News Tribune Editor Promises "Reset" in Wake of Cuts

David Zeeck, the widely respected executive editor of The News Tribune in Tacoma, posted an editorial Sunday discussing how the newsroom has reacted to last week's news of 8 percent cuts. It's a good read about how a strong newsroom is dealing with the shock of losing longtime colleagues due to changing market conditions.

As the week wore on, you could hear conversations begin about how the work will be different – how each of us who remains will have to shoulder a slightly bigger load to fill in the gaps left by the departures.

We’ve already done some of that work. Beginning in January we started a process we call “reset” (as in pushing the reset button on your computer) to rethink how we cover the news as the Web grows ever more important (it now accounts for more than 10 percent of our revenues with more than 857,000 unique visitors to our site in May) and as the staff shrinks slightly.

He compares the dismay to radioactive half-life — each day the pain was only half as strong, but likely to never be the same.

Zeeck ends with a quote from Mark Twain (a former newsman) about the ongoing need for journalism, no matter how bad the economy might get:

“I figure even the people in the north of hell will be curious about what the people in South Hell have been up to.”