Gannett seeks reporter to ‘reimagine’ RG police beat in ‘digital-first environment’
You may be curious about expectations for the reporter Gannett soon will hire to cover the police beat at The Register-Guard.
A recent job listing recently caught the eye of a couple former Register-Guard folks. We’re sharing a link to the the listing and invite your comments. Ignore the request for your email address, click anywhere outside the dialogue box and proceed to the listing.
Sounds like they left out one requirement: “Must be able to walk on water”
Seriously, though, I think The R-G reporter hiring standards in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and ‘00s included most of these requirements—we just never listed them with this specificity.
The new stuff is, of course, the requirements for being able to make good use of digital and “alternative” tools of reporting, and the emphasis on covering “marginalized portions” of communities feels a bit like eyewash to me.
Also, I’m not sure what they mean by “actively seek to engage” those portions of the community. Back in The Day our R-G reporters were barred from belonging to any group or organization that they might some day be required to report on, for good reason. We once hired a reporter to cover Springfield and later discovered that he was a member of the John Birch Society; he wasn’t let go but he also wasn’t a very good reporter and didn’t stay long in Eugene. Some years later we had a reporter who served as PIO for his Army National Guard unit and argued with us when we told him he could no longer do that particular job because the National Guard had become a subject of a series of news stories.
I think the requirement to be able to dig into “criminal justice trends” is a little pie-in-the-sky in the absence of backup daily reporting by others, an acute problem in a time when reporting staffs continue to shrink. It’s a hard fact that most editors choose to ignore that true enterprise reporting almost always requires giving up some daily reporting unless the reporting staff is overloaded with GA reporters.
The bottom line is you never really know the capabilities of the reporter you just hired until he or she has spent at least six months on the job (hence the typical six-month probationary period—which Gannett says nothing about).
We had our surprises at The R-G, some good, some bad. Who knew when we hired Jacqui Banaszynski that she would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize in St. Paul, Minn., and become an acclaimed journalism teacher and writing coach at the international level? And what were we thinking when we hired a police reporter who claimed his name was actually Daniel Webster, and that he’d spent three months in a Mexican jail on a phony arrest charge some time prior to coming to Eugene (his tenure was blissfully brief)?
I didn’t find on the Gannett job site any information on how much the BN/PSR job pays, or how many hours the reporter would be required to work, except for the boilerplate “On occasion, work extended hours, evenings, weekends and holidays, at times unexpectedly as news happens.” I doubt any serious applicant for the job will find that statement surprising.
Nor is there any mention that R-G employees are represented by the The NewsGuild-CWA.
According to Nieman Lab, when Gannett and GateHouse merged in 2019, the combined companies owned 563 newspapers and more than 50 of those newsrooms (most likely among its 261 daily newspapers) were unionized. Their number of newspapers is now fewer than 400, and the 25,000 employees who were working in 2019 has dropped to around 11,000.
Will Gannett get many applicants for this job? Well, in 2021, more than 13,500 people graduated from U.S. colleges with journalism degrees. You do the math.
That’s an excellent analysis by Lloyd. I’d like to add a comment.
When I left The Register-Guard in 1989 our news staff of 80-plus had one full-time courthouse reporter, one full-time GA reporter and one full-time “police reporter,” which meant covering cops, fires, accidents and more.
But we actually had a broader public safety news team that included all three regional bureau reporters and the county desk reporter.
On top of that, almost every beat reporter was expected to don the GA cap when needed in a public safety crisis such as the eruption of Mount St. Helens or the devastating I-5 pile-up during field burning near Harrisburg.
These memories make the Gannett job posting look pretty laughable to me.
As Lloyd said, the company’s stated goals for the position pretty much reflect what our unwritten mission was for public safety reporting at The R-G back in the day. The difference was that the Baker family provided the resources necessary to help us carry out that mission.
Gannett’s lofty words in the job posting are, frankly, a joke.
FOOTNOTE: Lane County’s population in 1989 was 278,665. It’s over 383,000 today. Good luck to whoever takes this R-G job.