After decades of unsigned editorials, The Oklahoman newspaper has changed their policy and will now byline editorials.
Why the switch?
Editorial Page Editor Owen Canfield recently gave reasons for the change in policy. First, when Gatehouse Media bought The Oklahoman in 2018, they did away with a standing editorial board. For a while, the “board” was simply the two remaining editorial writers and the paper’s editor, Kelly Dyer Fry. In April of 2019, one of the editorial writers was laid off, leaving Canfield by himself in that department with Fry. Then Fry resigned in January. Her successor is Clytie Bunyan.
Canfield thinks that by putting his name on the editorials, criticisms will flow to him personally rather than to the newspaper itself or to the reporting staff.
Newspapers used to have clear distinctions between the news reporters and the editorial writers but that has been blurred as reporters now constantly inject their opinion into “hard news” stories. Readers used to get the facts from the news columns and then read the editorial pages for different slants on that same news. Now it mostly mixed.
This situation is at least partially caused by several factors. First, corporations are buying up big newspapers for pennies on the dollar and consolidating operations. It’s a bottom line business – unlike the family owned newspapers of the past.
And the reason for the fire sales of once mighty newspapers is because most people get their news from TV or the Internet. Display advertising in newspapers has almost disappeared. Papers have reacted to lost circulation by jacking up subscription prices and that has added to the stampede away from papers. Newspapers made their beds and now they have to lie in them.
Charles Biggs writes all the editorials in the Tulsa Beacon, which is family owned.