Many of you know that I spent 12 years as the sports columnist for Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers before leaving in January to join the elite staff at Vero Beach 32963.
Some of you know that, before moving on to work in Jacksonville, New York, Los Angeles and Denver, I began my full-time newspaper career here in 1980, covering the Sheriff’s Office and courts for the then family-owned Press Journal.
And because of that personal history, all of you should know this: It saddens me to see that Vero Beach – and the rest of Indian River County – no longer has a hometown daily newspaper.
Instead, we have been forced to settle for a regional daily that is based in Stuart, printed in St. Lucie West and pretends to cover our county with a Vero Beach bureau that, according to my sources there, will be down to only five full-time journalists by January.
The Press Journal, which proudly, dutifully and comprehensively served our community for so many years, has been reduced to what is essentially the Indian River County edition of the Stuart News.
The Stuart News building, in fact, is where you’ll find the offices of all the upper-echelon editors. It’s where all decisions regarding news coverage – what stories get covered, how they’re covered and who covers them – are made for all three Scripps newspapers on the Treasure Coast.
It’s the mother ship of a daily newspaper operation that also includes the St. Lucie News Tribune, which is produced without any St. Lucie County-based reporters. (The journalists who once worked in the Fort Pierce Tribune building were forced to move to Stuart 18 months ago.)
Now, all but a handful of Scripps’ full-time newspaper reporters on the Treasure Coast are based in Stuart.
That wasn’t always the case.
As recently as a year ago, there were 22 full-time journalists – reporters, editors, columnists, photographers and a videographer – working out of the Press Journal building on U.S. 1.
When Indian River County columnist Russ Lemmon serves up his last batch of “Lemmon Drops” next week, he will become the seventh of the 22 full-timers to depart the company.
What was management’s reason for forcing staffers to commute from Vero Beach to Stuart, a daily grind that costs them two unpaid hours on the road daily and thousands of dollars a year in unreimbursed travel costs?
Was it really to foster more face-to-face interaction between editors and reporters, as management said?
Or was it simply to thin the herd and dump the salaries of veteran journalists – management knew most couldn’t or wouldn’t move and had no desire to commute – to make the bottom line more attractive for the recently announced newspapers-for-TV-stations trade between Scripps and the company that owns the Milwaukee Journal?
Certainly, money was a factor: Scripps plans to sell the Press Journal building and the valuable real estate on which it sits. The small group of journalists left behind in Vero Beach will move into a smaller, bureau-type facility yet to be leased.
And, barring a drastic change in philosophy when the newly formed Journal Media Group takes over from Scripps next year, they’ll give you just enough local news to continue the charade of the Press Journal being our hometown daily paper.
But it’s not.
Those of you who still read the Press Journal – the newspaper’s daily circulation in this county plummeted below 20,000 this summer – already know that.
Many of you have decided it’s no longer worth the price … or the effort.
Nowadays, on any given day, the Press Journal will contain more stories about what’s happening in Stuart, Port St. Lucie and Fort Pierce than in Vero Beach, Sebastian and Indian River Shores.
Too many stories are presented with a regional angle, often referring to Vero Beach and Indian River County in only a partial or peripheral way.
That’s why you’ll sometimes see a Press Journal front page with no Indian River County stories. You’ll also see stories that have no relation to Indian River County under the “Indian River County” banner on Page 2.
Too often, you’ll see stories you care nothing about.
You want examples?
Two Saturdays ago, the morning after Vero Beach routed Martin County in a high school football game, the Press Journal’s sports front contained a half-page photograph from South Fork’s victory over St. Lucie West Centennial.
The story on the Vero game was relegated to Page 5C, just below a four-paragraph blurb on Sebastian River’s triumph over Fort Pierce Westwood.
(Someone here must’ve complained because, this past Saturday, a photo from the Vero Beach game occupied the top half of the sports front. The story, though, again was buried inside the section, just above a short story on the Sebastian River game, which was allotted less space than stories on games involving Martin County, Fort Pierce Central and Centennial.)
Then there was the headline-grabbing story about the bicyclist who was stabbed to death by a homeless man in a McDonald’s parking lot earlier this month in Vero Beach.
The murder occurred at 9:30 p.m. on a Monday, just three blocks from the Press Journal building and more than an hour before deadline. Yet there wasn’t a word of it in the Tuesday edition of what’s supposed to be our hometown daily newspaper.
It wasn’t until Wednesday morning that a story and photos were splashed across the Press Journal’s front page under the headline: “Man fatally stabbed at Vero McDonald’s.”
And that was it.
No accompanying column on the homeless situation in Vero Beach. No sidebar delving into whether Joe Conrado, the fast-food restaurant’s longtime owner, had past issues with homeless people causing problems on the premises.
No extra effort whatsoever.
With a full day to work on a compelling story that stunned our usually tranquil, Mayberry-like community and made the national news wire, the Press Journal staff produced only one story.
The Stuart-based editors, who continue to overwhelm us with a mind-numbingly relentless and often-redundant barrage of stories about Lake Okeechobee, decided one news story on the Vero stabbing was enough.
That’s shameful, but it’s not uncommon.
That’s what we now get from a Press Journal that isn’t anywhere near the newspaper it used to be.
Fact is, the plunge in circulation says more about the product than it does the people.
Consider: When Scripps purchased the Press Journal from John J. Schumann Jr. in 1996, a whopping 70 percent of the households in Indian River County subscribed to the newspaper.
And despite the economic struggles in the industry in recent years, this county remains a vibrant newspaper market, blessed with a largely affluent, educated and older populace filled with folks who care about their community.
The Press Journal has stopped serving this community’s needs.
That’s why Vero Beach 32963 has been a rousing success on the barrier island. That’s why the newly launched Vero News has received such a warm reception from readers and advertisers on the mainland.
These weeklies, along with the Sebastian River News, are filling the void created by Scripps’ sad decision to treat Vero Beach as a suburb of Stuart and no longer give the good people of Indian River County the hometown daily newspaper they want and deserve.
I’m proud and happy to be a part of these hometown papers.
