news story / By Heidi Walters

Death of the Reporter

Humboldt County’s newspaper war ends suddenly, leaving a lot of unanswered questions

(Nov. 13, 2008)  Last Friday was nothing like a normal Friday at the typically ship-shape Eureka Reporter. Shoes were off, T-shirts and jeans on, the dress code kaput. Cardboard boxes filled with personal items and work files sat on mostly emptied desks. On the sales side of the office in the early afternoon, employees tossed a ball about in between finishing final projects and saying tearful goodbyes.

On the news side, when they weren’t sitting at their desks writing farewell columns, last stories and wrapping up bits and pieces — and sometimes just staring at web pages or into space — reporters, editors and photographers wandered about crying, hugging and laughing. There was quite a bit of laughing. Even the design team took time off from laying out pages to amble into the fray. And sports reporter Jackie Christensen’s gigantic fluffy white dog, Bella, flopped on the carpet, now and then bounding to her feet to lope around the cubicled modern newsroom tossing a stuffed toy with her teeth and then attacking it.

GALLERY >

In the lunchroom, boxes of pizza — courtesy of a dismayed Big Louie’s — consumed the counter space, and stacks of newspapers loaded the tables. On the wall above the pizza, next to a poster admonishing employees to wash their own dishes, copies of some of the dozens of appreciative e-mails sent by readers over the past couple of days were tacked to a billboard. On the shelves, the remains of the newspaper’s morgue — hard copies of old papers cataloged and bound neatly — leaned drunkenly into each other; the morgue had been ravaged in the past 48 hours as staffers scrambled to assemble clips for their resumes.

This was the last day of action at the Eureka Reporter. Two days before, on Wednesday at 3 p.m, Publisher Judi Pollace had announced to the staff that Eureka businessman Rob Arkley, who founded the paper in 2003 and had subsidized it ever since, was now shutting it down. Everybody would be laid off, and the last issue would be Saturday, Nov. 8. Simultaneously, out at Security National’s printing plant, Western Web in Fairhaven, Steve Jackson, Director of Production Operations, was telling his staff the same thing, except that the press, which prints dozens of Northern California publications, would stay open and its business would be reorganized. He did have to lay off four of his employees.

The only thing to survive is its future editorial “voice”: The ER‘s arch enemy these last five years, the Times-Standard, will print one page of ER editorial content twice a week. Pollace said last Friday that the page would feature the former ER editorial pages editor, Peter Hannaford. “That was part of the agreement,” she said.

But what does it all mean? What is this agreement?

This is what we know: The shutdown of the Eureka Reporter abruptly ends a local daily newspaper war that seemed a throwback to more vital times in the newspaper industry, when such battles were waged across the country. The war began in 2003, when the ER started as an online publication, then accelerated when the paper began printing thrice-weekly and, later, daily. Then the ER cut back to printing just five days a week. The fight ramped up this summer, with both newspapers selling full-page ads at cut-rate prices. And in August, things got bloodier: The California Newspaper Partnership, which owns the Times-Standard and the Tri-City Weekly advertiser under its parent company, MediaNews Group, sued The Eureka Reporter, alleging it had engaged in unfair business practices — that it was trying to eliminate the competition by luring in customers with low-cost and free ads.

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