Cox puts up "For Sale" sign

Wouldn't surprise me if the Marshall News Messenger ends up folding or if whoever buys it buys the longview paper as well and just consolidates them.

News Messenger, despite having a long good history, has been dying for years as has the town of Marshall itself.

 

When Cox bought/consolidated those eastern North Carolina papers about a decade ago, it was seen as an unshackling.
I believe Gray (Grey?) had owned Rocky Mount and others before swapping some Arizona weeklies for the N.C. territory with the Sisters Cox.

 

Hopefully the Austin buyer is good people .... have a friend who lucked out with his first job out of college there and he seems to like it. Hope this works out for him/them.

 

This whole layoff thing is happening in Sanford, NC, too. The Herald, which is a Paxton paper, also recently cut a lot of employees and completely shut down our printing press. We are now printing out of Durham and I've heard that eventually the papers in Henderson and High Point will start doing the same soon.

 

Somebody obviously is going to have some crappy deadlines if Durham's press is printing four papers. But why worry about the product the reader gets?

 

They can get it on the Web! The Web will save us all!

 

Could Austin become a Hearst?


Hearst has a pretty solid Texas presence in Houston, San Antonio, Beaumont and Midland. If you add Austin, they can start pooling resources Gannett style and become more, ahem, efficient. That has to be attractive to add that market in a place where consolidation of resources is a definite possibility.

I wouldn't be shocked if there wasn't a local buyer though. Lots of young, idealistic folks with money there.

 

Yeah, our sports deadline at The Herald is 10:45 Mon-Thurs and Saturday. On Friday nights during football season, it is 11:15.

 

That has to blow royally.

 

Trust me, it does. We are basically an afternoon sports section in a morning publication. Luckily, we had two afternoon baseball games that we were able to squeeze in there for tomorrow's paper and there's always the Olympics, too. It's not too bad now, though.

It will suck really bad when the World Series is on and we have to do a web tease to it or something (although, that's what ESPN, MSN, Fox News,etc are all for) because the game ends past our 10:45 press time. No more Superbowl coverage, no more NCAA March Madness coverage, College football Saturday night games, NFL Sunday and Monday Night Football, etc. it's really going to suck. But at least it'll look better, right?

And during prep football, we're doing like 2 paragraph stories in the printed edition for Saturday's publication and then teasing the rest of the story to the new website for longer and more in-depth coverage. It does suck, though. Trust me.

 

I fear we won't get much longer on our Friday nights.

It's Sad. Really f'n sad, man. :'(

 

I once worked at a paper that operated with 8 p.m. deadlines for several months. They gave us until 10 the night one of our football teams won a state semifinal and the night it played in the final. Of all things, it was lottery numbers that restored the sanity; we weren't getting them, people were complaining and the CEO of the (very small) company stepped in.