The news becomes news *

Updated March 6 (end of post)

The Long Beach City Council on Tuesday night unanimously passed a motion to study the city government's financial relationship with the Press-Telegram, with the possibility of pulling their ads, at wake of last week's layoffs and re-structuring.

The City Manager will be examining how much its departments spend on advertising in the P-T. The intent behind the council's study arises from its concern that the city is advertising in a local paper that reaches the people the city hopes to reach (and that there could be other alternate media outlets the city could advertise with); and to affect some influence in what's going on inside the P-T and its woes.

Council members during the course of discussion pointed out that they have seen a decline in the newspaper's quality since MNG CEO Dean Singleton bought the paper 11 years ago.

About 50 P-T reporters, photographers, copy editors and layout designers and former staff reporters attended the meeting. Several spoke about the distressing state of the paper, the newspaper industry, and provided council members and residents with a highly condensed history of MediaNews owner Dean Singleton: that the P-T is among many of MediaNews Group-owned local papers whose diminished qualities are the casualties of Singleton's buy-em-and-bleed-em revenue model.

The advertising dollars the city of Long Beach provides the P-T go to Denver and benefit Singleton and his top execs and are flushed to help leverage the company's heavy debts, said former P-T reporter Keith Higginbotham.

Not much is reinvested in the P-T. For that, Long Beach and the cities the P-T's skeletal staff struggle to cover. There are simply not enough reporters to be there and as a result, the P-T misses out on local stories, Vice-Mayor Bonnie Lowenthal pointed out.

Executive Editor Rich Archbold also made an appearance Tuesday evening to downplay the plight of the P-T.

"We're not going anywhere," he said, much to the amusement and dismay of his staff.

Moving the copy and design desk to Torrance means only that more phone calls will be made, he said.

And if he could, he added, he'd like to hire more staffers — ommitting the fact that such decisions are not within his power or sphere of influence to act on.

Staffers who addressed council members told a different story.

Reporter Tracy Manzer used a cancer analogy to describe what's happening: that to kill the cancer, the malignant growth needs to be excised; that recent medical research also found that cutting out too much could hurt and kill the body; and that MediaNews' is gutting its newspapers so deeply that they are dying.

"I know how to spell your names," copy editor Megan Lasswell said to council members, adding that she also knew which Lowenthal was which in a family whose several members are active politics.

The demonstration of institutional knowledge is vital to the local paper. Copy editors are considered the last line of defense against errors, and their familiarity with our communities are invaluable in producing a daily newspaper.

Lasswell, a Long Beach resident, said she has yet to know when her job — if she still has one one — will take her to Torrance. Losing a P-T copy editor, let alone their entire department is a big blow; would a Torrance counterpart know, or care, as much?

ILWU Local 13's Rich Dines' correspondence with Singleton during the P-T ongoing contract negotiations exemplifies MNG's investment and interest in its dailies: Singleton said he doesn't get involved in such local issues, Dines said.

Since the inception of this blog, we've heard from many of you through e-mail and in posted comments. We're grateful for the interest and the time readers — P-T staffers, and fellow journalists and non-journalists alike — took to read and drop us a line. One of the most common questions we receive is: Why stay in an a career, in a newspaper, that's seeing its darkest times? Why keep whining if you can just, you know, go?

Truth is, many of the P-T's staffers did. Some are in the process of leaving. Yet, there are still some of us who stay, with many complex reasons too numerous to name, but all bound by the fact that we still love what we do. And we hope to continue doing it.

We've been using this blog as a mobilization tool to inform about what's been happening at the P-T, not to mention give some insight into some of the stories happening behind the scenes. Tonight, we accomplished what we hoped to do: to get the community (and its leadership) to understand and get involved because the P-T, in truth, belongs to them. We also saw fellow journalists and up-and-coming student journalists Tuesday night, covering out story. We plan to keep fighting, to keep producing your daily newspaper — we hope you'll stand with us as this story unfolds.

(Photos by laid off P-T photographer Kevin Chang)

* Author's clarification: A former Torrance editor took the time to commiserate with us and brought up a good point.

Losing a P-T copy editor, let alone their entire department is a big blow; would a Torrance counterpart know, or care, as much?

While it's not our intention to question or cast under doubtful light the professionalism of our Breeze colleagues, we can see how the statement above could be read as such. For that, we apologize. What we mean to express is: a local copy editor with local knowledge is invaluable and likely has an edge over a Breeze counterpart whose task loads are now doubled by MNG's latest razing.

The last thing we want to do is to stoke animosity between the P-T and the Breeze, both hard-working crews, whose jobs are equally imperiled under Singleton's watch.