New SE in Oregon

Yes, but no one in SoCal was paying him to follow sports there.

 

Yeah, I get that. Was he so blinded by following SoCal sports that he was ignoring Oregon sports for his job?

 

Yep, this thread is fascinating in that respect. Would love to know the inner workings of it.

 

Geez. Then what motivated them to hire him in the first place?

 

This seems like a case of somebody taking a job that they didn't really want in the first place, even as attractive as it might have appeared.

He got let go from the Orange County Register and he just must have felt, when the opportunity of a level/type that he might consider came up in such a timely manner, that he'd better take it.

It was a mistake all around.

 

I was going to post my unfounded speculation about the private life of some man I've never met and only am familiar with thanks to this thread...but then I felt skeezy and decided to forgo the voyuerism.

Which makes me instead want to throw a threadjack in here:

Where does this particular episode fall on the spectrum of public v. private? Is my squeamishness wrongly placed? Is this just another example of how, in the modern age of social media and the Internet, everyone's a public figure and all aspects of everyone's lives are free game?

 

I have to admit, I'm fascinated by this, too, and I would love to know -- not that I have a right to know -- the real story about what went down.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't care one way or the other, but I sort of experienced this myself -- working as an ASE at a major paper, leaving the business for a while, then accepting an opportunity to become ESE at a smaller paper in the market and soon realizing it was a huge mistake and my heart wasn't in it. (I left after less than a year.)

The fact that he's a polarizing figure, however, only adds to the fascination.

 

It's a pretty public job within our little world.

Also the fact that this thread was as much predictive as it is reactive, that's a big difference. It's not like a bunch of people were piling on after the fact saying "I knew this wouldn't go well." They were jumping in before the fact saying "I know this won't go well."

 

Whatever the case, it's obvious this was a bad fit (and that's probably an understatement). The big surprise, based on the comments when he was hired, may be that he actually survived three-plus months. I once worked for an assistant sports editor who didn't make it past the 60-day mark -- almost everybody on the desk was shooting out resumes and going on interviews (myself included), and about half the design/editing staff would've been gone in a matter of weeks if the sports editor hadn't made a change.

 

I have to wonder if Willamette Week or another publication will have a story. Anything to tweak the competition?

 

I confess, I've been checking them from time to time.