Not good news for newspapers

I've had friends who worked for the AP and they were soon driven from the job by the mind-numbing boredom of sitting in front of a terminal and rewriting newspapers. This was in big cities, not the hinterlands.

There was very little enterprise time for anyone because of the manpower needed to churn out product around the clock every day.

Of course they have someone at the White House, Congress, Supreme Court, etc. But to think that AP could put out the volume of material it does without poaching from newspapers (directly or indirectly) is ridiculous.

 

And have you seen all of the openings at AP lately? The job(s) are brutally hard and people get burned out of them very quickly.

 

When you expect a 30 percent return on investment yerar after year, some years you're going to be disappointed when it declines three percent to 27 percent.

This is bullshit. These companies are doing fine and can continue to return 5-15 percent every year forever. But that's not good enough for Wall Street, or for the CEOs earning millions. Fuck them.

 

Who here is dancing on newspapers' graves? In fact, everyone has said newspapers aren't dead ... it's just a matter of getting rid of that short-sighted tunnel vision and looking more long-term and what is going on in the online world (and if newspapers went away, online wouldn't die).

 

I guess this is the reason Mr. Publisher has been up my ass about stupid shit all week.

 

Of course, none of them cover Podunk High.

 

Our ME was demoted today. Hmm.

 

Thank you.

I'm at a 35K paper and as bad as our higher ups hate to admit it, we've picked up. We're doing well. And it wasn't until some of us kept hammering them that they admitted it.

They try to use all these chains as an excuse not to hire people. Screw that.

Then they tell us ... well it's only a matter of time until it trickles down to us. If you think like that, then fuck yeah, it's going to happen.

 

Just received the e-mail: Seven people in circulation at my newspaper "had thei jobs affected" today with the merging of some/much of the department with a sister paper.

No word yet on total job loss, or if some of those people will be able to work at our sister paper about 45 minutes away.

Either way, not good.