Demise of The Star-Ledger: End of an Error

OPINION

In a few days, The Star-Ledger will cease printing after 86 years and then fade into history as a daily newspaper produced by what was once one of the premier news organizations in America.

But in truth, the death knell began sounding at the end of 2008 when the paper lost 40 percent of its news staff in coerced buyouts as the owners felt a need to drastically downsize the operation.

Included in that group of around 150 employees were many veteran reporters, editors and photographers across all areas of coverage as well as young and promising ones, with most never returning to daily journalism.

It was a blow from which the paper never fully recovered, and the exodus of skilled and experienced talent hastened its trip along the road to obscurity.

This certainly wasn’t what Samuel Irving “S.I.” or “Sam” Newhouse Sr. could have imagined was coming when, in 1939, he bought the name (and circulation list) of the failing Newark Star-Eagle and added them to his Newark Ledger to create The Newark Star-Ledger, later just The Star-Ledger. He also took over the Star-Eagle building.

At the time, Newhouse was on a mission to own more daily newspapers in America than anyone else, a goal he eventually achieved.

Newhouse set about his quixotic effort believing he had a singular formula for turning floundering newspapers into moneymakers, and he surely hit the jackpot with The Star–Ledger. A basic tenet of his plan was increasing editorial budgets.

Over time, the Ledger became the Newhouse family’s largest daily paper, if not its most profitable, in a chain of more than two dozen daily newspapers that stretched across the country.

In its early years, the Ledger operated from an office on Halsey Street in downtown Newark, just off Branford Place, in a building that, years before, had been a horse stable. Today, the site is an empty lot.

But in the mid-1960s, the paper moved a few blocks south to new headquarters on Court Street (between University Avenue and Washington Street) as part of an urban renewal initiative in Newark.

It was there that the paper thrived and where Donald Newhouse, one of S.I.’s two sons, ran the newspaper side of the family’s media empire for several decades after his father’s death in 1979.

At its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Star-Ledger printed close to 450,000 copies of the paper weekdays and upwards of 750,000 on Sundays. Those figures put it among the top 15 biggest daily newspapers in the country and largest in New Jersey by far.

In the paper’s salad days, weekday editions could run up to 100 pages or more and the Sunday edition to better than 300 pages, numbers few other papers could match.

In the process, a bunch of Ledger writers became household names throughout the state. Among them were news reporters Bob Braun and Herb Jaffe, feature writer Mark Finston and gossip columnist Jerry Nusbaum. Sportswriter Jerry Izenberg was nationally known.*

But the Ledger’s road to prosperity as the flagship paper of the Newhouse newspaper chain wasn’t straight, nor was it without potholes.

Mort Pye, the editor most responsible for turning the paper’s fortunes around, liked to tell the story of how S.I. once convened a meeting during a particularly trying spell in which everyone summoned to attend was all but certain he was going to shut the Ledger down.

Instead, S.I. chose the opposite course, saying he intended to invest in the paper and build the Ledger up so that it could compete on equal terms with its crosstown rival–the older, more established and more influential Newark Evening News.

When the Newark Evening News went out of business in 1972, for reasons beyond just competition from the Ledger, it left a void that Pye eagerly jumped in to fill with the Ledger and then pulled off in remarkable fashion, in large part by boosting staff and coverage.

But by the time the summer of 2008 rolled around, Pye had long since passed away, Donald Newhouse had vacated his office in the Court Street building and rumors about the fate of the paper and its staff surfaced seemingly every day.

All anyone in the newsroom was told was that circulation and advertising had fallen, courtesy of the internet and cable TV, to the point that the paper needed a minimum of 200 nonunion employees from all of its departments to accept buyouts in order to survive.

It was never made clear to workers whether the Ledger was actually losing money or just not making what it once had because revenue and expense figures weren’t shared.

Employees had roughly seven weeks to make up their minds about buyouts and those who accepted the offer began leaving in early November. The largest and last group of departing staff members from the newsroom left on New Year’s Eve.

The buyout process was not pretty and included threats of the paper closing, misrepresentations about benefits and a bewildering suggestion that each worker should consider giving up his or her job so others could keep theirs.

Even getting a buyout offer was jarring since staff members had a lifetime job security pledge in writing that was good, it promised, regardless of economic conditions.

While Ledger employees, at least those in the newsroom, had long been treated as though they were part of a big extended family, no longer was that the case in the headlong rush to cut the payroll.

The paper not only lost valued personnel, it also lost institutional memory.

Within a few years, just about every reporter who’d been at the paper in its heyday was gone, while the Ledger building in Newark was sold in 2014 to become a storage facility for fine art and the news operation moved to Middlesex County.

In the post-buyout era, the paper did nothing but wither on the vine and its coverage migrate online.

Gone were the days of winning Pulitzer Prizes as the enhanced system of reporting, writing, editing and presenting the news under Jim Willse, Pye’s successor, was incrementally dismantled.

Also disappearing was the Ledger’s ability to influence public policy as it once had done so convincingly with the construction of the Meadowlands sports complex in East Rutherford, Route 280 and NJPAC in Newark, among other major projects.

The recast Ledger had fewer pages and fewer stories.

Replacing an abundance of state and local hard news that had been the paper’s lifeblood came an overload of wire stories from around the country and world, lengthy opinion columns with no connection to New Jersey, oversized graphics and a steady flow of lifestyle and trend pieces.

If that weren’t bad enough, the paper regularly got beat on local stories, both big and small; good stories went unreported or were underreported; the paper far too often cited the coverage of other news outlets in reporting stories in its own backyard; some stories were just plain frivolous, and copy editing appeared to go out the window.

In recent years, the Ledger and its online counterpart also seemed to rely more on press releases, sketchy information from press officers, the wire services and even TV for some of its news rather than having reporters in the field asking questions and pressing for answers, digging out what officials might not want divulged and developing sources.

Where the paper once had a bureau in every county in north and central Jersey, some with multiple reporters, along with a reporter in Monmouth and Ocean counties and Atlantic City, there were now none. With the bureaus had come separate sections of the paper devoted to news coverage in that area.

The Ledger’s bureau in Trenton, once the largest statehouse bureau of any paper in the country, became a shell of what it had been.

Just as shocking, there was not a reporter assigned to any courthouse in the state, including the federal courthouse in Newark, one of the busiest courthouses of its kind in the country and the site of many major cases.

There was no longer a reporter even assigned to keep an eye on the inner workings of Newark City Hall, a place notorious for corruption. Meetings of the city council, board of adjustment, central planning board, landmarks commission and other such elected and appointed bodies went uncovered.

Also largely ignored were the Newark Police Department, Newark Board of Education, Newark Housing Authority and Essex County government, all of them historically plagued with dishonest dealings and/or mismanagement issues.

In previous eras, there were at least two reporters in Newark City Hall with a newsroom full of reporters a block away to pick up whatever stories the bureau couldn’t handle; the same with Essex County.

Essex County’s suburban towns, once in the heart of the paper’s prime circulation area, were pretty much forgotten, too.

At the very time the paper was retreating from nuts-and-bolts news coverage, it was boasting it had six reporters covering high school football in New Jersey.

All of this, of course, was a recipe for not adequately covering what interests and affects people the most at the grassroots level, and the fact that readers increasingly shunned the Ledger’s print edition should have surprised no one, especially as the price of the paper did nothing but steadily rise.

As could be expected, the collapse of coverage and circulation was gut-wrenching to many members of the newsroom’s previous staff who had dedicated their lives and careers to building the Ledger into one of the biggest, best and most respected newspapers in the U.S.

This is not to say the Ledger turned into a blank sheet. There has been some outstanding reporting by good reporters since 2008, certainly in the form of projects. There simply hasn’t been enough of it as the scope and depth of the paper’s news coverage kept shrinking.

A question that naturally comes to mind is why the Newhouses, one of the country’s wealthiest families, would allow the Ledger’s print edition to deteriorate after they had spent untold millions building its brand and after the paper had apparently played such a key role in the family’s business?

Did the family ever consider for a moment that owning a newspaper is a public trust carrying a responsibility to help foster an informed citizenry and expose official corruption as much as it is a business?

Was it paying more attention to its magazines like Vanity Fair, Vogue and The New Yorker or its interests in the cable TV industry and entertainment world?

Did it realize or care that the decision to scale back the Ledger would invariably lead to New Jersey becoming a news desert in an era when disinformation and conspiracy theories are shaking the foundations of democracy?

Was it strictly a matter of the bottom line or did the family just lose interest in putting out a quality statewide daily newspaper in New Jersey as it instead poured millions into other kinds of businesses, including one that organizes endurance competitions and another that checks academic papers for plagiarism?

If the latter, why didn’t the Newhouses sell the paper to someone with a commitment to keeping it going? Or make a run at turning it into a nonprofit, a move that has proven successful elsewhere?

Lastly, does the family honestly believe that moving The Star-Ledger in its current form online as a subscription product will make much of a difference to anyone?

Since the paper is privately held, it’s doubtful that these and other such questions will ever be answered, certainly not by the Newhouses, who rarely, if ever, speak publicly about their business decisions.

One thing is clear, though.

While subsequent generations of Newhouses and their hired hands have tried in vain to match the records of success attained by S.I., Mort Pye and Jim Willse, gutting the newsroom and stripping away coverage should never have been part of a workable solution to offset circulation losses.

In the end, it only served to still a Voice for New Jersey that proudly kept readers informed and engaged in the world around them each and every day for several generations, an accomplishment the history books will surely make note of in boldface type.

R.I.P., The Star-Ledger.

Guy Sterling was a reporter with The Star-Ledger in Newark from 1980 until Dec. 31, 2008.

*Some of the other Ledger writers who built followings over the years were news reporters Gordon Bishop, Kathy Barrett Carter, Robin Gaby Fisher, Kitta McPherson, Tim O’Brien, Bob Rudolph, Don Warshaw, and Joan Whitlow; sportswriters Sid Dorfman, Willie Klein and his sons Dave and Moss; Tom Luicci, Anthony Marenghi, and Jim Ogle; critics and feature writers Pete Genovese, Bill Gordon, Tere Greendorfer, George Kanzler, Jerry Krupnick, Michael Redmond and Bette Spero; columnists Nelson Benedict, Barry Carter, Mark DiIonno, William Doyle, John Farmer, Roger Harris, Mark McGarrity; John McLaughlin and Paul Mulshine; Newark reporters Tex Novellino and Barbara Kukla; Trenton reporters Dick Schaefer, Franklin Gregory and Dan Weissman, and Washington, DC, reporter Bob Cohen. And who could forget illustrator and cartoonist Bil (cq) Canfield?