The newsonomics of loss

NiemanLabs reporting:
It’s not just newspaper employees who suffer when a newspaper dies, as is happening to MediaNews’ papers in the Bay Area. It’s a loss felt across the community.
...In short, Bay Area News Group (BANG), which has had 15 separate titles, announced it was combining 10 of those titles into two new ones (the East Bay Tribune and the Times), closing a printing plant and gaining other production efficiencies. Gone into history will be such titles as the Oakland Tribune, the San Mateo County Times, and Contra Costa Times, along with another 8 percent of the overall workforce — or another 120 or so jobs, 48 in newsrooms.
The Bay Area News Group cutback, in fact, reflects much of what we are coming to miss. So let’s look briefly at this newsonomics of loss, a function of our times, even as much is being rebuilt — and gained — at the same time: 
Identity: The soon-to-departed (in November) Oakland Tribune is 137 years old. It will be subsumed under the East Bay Tribune nameplate. The East Bay Tribune will stretch from Oakland south to Fremont, a stretch of 27 miles and at least 1.5 million people, many of whom don’t feel connected to the geography Media News now asserts. Newspapers are all about community identity; they have both reflected it and provided rallying symbols of it. Business efficiencies may argue for “East Bay,” but readers’ senses of what’s local are something else again. With this decision, Oakland, for one, has lost something of itself. 
Reporting: Most of the jobs cut in this re-org are on the production and printing side of the business as BANG closes one of its four regional printing plants. However, 48 jobs are being cut from the East Bay newsrooms, about a quarter of the unionized editorial workforce, and that’s got to affect news-gathering...
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