver.com
This week's New York Observer, the last for 2006, awarded it's fourth-annual "Media Mensch Of The Year" to former Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet, the editor who urged defiance in the face of eroding budgets and faced down his corporate overlords and refused to back down over newsroom cutbacks, getting an election day pink-slip for his efforts.
In an era when print is under siege, the internet is gobbling up ad revenue and cutbacks are legion (cf. Time's Merry Christmas to 27 staffers), newspapers are in danger of being whittled away — and literally, as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal cut themselves back physically by actual inches, shrinking down to "proportions that are trimmer, handier, friendlier. Cheaper." Not, as New York magazine recently pointed out, unlike another paper: The Observer.
It's hard not to see a parallel between the Observer applauding Baquet, publicly endorsing his "courage" for standing up to the ax-wielding Man, and the realities of their new ownership by Jared Kushner, who bought the paper this past summer. "Does the owner understand that a newspaper is not just a business?" asks the Observer — considered by many to be an essential staple of the New York media landscape, despite its red-inked balance sheet — in an unsigned, front-page editorial. So far, the Observer is in a holding pattern, with whatever changes still in the planning stages (like going tabloid, or perhaps more) — but it's been quiet, and who knows what they're girding for (which might explain the air of general crankiness reported at their holiday party, and more generally reputed).
"By defying the company," declares the Observer, "Mr. Baquet turned a fiscal cry over budget targets into a public emergency about journalism leadership." With $2-million in losses per year, this no doubt hits very close to home. "Does the owner understand that a newspaper is not just a business?" It's clear that the Observer really, really hopes so — and just in case he doesn't, they've put the message somewhere he can't miss it.
