Newspapers nationwide are laying off so many of their journalists this week, but there are a variety of reasons why it happened…some you know and some you don’t know.

This has happened at The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The Washington Post, and on and on and on.

More layoffs are coming.

You, like most people, will probably blame the Internet for killing newspapers. That’s true…but only to a certain extent.

I worked in newspapers for nearly 10 years. Yes, most of the reporters are overwhelmingly hostile to conservatives. And, yes, I often had to keep my views to myself if I wanted to keep my job.

Let’s start with the bias first, shall we, and then work our way down to some lesser-known problems that tanked this business.

THE BIAS

Newspaper editors and reporters couldn’t keep their personal political biases and their condescending attitudes toward their own readers out of their work.

There was the time one of my editors in Florida ordered a colleague of mine not to publish a story about Democrats voting early in the 2006 mid-term elections. Doing so, my boss went on to say, might inspire Republicans to vote early too. Oh, how that man hated Republicans. And when the Democrats won big in those mid-terms, that same editor and my assistant editor high fived each other in the newsroom. How unprofessional.

There was the time that same editor wrote an editorial calling our own readers racist for not wanting to take in and support illegal immigrants.

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Not at all uncommon was to sit in a newsroom and hear other reporters compare conservatives (roughly half the population of the United States and, more importantly, potential subscribers to our product) to Nazis and Klan members.

My favorite display of unprofessionalism was the time I interviewed at a Gannett-owned newspaper in North Louisiana. My would-be boss complained that too many of the locals were too stupid and too ignorant to vote for anybody other than Republicans. He hated his own customers. And then he recited a list of prominent conservatives whom he insisted must die at the hands of a military firing squad. No, I’m not kidding. He actually said this during a job interview.

In case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t get the job.

MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

As reporters, more people bought our product to read our stories. A smaller segment of people bought the paper to read the ads or read the classifieds. But, again, most people bought the paper to read the news. Oftentimes, the people in the news department put in the longest number of hours, 60 to 80 a week, often at the expense of having a social life or spending time with our families. Of all the people in the building the ones in the newsroom were the most formally educated, but also, ironically, and also, by far, the least compensated for the 60 to 80 hours we put in every week (especially compared to the people in the advertising department, who made far more money than the reporters, even BEFORE their commissions kicked in).

So, yeah, the reporters got the shaft.

And when I say “least compensated” I literally mean we were college grads (some with master’s degrees) making as much money as a high school dropout working behind the counter at Burger King.

And this was 15 to 20 years ago, when newspapers were doing brisk business.

As I distinctly recall, newspaper reporters were forbidden from taking second jobs to make ends meet (not that we had the time or the energy to do so). The end result: reporters nationwide are overworked, underpaid, angry, have low morale….and, as a consequence, don’t put 100 percent into their work. And that affects the quality of the final product.

And management cannot treat employees like that and expect to stay in business.

Is the lesson here, perhaps, that liberals don’t know how to effectively run a profitable enterprise?

SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS

Yes, I know. If you’re reading The Hayride then odds are you’re MAGA all the way (so am I) and despise people in my profession. I get it. Most (but not all) of the people in my line of work are actively working against your best interests. They’re activists firsts. Journalists second.

And that’s a shame, because as a reporter I’m not a political activist as much as I am a storyteller and an objective pursuer of truth. That’s true even when I uncover information that contradicts my own confirmation biases.

Bad management killed the news industry. For that matter, bad management will kill ANY business or industry.

How I wish that every manager in this country were required to take formal training to understand not just the mechanics of how management works but also the psychological aspects of it: keeping morale high, incentivizing workers, treating employees fairly. And it’s astounding how clueless so many managers in this country are about that stuff. They eventually pay a price for it. Managers who work in the news industry already have.

People would still buy print newspapers if they were still worth reading (with or without the Internet). But customers aren’t buying newspapers. Contrary to popular belief, that’s not because print is for old fogies.

Yes, newspapers often carry yesterday’s news today, but there are still plenty of good stories to tell that that didn’t already make the AP Wire or FOX News. Those good stories worth writing about one can find locally. I always tried to take a subject and write the story behind the story.

OK, crime in one neighborhood in town is bad. But WHY? Talk to the locals. What you’ll hear is eye-opening. The locals know who committed all the crimes, but they’re too scared to tell the cops.

Not enough businesses want to invest in the town. But WHY? Maybe because of the area’s high taxes and too many trial lawyer billboards.

Bullying is a problem in the local public schools, but school officials don’t want to do anything about it. But WHY? The answer to that one too is eye-opening.

Talk to real people about these topics, and they will tell you all kinds of things that the politicians and the business leaders don’t and don’t want you to know.

This is valuable stuff that the community needs to hear. People would pay to read these stories…if only someone would write them (and write them well). Most reporters just run with what they see in a press release from a politician or the local chamber of commerce.

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The publishers, the investors, and the newspaper management only have themselves to blame. The Internet was an obstacle for them, but instead of trying to compete against it they doubled down on the low pay, the low morale, the hate for their own readers, and the pi$$-poor management.

If that industry wants to survive then it needs to rebuild from the ground up. And that includes better pay for reporters, better management, better stories (that people actually care about), no political biases creeping into published articles, and actually showing respect to all of their readers.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Most of that industry’s wounds were self-inflicted.

Sorry to vent. I’m just tired of hearing that the Internet alone is what killed newspapers.

Special thanks to Warhammer’s Wife for proofreading this story before publication to make certain there were no misspellings, grammatical errors or other embarrassing mistakes and/or typos. Follow Warhammer on Twitter (or is it X Now?) @Real_Warhammer