Another Gazette colleague has joined the exodus. Jan Falstad’s last day was Friday and her final Have You Heard column — the last of some 840 columns — ran this morning on the Business page.
Jan was a hell of a business reporter. She understood the nuts and bolts of finance and the stock market, but she was alive to the human aspect of every story, too. She made her column, which could have been a dry, narrow-interest feature, into a must-read piece that was one of the more popular parts of the Gazette week after week, year after year.
Although Jan could be tough and hard-nosed, she had a deep streak of empathy as well, which is an important trait in a well-rounded reporter. She really cared about the stories she worked on, which pushed her to do the extra bit of research and digging and phone-calling.
It must be said, however, that she did have one noticeable bias. I sat a few feet away from her during her entire career at the Gazette, so I heard portions of her end of hundreds of phone interviews. If she found out that the person she was talking to was from her home state of North Dakota, you could hear a slight elevation of familiarity in her voice. If the person was also of Scandinavian extraction, you could hear a few more ticks on the friendly meter. And if that person was also fond of horses, well, that was it. No matter how important the story was, Jan might take a 15- or 20-minute detour to talk about those things that were closest to her heart.
And I have to add this: In the dead-tree edition of the Gazette, there is a little box at the end of Jan’s column, containing a photo of Erik Olson, the Gazette’s new business reporter. But if you read the column online, there is no picture of Jan, just a very large portrait of Erik Olson, identified only as “Olson,” without a word as to who he might be. I hope that gets changed soon. (8 p.m. update: It’s been fixed. Thanks.)
I should also point out that with Jan’s departure, the Gazette has lost six experienced reporters in less than two years. The first to go was Donna Healy, who took a buyout two years ago this spring, followed by Mary Pickett, Lorna Thackeray, Greg Tuttle, me, and now Jan. Rob Rogers, the Gazette’s education reporter, announced his imminent departure last week.
My rough calculation is that all those departures add up to a loss of 150 years’ worth of reporting experience — that’s 150 years of reporting just here in Billings. All told, the years of experience easily top 200.
There have been at least half a dozen departures in other areas of the newsroom as well, in the sports, editing and photography departments. It’s partly a generational change, with some folks retiring, but most of the people bailing out have gone on to new jobs. The most foolish of the lot even founded a new website. We’ll see how that goes.
I feel a little sorry for Darrell Ehrlick, the new editor who came on board last fall. He has lost a sizable portion of his staff in a very short time and must be scrambling something fierce to get back to full strength.
Full strength is a relative term, of course. Two of the reporters lost since the spring of 2012 were not replaced, and it was increasingly distressing to look around the newsroom in recent years at the growing crop of empty desks.
The worst thing of all, though, and I think I’m speaking for everyone who’s left in recent years, was the realization that Lee Enterprises, the corporation that owns the Gazette, seems destined never to get out of the hole it dug for itself. A decade after the disastrous decision to buy the Pulitzer chain of papers, Lee remains something like $775 million in debt. (I don’t pretend to understand all this, by the way, but you can bet Jan Falstad does.)
No matter how much we enjoyed our jobs at the Gazette — and we really did have a lot of fun over the years — we knew that Lee would continue vacuuming up whatever profits we helped produce, and that the Gazette would inevitably grow smaller and smaller, no matter how much good work we did.
It’s a shame, but it’s also life. What’s important is that good people like Jan are finding good things to do with their lives. I wish her the best of luck.
