Some of you have noticed something missing in The News & Observer lately. Three of the newspaper’s columnists have disappeared from their regular perches.
Dennis Rogers has vacated the space on the left side of the City/State page after 30 years as the N&O’s longest-running news columnist. Dan Gearino’s Tuesday column on the front of the Life, etc. section ended in February after 10-plus years. And Ned Barnett left the sports section after eight years of writing about the games we play in North Carolina.
All three were very visible presences in The N&O, and lots of you wrote to them, and me, to ask about the changes. Among them was Pittsboro reader Saunders Bennett:
“First, Dennis Rogers decides that before he retires he wants to get back to reporting.
“Then, Ned Barnett gets kicked up the ladder to be Sunday Editor.
“Now, G.D. Gearino is going back to being a reporter.
“Just coincidence, or the gradual extinction of the columnist in the N&O?”
It is disappointing to see their columns disappear, but the good news is that all three will continue to deploy their talents for N&O readers. Rogers moves to a new beat, called “Home Front,” in which he travels Eastern North Carolina chronicling how military families cope with the absence of family members. Gearino takes on a new assignment as the paper’s designated “profiler,” drawing word sketches of notable community personalities and writing stories. Barnett, who was an editor before becoming a columnist, returns to that role as the paper’s weekend editor, responsible for the content of the Sunday and Monday editions.
The changes come amid a broader restructuring of the newsroom staff that has resulted in wholesale reassignment of people to different jobs. Executive Editor Melanie Sill says the purpose is to better align positions with the newspaper’s changing mission, which is to move “from a newspaper with a Web site to becoming a newsroom that publishes in print and online.”
Sill said the changes were not made to save money, although the newsroom has had to deal with reduced staffing levels — the result of financial pressures that are facing all newspapers.
Sill said Rogers’ reassignment would have come even if there had been no reorganization. She said she sees the other columnists’ shifts as better employing their skills for the changing needs of the newspaper. “We didn’t want to lose columnists, we wanted to gain other things,” she said. “Our goal with all these changes is to have our readers get the maximum benefit of the talents of these folks.”
The aforementioned talents take on their new assignments with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Rogers says he’s pleased with his new role. It grew out of a question to him from the editors: What would your ideal job be? His response: “I kind of would like to get away from the daily deadline pressures, and I would like to go to what I know best, Eastern North Carolina and the military.”
Presto: The “Home Front,” which actually still is a Dennis Rogers column, just not in the same place and on the same days as the old one.
Barnett said in his departing column that he welcomed the change. “There aren’t many jobs better than this one, but I didn’t see it as a lifetime appointment,” he said. “One of the appeals of newspaper work is its variety.”
Gearino was less than overjoyed. “I had to be dragged away from this column,” he wrote in his farewell column. He has told me that he likes the idea of his new assignment, but he laments the loss of columns from any newspaper.
Gearino makes the case that columns are even more important in a 24/7 news age, when readers can get their news from a multiplicity of sources, because columnists give the newspaper an identity that makes it unique. A newspaper, he says, should be not only the community cop — ferreting out corruption and holding officials accountable — but also a friend to readers. “Everyone needs both cops and pals in life,” he wrote me in an e-mail. “The N&O is making a mistake by shrinking the circle of friends it offers.”
Those aren’t the only changes, by the way. Peder Zane will move soon from his position as book editor and literary columnist to a job titled “ideas columnist.” Features editor Thad Ogburn says he sees Zane taking up cultural issues such as New York’s new law against crossing the street while listening to an iPod, or Krispy Kreme’s switch to a whole-wheat doughnut. Sounds like an intriguing concept but I anticipate protests from our book-loving readers.
Change happens, and a newspaper that sticks to old formulas in a cyberspace era is doomed to obsolescence. “This kind of change is normal in the life of a newspaper,” said Sill, who notes that when Rogers started he was The N&O’s only columnist, cranking out five columns a week. She points out that readers can find plenty of new commentary in the 20-plus blogs and online reporting now on the Web site, www.newsobserver.com.
Also, the paper retains columnists Ruth Sheehan and Barry Saunders in the news pages and Rick Martinez on the Op-ed page (Saunders also appears on the Op-ed page on alternate Saturdays), who will continue to engage, provoke and amuse readers.
All that said, there will be fewer distinct voices in the pages of the newspaper, and I think that’s a loss for readers, in a couple of respects. First, columns are showcases for good writing — a gift of all three of these gentlemen — and newspapers yield an advantage by giving them up.
And second, as Gearino argues, columns are a leavening element that softens the edges around an often hard-shelled institution. The columnists are the personality of the paper, giving it a human dimension to which readers can more readily relate. We’ll miss that personal connection.
