DFM bloodletting continues

Mile, you mentioned the subscription model online, so I'm curious what you think about The Salt Lake Tribune going behind a paywall, particularly with its primary competitor giving its content for free -- at least for now.

 

More buyouts and layoffs in the Bay area in the next couple of weeks.

Buy-Outs and Layoffs Hit East Bay Times and Other Bay Area News Group Papers | East Bay Express

 

Particularly risky in a two-paper town with the competition offering everything for free. We'll see how it goes.

 

That is especially brutal for the Richmond area - The Tribune and CoCo Times used to overlap in that area pre-merger, Richmond alone has a population of 100,000. Figure surrounding area adds another 100,000. No lie.

Even when they won the Pulitzer, it was kind of sad just seeing three employees checking the wire story - the copy desk is 30 miles away, the corporate suites are 40 miles away.

 

Great column. It just amazes me the suits see no value in these veterans. It's a crying shame the journalism profession got stampeded by clueless suits/consultants/businesspeople like the ones at Gatehouse. The writer of this piece has done so much compared to those suits who resemble the Bobs in Office Space.

 

They see value. They don't see the costs worthy of the revenue. The sad thing is, people really do develop a relationship with a newspaper. The writers ARE the paper, the identity (mostly the columnists, but still). And papers are going out of their way to damage that relationship by saying goodbye to the best ambassadors they have, the people who "make" the paper the paper long-time readers know. I'd be curious to see how long the average subscriber has subscribed to most papers. It might make economic sense to replace someone making more with someone making less, but to the readers it's like coming home at the end of the day and finding a stranger in your house instead of your spouse of 30 years.
I haven't felt the same way about baseball since the strike. When I realized that life would go on without a World Series it seemed a lot less important to follow.

 

Just found this on Twitter. Geez.

 

"We can’t count on the corporate ownership model to take care of our kids and our athletes."

Look, it might be sad that local kids won't get written about in the paper, but let's not pretend they were curing cancer.

 

"Curing cancer" sets the bar pretty high.

How about "helping cure cancer" by writing about programs like this? Touchdowns Against Cancer – High School football teams united to defeat childhood cancer

Or writing about young local athletes whose newspaper clippings help raise their profile and get them recruited by great schools and win Rhodes scholarships and get medical degrees and become doctors, like Myron Rolle?

Indirect, sure, but still.

Nothing is "curing cancer" except curing cancer.