News & Record publisher Robin Saul should retire

GREENSBORO, NC --

Ed Cone:

This is big statewide news, with national implications, but the bosses have it hidden in the GPV [Google-proof vault]. Same with Ewing's expanded writeup on McNeill Smith. (Binker tunnels under the wall with this blog post on his own story, noting that even the Google-proof version will disappear after a week.) Whatever you think of the circ-boosting strategy behind the electronic edition, disappearing these two articles makes no sense.

Why does the News & Record's president and publisher Robin Saul still retain his position? Saul has exhibited no publicly discernible ability to successfully steer his enterprise towards modernization. Under his leadership:

• He allowed the N&R to institute a technology that sets its presence on the Internet back fifteen years -- that to which Ed is referring above -- hiding content from search engines and allowing archives to expire in a virtual instant. The N&R's content is no longer the "record," it is a fleeting, hard-to-reference and nearly-invisible oddity. Even News & Record staff must resort to linking to other media outlets' stories because their own, on the same topic, are impervious to hyperlinks. Saul has remained oblivious to, or certainly unresponsive to, the righteous criticism of the egregious problems caused by this bonehead decision from people who are smart about these things. The lack of a technology-aware head in charge also manifests itself in other missteps, such as only allowing comments on some content weekdays 9 to 5 -- pretty ignorant of the nature and culture of the Internet.
  
• Saul tolerates or is unable to improve inconsistent standards. Occasionally, the N&R will produce some good reporting. Too often, "reports" are cobbled together from regurgitated press releases and unchecked assertions, even occasionally treating readers to a fabricated quote, representing a charlatan as legitimate or plagiarism. The professional standards at the N&R are inconsistent and if Saul has tried to raise them, the results have not been a success.
• His management staff remains stuck in a twentieth century newspaper model, rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship instead of envisioning and implementing a new model. It is Saul's responsibility to either inspire people to reorient the enterprise or find new people who will. After more than six years, he appears incapable of either.
• Circulation has fallen off a cliff. Saul's area of expertise is print circulation. Despite this, since 2005 -- the year after Saul took the helm -- weekday print circulation has declined 34.7%, from 95,119 to 62,074, and Sunday circulation 23.2% from 112,154 to 86,087.

Nobody has this all figured out; other newspapers are struggling with the Internet too, but if Saul bears any responsibility for the public face of his enterprise's efforts, it appears too obvious that he is uninspired by or befuddled by, if not hostile towards, modern information technology. That might be excused if he were doing a bang up job without it, but he's not.