4/10/2023 0 Comments Spell insurmountable![]() There are plenty who believe Squier isn't wrong and would say the Times-Standard is simply a small example of a pattern playing out across the United States as the newspaper's owners gut their properties to maximize profits. ![]() "This is corporate greed destroying a local institution," Squier says. In a roughly six-week span from late July to early September, recently hired Publisher John Richmond let three newsroom employees go, Squier and the sole staff photographer among them, freezing their positions and reducing the newsroom staff by 33 percent. Many thought there was simply no way the newsroom could sustain further cuts and continue to cover a county with seven city councils, more than half a dozen police agencies, 30 school districts, two courthouses and a multitude of community services districts. In one form or another, the Times-Standard has been Humboldt County's daily paper of record for 150 years, chronicling its tragedies and celebrations, its failures and its successes.īy last year, however, the paper had been cut to the bone, largely the result of corporate decisions made hundreds of miles away. The paper had been publishing in its current form as the Times-Standard for 50 years but its roots stretched back further, to the Humboldt Times and the Humboldt Standard, which began publishing in 18, respectively, and battled for headlines for much of the next century until merging in 1967. The newsroom he was returning to had nine employees total.īut Squier also saw the Times-Standard as a local institution, not unlike the old growth redwoods that still tower over parts of the North Coast. When Squier served as the paper's sports editor in the early 2000s, he was one of four people on the sports desk, which sat between the reporters, seven of them in all, and the photo department, which had three full-time employees. When Daniel Squier returned to the Times-Standard in January of 2018 to take a reporting job covering local courts, he knew he would be stepping into a newsroom fundamentally changed from the one he left 12 years earlier.
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