East Valley Tribune gets hammered

Christ, I hate this fucking business.

Good luck to all at the EVT.

 

Wow. A great paper with a fantastic website. This is sickening.

Best of luck to those facing a layoff. Know that you produced a well-respected paper.

 

I'm just glad Darren Urban got out before the hit. He always did a great job covering the team.

 

I'm getting more and more thankful every day I jumped the good ship Freedom before they started tossing folks overboard.

It may be a chicken-or-the-egg question at this point, but I wonder how much of this is corporate-bleeding rather than EV-bleeding. Freedom seems to be taking the machete to its papers in these past months.

Part of me wishes they'd start out-right selling off papers rather than crippling them like this. The Trib might be a tough one to unload given the competition it faces from the Republic, but they've got plenty of decent shops in one-paper towns that a smaller company could make a profit with.

Though I suppose most sane people aren't buying newspapers these days.

 

WFW. My heart aches for the friends I still have inside Freedom. The time to leave was 1-2 years ago.

 

Fuck, that's awful. What incentive do people have to pick up the paper when the higher ups keep watering down the product?

 

I can't add anything, but I hope everyone lands on their feet.

The "box scores" thread came quickly to mind.

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/posts/1807032/

 

I was really saddened when I heard this news. My heart goes out to all the people I used to work with. Over the years, the staff did a hell of a job with limited resources.

 

This is horrific. My best to everyone who's going through it.

 

As one of the aforementioned guys who got out, I still have been ill over the events of the past 24 hours or so. I spent plenty of time agonizing over my decision to leave in July, '07 (I had been on the Az Cardinals beat since 2000 and left to write for the team's website) because of the whole "should I jump to the dark side" thing. When you have covered a team for so long, it feels so wrong to go on the payroll. Besides, I liked the staff and I had been there since 1994.

Then I look what has happened -- it's amazing what has gone down with newspapers and the EVT just in the 15 months I've been gone -- and it's crazy to think I ever was on the fence. As an added bonus, the job with the Cardinals has been less restricting than I thought it would be.

There are some good men and good writers that are losing their jobs. And the sickest part? The ones getting dumped (and severance packages) might be better off than the ones staying, because there's no way to be optimistic of the EVT's future.

 

I don't know a single person who has gone from newspapers to working for the team's website, or NFL.com or MLB.com who regrets it for a second.

 

So who's left on staff? SE Bob Romantic? Matt Paulson? Those are the two guys I know from my days in Yuma.