Gannett strikes again

He was.

 

Yeah, Miller went to Iowa, started at the Iowa City paper and moved his way up there, then moved to Des Moines and moved his way up to the SE chair. Slid back to the sports columnist's job when they did some personnel shifts along the way and desperately needed someone with a credible voice in that job.

From what I could tell from afar, he did a nice job with it. Covered some big stories, including a couple of Olympics and some decent-sized bowl games, maybe a Masters or two. Things that (no offense) a paper in Des Moines, Iowa, shouldn't expect to have a columnist attending. Seems like he really embraced the digital move, with video reports, helping provide content throughout the day to keep the website fresh.

Definitely don't fault him for deciding this is the time. Hope he has something lined up, or at least will be all right. Not sure if there are as many opportunities in Des Moines, Iowa, for columnists to jump to the TV side as there are in Louisville and Indy, but I hope he has a plan, or at least will find a soft landing spot.

 

Yep he was, when the late Randy Brubaker moved from SE to News Editor. When the newsroom got shifted around again, Miller went back to being sports columnist. Chad Lesitkow, who started at the IC Press Citizen when Miller was there, is now the SE at the DMR (spent time at USA Today before coming back to Iowa).

Burns, the Register was kind of the exception when it came to sending a columnist to things like the Olympics, the Masters, et cetera. One part of it was tradition (Sec Taylor, Buck Turnbull, Marc Hansen, and others got to do those things back in the days), and the other part was if there was an Iowa angle to it, it was customary to send a sports guy to Sochi or another place to cover it, as a means to appease the Register reader base, for what it's worth.

I doubt that this will continue with Bryce leaving, though Randy Petersen and Rick Brown are still there at the DMR doing sports.

 

Coffee beat?!

 

We just finished our reorg today here in Fort Collins. Obviously, we still have a sports section and a life section, but we're under one umbrella as the storytelling team (focus more on people and life). Here is our setup:

Sports Columnist/Engagement - Me
CSU Athletics - Kelly Lyell
Xplore (our outdoors section) - Stephen Meyers
High School Sports (and smaller CSU sports) - Kevin Lytle
Sports clerk/sports for our nearby weekly - Quentin Sickafoose
Food and Drink (brewery scene is hughe here) - Josie Sexton
Fort Collins living (entertainment/night life/alt weekly-ish) - Erin Udell
Causes (volunteering/philanthropy) - OPEN (previous person to hold this is now our environment reporter)

I really hated seeing us lose people, but I'm genuinely excited about the group I get to work with here. Should be fun to see what collaborative projects and stories we come up with.

 

"Focus more on people and life"

Wasn't that supposed to be Real Life, Real News? Or Passion Topics? Or Moments of Life?

 

Poor bastard.

 

This line reminds me of that scene from "Independence Day" when the hippie scientist at Area 51 shows the President the spaceship that they had been working on, then tells him that ever since the aliens arrived, the past few days have been "really exciting".

Then the President rips him a new one because, while Hippie Scientist's work got exciting, millions of people lost their lives.

 

No way, they'd be done by 6 p.m. every day.

 

Sounds like a good plan as long as readers don't want to read about sports.