Gannett, Gatehouse talking merger

You’d be lucky to hang on with an independent league team given this environment.

 

I had the same idea, except I got stuck in Single-A.
When I was in my early 20s and starting out, I wasn't good enough to move up. Honestly, I was hanging on by a thread. When I turned it around, we had a good crew I enjoyed working with and didn't want to go anywhere. Then I met my wife and settled into that for a couple of years. I had a chance to leave around 2007 but didn't, and it might have been the best decision I ever made. The paper I was looking at was a suburban offshoot of a Gannett paper that was shuttered when the bottom fell out of the industry a year or so later.
Wound up becoming a made man at my small paper and, eventually, sports editor (as well as sports writer, paginator, photographer, etc., in a one-man shop). From what I gather, as long as there's a paper and a sports section they want me to run it. And they pay me well enough to keep me happy, even if I'll never be a millionaire. I'm smart enough to appreciate what that means in this day and age.

 

I thought that would happen to me
I had been stuck at a small daily for nearly six years and saw my friends all advance to better jobs
When I made the decision to switch to the desk full time I was given a chance in Jacksonville by a fellow known around here as SF Express
Two years later, I was in Detroit
Never would have happened if Craig Stanke hadn’t believed in me
Unlike you, I always would have wondered what might have been if I hadn’t made the move

 

It's all personal circumstances and timing, too. The unfortunate thing about this business is that major moves in stature often require major physical moves to another city or state. As I noted, when I was younger and might have had the drive to do that, there were personal things that kept me where I am. Then it was the state of the industry that made me realize I just might be in the greenest yard in the neighborhood.
Maybe I can't do all of the things I might working at a bigger paper, but I can still do some good and interesting work here. As long as I don't start putting 70-point F-bombs in headlines I have as much independence with my section as you could ever hope for. I've been lucky to have a string of three publishers now who realize my value to the organization and that they'd be a lot worse off if I left. I even, somehow, managed to get a couple of raises the past couple of years after going about seven years without one.
Do I wonder what might have been? Maybe once in a while. There was a window where I was talented and motivated enough to take off if I'd put myself out there more. Then I realize I'm in a good spot either way. I'm at peace with it.

And this is a tangent, but one of the folks I think about in this regard is the late Chris Simmons of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va. Spent a lot of his career at a small paper in a relative backwater, but he never let it stop him from being a giant in the industry. He did great work, took his craft seriously, and helped a lot of people in ways big and small along the way.
I'll never come close to being that good, but some day I hope people around here look at my career in a similar fashion.

 

One other aspect that’s changed: Copy editors used to be heavily in demand. I remember reading somewhere that open reporter jobs would bring dozens to hundreds of resumes, but copy editor jobs would barely have any, and moving up in papers was much easier if you were a copy editor. Now, copy editors are nearly extinct, and reporting jobs, relatively speaking, are the way to go if you want to stay in journalism.

 

I used to consider that as well. I even had a relative who is a baseball fan, but who wasn’t familiar with how the newspaper industry was (15 years or so ago) ask me about moving up. I told him the paper I was at was the equivalent of Double-A ball (40K daily circ) and that the smaller papers I had been at previously were Rookie League and Class A. He understood where I was coming from.

 

I don't know why you "hate to say it." Offer a unique voice? Develop relationships? That's the job, man. That should be the goal from day one.

 

When I graduated from college not all that long ago, the conventional wisdom was that papers/sites would keep the copy editors around so they didn’t get sued into Bolivian (hi, Mike Tyson). It certainly influenced my career path. So much for that.

I wouldn’t say it was easy to get a Dow Jones internship, but if you were a half-decent copy editor at a good college daily, odds were in your favor.

As we saw with the Gawker case, it’s not usually the copy editors who make the stupid, lawsuit-worthy poor judgments anyway. A few misspelling errors? No big deal.

 

I hate to say it because these "unique voices" seem to be willing to sacrifice credibility for bombast and controversy for its own sake. Sure there is "bandwidth" for stupid opinions that no sane person would be willing to make. But are you willing to be that one person that will stick up for the unforgiveable? Defend the undefensible?
People wonder why we've become a more polarized nation - it's because we've made given equal weight and coverage to opinions that shouldn't have them.

 

To be fair though, I think the folks that are still making hay as national journalists in their respective sports aren't doing what they would have done 15 to 20 years ago - following just one team, or covering the biggest game of the week for S.I., etc. The people I enjoy reading now are Zach Lowe, Keith Law, Hollinger - folks who kind of made their own beat, usually via some combination of scouting and data analysis. Back in the day, I remember having to comb Page 2 for the latest Rob Neyer column, or checking out a Bill James abstract from the library.

 

That's not having a "unique voice." And Portnoy's an asshole who doesn't belong in with the other two.

I know people here love to shit on Bill Simmons, but Simmons got where he is specifically because he had a unique voice that resonated. He was a deeply knowledgeable fan with an obsession for pop culture who wrote in a way that people really connected with. Yeah, he could be insufferable and could use an editor and his best writing years are 15 years in the rearview mirror.

If you're a writer and you don't aim to have a unique voice you should probably be selling insurance.

 

I came to San Jose, Costa Rica to enjoy the sunny, 80 degree weather. And when I get over the bad cold I developed the night I got here I will. But I am stuck in my hotel.

As I kill time I decided to do some research. The CEO says that revenues at the combined companies will decline by about six percent over the next three years. revenues have been decline at a rate of about seven percent a year. When asked how the new company was going to reduce the rate of decline in revenues the CEO said through additional electronic publishing revenues that a company with such a large presence as the new Gannett would be able to procure.

The combine companies will do a little over four billion a year in revenue this year. So to reduce revenue loss from seven to two per cent a year over three years we are talking about 600 million dollars of revenue coming from somewhere, becuase even Gannett management expect to lose about half their print advertising over the next three years. The New York Times made about 660 million dollars in electronic revenues. The New York Times had 3.4 million subscribers at the end of 2018. The new combined Gannett has 824,000 electronic subscribers.