'Black Wednesday' in Tampa

I am really filled with the urge to slap around all these young kids who think they know everything, whether it's interns blogging about shit they don't get or young posters salivating at the thought of people getting pay cuts or laid off.

Complete and total idiocy.

 

Janet Coats made two things clear I hate, first being the Trib should not look at the SP Times as competition and second that the Trib is part of TBO.com instead of TBO being the add-on.

Both are total bullshit. TBO.com might exist without the Trib but in an incredibly reduced role. Remove the Trib and its resources to see what happens to the site. Life support at best, at least for a while. Maybe I'm wrong.

Can anyone say definitively the association between the Trib, TBO.com and the television station has produced better journalism, better revenues or better anything? If it has, great. If not, why continue to push so hard to create an all-encompassing newsroom of the three unless there are new ideas to make it work better?

 

Andy Staples is to be lauded. Excellent letter.

 

Seems to me there are plenty of reasons to boycott it.

Cummings does a very strong job with the Bucs and Kaufman is excellent on NFL things. Fennelly is often brilliant. McMurphy pretty much owns the USF beat.

But your point certainly is noted and not far off-base.

 

Goddamn. Scott was a good writer when he did the Rays as well. A decent paper just took a big shit.

 

I'm STUNNED the ME complimented her blog post. STUNNED. :

 

The scary thing is, if Tribune is still around in five years, I can see Zell hiring this intern to be his CEO.

 

But how good an idea is hyperlocal in that market, which famously is dominated by retirees from Someplace Else.

 

And before Atlanta tried it, The Orange County Register had its "newsroom without walls" in the early 1990s and others followed:

http://www.colepapers.net/tcp.archive/Cole_Papers_98/TCP_98_12/reorg.html

We have a generation of editors who haven't bothered to learn anything about the history of newspapers in general or even that of their own newspaper. I once worked for an editor who breathlessly burst into the sports department waving a broadsheet's new tabloid sports section. Innovative! Brilliant!

He didn't know his newspaper had done that very thing more than 20 years earlier. As had his last newspaper, in fact.

And so newspapers don't really reinvent the wheel, they unwittingly drive on old wheels that they think are new. Because some editors are too ignorant to know the difference.

Well, they say, we have to do something. As if newspapers haven't done something new every year for the past three decades.

The answer isn't reorganizations or redesigns or new beats. The answer is getting back to the basics of covering hard news on a town-specific basis. It is the only way to connect with people.

 

Amen, and please pass the okra.

 

I dunno. Obits will still be a robust business, though.