Mercury News Columnist Sal Pizarro Reveals His Biggest Surprise about the Newspaper Business
March 25th, 2009 Posted by Steve Mangold Posted in Blog
Sal Pizarro is a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Previously a sports writer and editor, he took over Leigh Weimers’ column in late 2005.
PRx: Is your role changing at all with the economic downturn? You write a lot about nonprofits and arts groups, about their events and promotions and about the companies that support them. Is that the mission of your column?
Pizarro: Certainly one of the roles I and my column have, especially in this ever-shrinking economy which has severely impacted newspapers, is that I’m getting more things on my plate. My role has expanded over last few years. We used to have a dedicated philanthropy reporter and there were business reporters who covered corporate philanthropy as part of their beat, whether they were covering Applied Materials, eBay, Apple or any of a lot of companies.
That role has shrunk along with the staff, and more nonprofit stuff has come my way. It’s one of the surprising things about how the column has evolved. We emphasize the good news that our corporate citizens are doing and there’s a lot out there and that balances what we see on the front page and in the business pages.
The column was kind of nebulous when I took over from Leigh. One of the goals was to continue the legacy, to report on community organizations and highlight community names, and while corporate figures were part of it, they were not as big a part because we had other reporters covering them. So if NVIDIA or Applied made grants, that hadn’t been on my radar until now. Now we have a lot of news from the corporate community relations field in the column because no one else is covering it.
PRx: Can you tell if the economic slowdown, the recession, means that corporations are doing more or less?
Pizarro: It’s a little bit of both. One thing I’ve seen is that corporate sponsorships are way down across the board when it comes to events and other campaigns. The economy just isn’t there for them and they’re pulling back, but many of the companies are still continuing their programs. We’re seeing a lot more involvement on the employees’ part, that they’re volunteering more and doing more when their employers are able to do less.
Where it really hurts now is event sponsorships, like the San Jose Jazz festival and other big sponsored events, where they’re looking for sponsors for the bigger levels, the title and presenting sponsorships, and are now getting smaller sponsorships from the same companies. They’re still sponsoring but at lower levels.
PRx: What about the media companies? Have they cut back, too?
Pizarro: Yes, we get that question. When the Merc’s old parent company Knight Ridder went away, that was a big loss to the community in terms of grants and sponsorships. But our sister papers, the community papers, still do a lot of that, and the Merc still acts as a media sponsor for many events and nonprofit promotions, but we’re missing the corporate support Knight Ridder showed, especially as it was headquartered in San Jose. Our new owner, Media News, encourages the newspaper to do a lot, but it doesn’t have the ties Knight Ridder did since it isn’t headquartered here.
PRx: You’ve been a reporter for a long time, belying your youthful good looks. What still surprises you, or is there nothing new in the news business?
Pizarro: The No. 1 thing that surprises me, especially after I started writing this column, is how much volunteering people do in this valley. A lot of it is really invisible, but you have a lot of people who work crazy hours as it is in whatever field they’re in and then put in time at soup kitchens, schools, nonprofit agencies and the like. Nobody gets enough credit for that.
As for the news business itself, we’ve got new surprises all the time, but most of them aren’t good. I am, however, continually surprised by people who don’t realize that most of the news they read on the Internet, whether it’s through Google News or links from a blog they like, originates at a newspaper company. You can endlessly debate the virtues of print vs. the web, but right now, without the print product, the companies that produce that news can’t stay in business and that’s not good for anyone.
