Pilot loses wealth of experience

The news about the news business is bleak and getting bleaker around the country - and in Hampton Roads.

Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune, the Daily Press in Newport News and the Los Angeles Times, declared bankruptcy last week. The New York Times will mortgage its headquarters to the tune of $225 million.

"What's black and white and completely over?" comedian Jon Stewart asked on his Monday show. "It's newspapers."

Locally, the news is somber, too. In another cost-cutting move, The Virginian-Pilot last week announced the end of home delivery in parts of the Eastern Shore and rural areas of North Carolina. "How could you?" asked readers in both locations.

That same dismay greeted last month's announcement of plans to cut The Pilot's staff by 10 percent and its size by 8 percent. Along with eliminating 125 jobs, the newspaper will lose about 40 pages a week. This will result most noticeably in the elimination of the daily business section. Daily business news will appear in other sections; a stand-alone section will be published on Sundays. Recently, Landmark Media Enterprises announced that efforts to sell The Pilot have been suspended - "at least for now."

No wonder readers are asking, "What's going on down there?" Because The Pilot endured under family ownership decades after other newspapers were bought by media conglomerates, readers here have a proprietary attitude about what Nancy Bagranoff, dean of Old Dominion University's business school, calls "our Virginian-Pilot." We have all been neighbors for a long time and share a stake in the community's well-being.

Reporters and photographers who have interacted with hundreds of contacts for years, staffers whose bylines have long been familiar to readers, account for almost all of the 15 newsroom staffers who will depart by year's end. Theirs are names readers remember and will miss.

Among Tony Germanotta's many shining moments is his work in revealing that gunpowder made unstable by improper storage likely caused the deadly explosion on the USS Iowa, a revelation that upended the Navy's effort to lay blame on a sailor killed in the accident. His stories about the John Walker spy trial were similarly memorable.

Mike Knepler practiced grass-roots journalism in the neighborhoods of Norfolk and Portsmouth for many of his 30 years at The Pilot. In his role as a city reporter, he saw himself as a conduit for information, feeding city leaders news of the neighborhoods and informing the neighborhoods about their government.

As a writer and later Sports editor, Chic Riebel has covered hometown sports with uncommon passion, most recently on the high school sports Web site, where he has spotlighted the achievements of generations of high school athletes.

Kerry Sipe, whose career began shortly before linotype machines became extinct, has spent the past eight years working in the brave new world of multimedia for PilotOnline.com. Longtime readers will likely recall that he was one of my predecessors as public editor in the mid-1980s.

Earl Swift's in-depth narratives chronicled his experiences canoeing down the James River, recounted the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and described how military forensic teams search for the remains of Americans lost in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War..

Gone, too, will be John Sheally's photographs of presidents and Phyllis Speidell's community news reports of "fires and festivals, hurricanes and homecomings."

The 15 departing staffers take with them roughly three centuries of experience. They, along with 14 longtime staffers who accepted buyout offers late last year and 26 other vacancies that will not be filled, add up to 22 percent of the newsroom staff. Gone with them is a historical perspective and context of events. Editor Denis Finley put it best in describing Germanotta: Metaphorically speaking, these reporters not only know "where the bodies are buried" but also "who dug the holes and where they bought the shovels."

Finley called the first round of departures "the largest drain of experience and talent for the newspaper in at least two decades." This year, he reassured readers that costs, not coverage, were his key target and that he is keeping "as many reporters on the street as possible."

But no business does more with less. Who will produce the carefully crafted voter guides? How will we keep tabs on lobbying efforts to lift Virginia's 25-year ban on uranium mining, a move that could endanger local water supplies? The danger here is that democracy cannot thrive without journalism.

An irony of the digital age and its capacity to provide countless news sources is that the overload it generates is likely to lead us back to our trusted news providers. While the ink-on-paper model of news delivery is likely to become a relic in a decade or two, the demand for reliable news is certain to grow.

That is why established, brand-name news operations will likely endure. Younger journalists, nimble and sure-footed in the ways of new media, will reinvent "our Virginian-Pilot" for the digital age. Newspapers are not "completely over" because reliable news, made all the more urgent by the electronic cacophony that assaults us, is always in demand.

Joyce Hoffmann, the public editor, is an associate professor in the English Department at Old Dominion University. Reach her at (757) 446-2475 or public. editor@pilotonline.com.