MPR is wilting but it's got company

 I had lunch with a long-time best friend colleague during my working years yesterday. She came out to the hangar for a picnic.

She left MPR a few months ago, which surprised me because she was an indefatigable supporter of the place; one could easily make the argument that she was the foundation. I've never asked the circumstances of her exit but one thing she said to me revealed a lot. "I rarely listen anymore," she said.

She said this after I learned that Mike Reszler, probably the smartest digital news person I've ever known, was shoved out last year in what remains of Minnesota Public Radio's expertise:  reorganization. The deck chairs are moved around every few years, and the Board of Trustees is none the wiser that they end up being moved back to where they were a few years earlier.

Reszler's exit - and my friend's - was but the latest release of talent from an organization that has a dwindling amount of it.  The two newspaper people who fled their own dying industry years ago and now run MPR, are trying the same strategy for saving it that they used in their previous industry: shed talent , move the deck chairs, and see what happens.

To be sure, there are still amazingly talented people working at MPR, although I know very few of them anymore. But like the Pioneer Press, which still has a handful of hardworking journalists putting out a paper every day, it's not enough to grow; it's only enough not to die quickly.

This, of course, is not unique to MPR.  

Yesterday, WGBH in Boston announced it's cutting 30 people and canceling shows

“We made these hard choices only after implementing a range of other cost-saving measures and operating efficiencies,” wrote Susan Goldberg, GBH chief executive in an email to staff. “The basic reason for these reductions is simple: revenues are flat and the cost of doing business has gone up. A lot.”

“Susan [Goldberg] has repeatedly assured newsroom staff in multiple meetings that local news is of utmost importance to her,”  Zoe Mathews, a steward and senior radio producer at GBH, tells the Boston Globe. “Today’s layoffs are in direct contradiction of her statements about and directly to the newsroom. ... [What] happened today — and the way it happened — is a disgrace to an organization that holds itself up to the public as a vital source of community news, transparency, and accountability.”

There's a lot of that going around.

A newsroom member said she had no idea of the financial condition of WGBH up to that point, which is odd, given the wildfire of public media's collapse should not be escaping notice of any newsroom.

Just up Commonwealth Avenue, WBUR axed employees last month, including my college best friend. The upper crust of public radio - KQED,  Chicago Public Radio, NPR - are all presently following the same path.

Each organization president utters the same thing. They'll turn to more digital offerings. MPR did that 10 years ago under Chris Worthington and - wait for it - Mike Reszler. It was glorious before their bosses decided to slash the newsroom digital operation and send more money to Marketplace in California and set up a podcast operation.

Worthington is gone. Reszler is gone. Most of the podcast operation has shut down.

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there," the late senator, Dave Durenberger, quoting Lewis Carroll, said about U.S. economic policy.

And that's where public broadcasting is: desperately trying one road, then another, with no idea, no vision, no strategy, no innovation in mind and no acknowledgement of the reality that a dead end is just around the corner.