There is still room for improvement, but newsroom defections, raids by competitors and nationwide trends have caused ACBJ to attempt some serious salary catch-up. Knight-Ridder was based in Miami until it moved to San Jose to chase the tech revolution dollars. The day after Harris' resignation, Knight-Ridder announced it was lowering its profit target, a nice public relations touch contradicted by the news that the Mercury News is offering employees cash incentives to retire early. You can work the equations with layoffs or early retirements, but the sum of the damage is the same. Yes, newspapers are a business.
Businesses have to make money.
But a business that puts money before people will soon find it cannot attract and retain the top talent. The drive for ever-increasing profits is pulling quality down. Unless some booster restores newspapers' upward momentum, gravity will take over. If that sounds cynical and righteous, naive and indignant, it's because those are the words of a journalist. Harris may be the storied tree that fell when no one was there to see it, but everybody in the newspaper business felt him hit the ground and will long remember the sound.