Greeley (Co.) Tribune lays off sports department

Option C: Stupid.

 

I maybe could understand it if they eliminated the sports section altogether. I'm a little worried things are heading that way anyway as more teams, schools and leagues put out their own releases and such. Hell, I'm already at a point where, as a one-man shop, I'm reliant on those entities for at least the raw material that I can aggregate.
If the publisher in Greeley just said, "We feel like we need to focus on hard news and not sports at all," there might be some dignity in that.
But what he's doing instead just sounds like more of the same asinine bullshit we've seen for years. Do more with less. Fire the experienced people who have had the gall to work their way up to a good wage and hire a revolving cast of chuckleheads who make slightly above minimum wage -- and then wonder why none of them ever last longer than six months.
Every task for the new position that he describes in that op-ed is something sports writers do every day in the course of their normal duties. So he's basically firing two experienced sports writers, hiring a young one that doesn't know their ass from their elbow, and dumping more work on the other newsroom staff. All while calling it the buzzwordy "sports data journalist."
Why do I get the feeling this publisher will be gone by the end of 2020, having left a path of utter destruction in his wake that some poor bastard or bastards will have to figure out a way to clean up?

 

It's like all these columns talking about something new end with a PBS pledge break.

 

I’m convinced that some of the dumbest people on on the planet are newspaper executives. This publisher isn’t helping that opinion.

 

Just wait until the sports data journalist costs some kid a scholarship.

 

That won’t take long.

 

I hate this motherfucker's guts.

 

I'm with you on that. What a clueless moron. Makes himself look like more of an idiot with every tweet.

 

The worst part about this entire thing, to me, is that this dude with no editorial experience (according to LinkedIn) is making and then explaining major editorial decisions. Place is doomed to fail with a business side guy crossing that line.

 

Greeley is a university town (the University of Northern Colorado is a D-1 school with an enrollment of about 12,000) with a population of over 100,000. The population has grown by close to 20% in the last ten years. Greeley is a prosperous and growing place, unlike Youngstown. Yet the paper does not think it has the money to even cover the local D-1 team.

If the paper in Greeley is struggling this badly I think it is further evidence that small papers are doomed.

 

Please don't take this as an endorsement of the publisher's decision, and knowing nothing of the community or region ... but the D-I football program averages less than 5,000 attendance, second from the bottom of a 13-team conference. Is there enough reader interest to justify a beat writer?

 

Brief counterpoint, while not wishing to argue. How many events in a community of 100,000 can bring 5,000 together at the same time and at the same place? Certainly not a city counsel meeting, probably nothing.