DFM bloodletting continues

I trust you agree there is a big gap between being recruited for a junior college program and an NCAA Division I program.

 

Certainly. I was just pointing out an example of what heavy coverage meant in one community.

That program has remained strong even though it gets virtually no newspaper coverage now.

 

I didn't know this until today when I didn't see his name in the columnists list on the OCR website.
Jeff Miller, No. 1 sports columnist for the paper, is gone. He has been referred to as "the best writer at the paper."
No argument here.
Mark Whicker still appears in the OCR, but, technically he is on the payroll for the L.A. Daily News. Jim Alexander is on the Riverside Press Enterprise payroll.
The OCR has one sports columnist, Steve Fryer, the prep writer.
I was told that Jeff Miller being laid off was the BIGGEST surprise of the current layoffs.

 

Do either Whicker or Alexander write about the Angels?

I wonder at what point the LANG papers lose the ability to provide superior coverage to the LA Times. Because at that point LANG loses their reason for existence. And I suspect the papers get closed.

 

Other than prep coverage in the individual markets, how did the LANG papers provide superior coverage to the LA Times?

(Not snarky, just curious.)

 

I am not that familiar with the LANG products but let's use Long Beach as an example. Long Beach has it's own city government, police department, school district and even an airport, The Long Beach paper could fill its pages covering those entities. The LA TImes would not have space to cover these because of the size of the LA metropolitan area. But a successful local strategy requires good beat reporters. If you fire all those staffers the paper loses its reason to exist.

A good suburban paper frequently dominated its circulation area and made a hell of money in the pre-internet days. But suburbans were heavily dependent on classified ad revenue and were the worst hit by revenue declines. Mile High knows this for sure but 20 years ago I think the LA Daily News (which covered San Fernando Valley), the Orange Country Register and the papers in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties had higher circulation penetration in their local markets than the LA Times.

 

A few points from several of these responses:
--Whicker writes whatever he wants. So, yes, that means Angels and Ducks in addition to the L.A. teams. He does everything well, in spite of the people on SJ who only remember his one big gaffe and will continually bring that up regardless of what else he does. He helps out the depleted staffs by also writing gamers, if necessary, especially if he is at a golf tournament. In today's edition, for example, he covered the Ducks-Oilers last night. But he wrote an early column for print on how the NHL has taken the gold out of the Olympics by not sending the best players. Then for the web, he wrote another column on this game. He does that a lot, providing different columns for print and web because they pushed the print deadlines up.
--I hardly ever saw the other LANG papers, but OCR's O.C. coverage was no worse than equal to LAT. Angels is a push, Ducks are owned by OCR and the beat guy was laid off from the LAT. Yesterday, there was a story in O.C. about a guy who had a gun and threatened to kill his contractor. Shots were fired and the guy was shot by sheriffs (the contractor was not hurt). He died later that day at a hospital. I searched the LAT website and saw nothing, and the deceased is a former LAT employee. It was big news at OCR, OCWeekly and several TV stations.
-- In the late '90s, OCR and LAT-OC had a circulation war. OCR won easily as its numbers rose to the mid 300,000s while LAT-OC dropped into the 200,000 range. OCR owned Orange County. Yes, that was 20 year ago. Big changes since then.

 

Goff posted a picture recently on Facebook of his newsroom. His was the only occupied desk among probably 20 in the photo. It's a damn shame that is has come to such a sorry state because I worked with some great folks there in the mid 2000s.

And my heart goes out to Michelle, a true pro.

 

About 20 years ago, I worked at a weekly in a well-to-do Boston suburb. Our penetration rate was something ridiculous like 90 percent. Most of the suburban dailies were above 50 percent, IIRC.