Gone, Wisconsin: McGinn, Gardner leave Journal-Sentinel

The money is in cashflow. Say your budget says you will be bringing in $100 next month. And your expenses are $90. You cut another $10 before next month you "make" an extra $10 bucks. Next month your budget says you will be bringing in $90....that's what Gannett has been doing for the past 15 years. Managers figure as long as they keep bailing water and the boat is afloat they'll still be paid twice a month.
At some point soon there will be a team of three or four people who will accept free blog posts/reports from "citizen journalists" (with a prize of $50 for the most viewed item each week) under each location's masthead. Maybe the three or four people will be situated locally - or the team will be larger (in Phoenix, or Louisville or somewhere).

 

There's still more to this.
1) It seems extremely unlikely that Bob would approach management to initiate talks about a buyout. It had to be the other way around.
2) Bob was likely told that if he took a buyout, the company could keep up its Packers coverage by not having to lay off two or even three reporters to match the savings gained by jettisoning Bob's massive (and 100 percent well-earned) salary.
So he protected those jobs -- and saved himself from a greatly increased workload that would have resulted from the forced departure of two or three colleagues.
Cherry on top: He doesn't have to be part of the Gannett shitshow!
Add it all up and that's quite likely closer to the essence of what happened here.

 

Already one paper in an NBA market that accepts free posts/reports.

 

The Packers tried really, really hard against the Patriots, who we all know cheat anyway, but just couldn't score enough points today. But they practiced just as hard as the Patriots did and all of Wisconsin should be proud of them.

 

Absolutely. This is spot-on.

Of course he didn't get fired. And you can't say he got laid off. But the, "It's you or 3 other people, and if you pick yourself, you're doing their work" strategy has been going on at papers for years now.

I totally believe it was 1,000 percent his decision, and he obviously loved working for JS.

Hypothetically, I loved driving a Porsche until it caught on fire. Then it was 1,000 percent my decision to bail on it.

 

I think we could be dealing with an all-of-the-above sort of answer here. The biggest key in the initial announcement that led me to think it was Bob's call was that he already had a moving destination set up (in this case, Ann Arbor -- I think he went to U of M). The other thing that pointed in that direction was the timing -- with the draft over, this is about as good a time of the year to step down, is it not? That said, it certainly could have been "suggested" by someone who said "Bob, corporate has ordered us to cut X out of the budget, so if you've got retirement plans, now might be a good time to put them in motion as opposed to us having to lay people off just so you can hang on for one more year."

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To be frank, Bob McGinn stories are one of a rapidly dwindling facets of NFL coverage I have any interest in. The granularity and attention to detail of his work fascinated me well beyond the degree that talk of quarterback controversies and general BS that serves as NFL coverage today. His Super Bowl book is first-rate. He will be missed, but I'm sure he'll keep doing stuff maybe for one of the big websites or something. Hell, there's probably five books of material just in his library alone.

 

I share your sentiments entirely.

I love the NFL, but the over-saturation is beyond a breaking point for me. You hit the nail on the head here. Fucking QB controversies, rating who's "elite" and who's not based solely on subjectivity, "reporters" freaking out about the state of every team each week when anyone with half a brain knows the NFL season doesn't really begin until Thanksgiving, daily State of the Cowboys updates (not being a Cowboys hater, but enough is enough), etc.

It's intolerable. You can't even watch any goddamn highlights on a Sunday night anymore. It's always 5 guys yelling about something they haven't even bothered to report on. Intolerable.

Anyway, rant over. McGinn was way above all that. As you said, though, I'm sure he was fielding many inquiries for his work 5 seconds after it was announced he was leaving, or likely well before that. We'll be reading Bob McGinn in some capacity, and it'll be great.

 

The NFL is now clearly my No. 3 professional sport behind baseball and hockey, and the big reason for that is what I call bullshit-to-content ratio. When you have 162 baseball games a year, there's real data and actual events to report on fairly regularly. Though the NHL has a fraction of the national popularity of the other three, you're still looking at 2-3 games a week, and because the players are in most cases lower-profile, the focus is still on or near the ice. When the local NFL team plays one day a week, you spend months on bullshit like whose feelings are hurt and how badly by the fact that the quarterback of the 28th-best team in the league refuses to stand for the national anthem. (To prove my point, note that Carlos Delgado did the same thing for a time in the early 2000s with the Blue Jays. It was mentioned once or twice and the story disappeared.)

I absolutely loathe the NFL Draft, but reading his annual materials on it was more than enough to understand who was worth watching and what they did. And for all the people who complain about strategic Wonderlic leaks to make (mostly black) players look dumb, McGinn (from whom I'd guess a lot of that Wonderlic data comes from) uses scores from across the spectrum, good, bad and otherwise. One of the silver linings coming from bad Packers losses was getting to enjoy the withering postgame unit-by-unit evaluations (normally on Tuesdays), rich with details on just how many blocks were missed or tackles broken.

Oddly enough, at my present location (within the NFC North spectrum but on the edge of Packers territory), we have access to JS stories on the Tribune News Service wire and our current SE has a standing order to use McGinn stories as a last last resort because he finds the analytical stuff tedious and notes that (paraphrasing) "none of the players talk to him." Oh well, different strokes, I suppose.

In what is one of the greater missed opportunities of my career thus far, my first job in the business was in Bob's hometown and I worked for a sports editor who was a close personal friend of his, but I never got the chance to meet him personally.

 

Eh? There are teams that are out of it by mid-October. The season damn well began for them before Thanksgiving.

Now, if you're talking about playoff seeds and such, that's a whole other matter.

 

Well, yeah, that's what I meant.

Basically, anyone with a shitty QB is eliminated, well...now. I'm talking about the teams that have good QBs and a real chance. Injuries are such a factor, you just need to get to Thanksgiving in the mix, then the cream generally rises.

Not to get all "fanboi" here, but the Packers were 4-6 going into Thanksgiving last season, everyone was writing their obit, then they got a little healthy and Aaron Rodgers did his thing. Point is, everyone freaks out after Week 1 or 2, it's not hard to see who the contenders are and predict who will emerge, save some surprise teams here and there.

OK, sorry for the hot take.

 

Interesting, good stuff.

Yeah, great points here. I generally agree, except the sport I've gravitated more to is college basketball.

I'm in SE Wisconsin, actually in dual Packers-Bears territory, closer to Chicago geographically but more Packers fans because we're above the state line. Yes, my shop purchased JS content for a time, and we'd run McGinn as much as possible. The Tuesday breakdowns were pure gold. Just incredible stuff. We'd run as much of them as we could, and a nice side benefit was the layout guy could basically lop off a whole page right away without worrying about deadline, since the things were like 65 inches.

And yeah, I get the hyper local stuff, but our readers loved that still. We stopped paying for it, though, and now it won't matter in terms of McGinn.

I also totally agree with you on the NFL Draft. I find it utterly mind-numbing (except two years ago when it was in Chicago and we had two kids from the same local HS get selected in the first round and went down and did blowout coverage, that was awesome, but I digress). It might be my least favorite "sporting event" of the year. So many experts with so little knowledge, then they grade it before the players even walk off the stage. Ugh.

But McGinn's breakdowns were splendid, as always. I liked the Wonderlic stuff, too. He would insert Wonderlic scores in creative spots in stories all the time. The guy had the scoop on every damn thing.