Paxton Media Group

Before Paxton came through, Potter was covering N.C. Central football and basketball(men's and women's) during the school year AND the Hurricanes, with NCCU being given the priority over the Hurricanes. He also is the Durham Bulls beat writer. Think there was a little bit of overlap this year?


When Paxton laid off Al Featherston, the Herald-Sun no longer had an N.C. State beat writer, so I guess Mike and others help out there.


Their preps person, Guy Loranger, already had a challenging job but is no doubt working a lot more desk shifts since Paxton took over.

How cheap were they? The Hurricanes were the hottest story in that area -- news or sports -- with the exception of the Duke lacrosse saga and instead of sending Potter on the road for the Canes games in Buffalo, they traded stories with a suburban Buffalo paper. Shockingly, they did send two people on the road during the Stanley Cup Finals.

Paxton laid off a desker and Featherston in January 2005.

Since then, Neil Amato (who was its UNC beat writer) has left to become sports editor at the Wilmington Star-News. They deservedly bumped Nolan Hayes up from non-revenue sports to UNC beat writer and hired Jack Daly, a guy from Montana or Wyoming (don't remember which one) to be a non-rev/desk guy. He ended up helping out during the Canes' run and Nolan Hayes covered UNC's College World Series run.

They lost their best desk guy, John Zhu, when he left the business in January and they replaced with Chad Saleska, who was with the Henderson (N.C.) Dispatch (a Paxton paper.) Paxton no doubt saved some money on that deal. They two other surviving deskers both are young, likely saving money there too.

Nolan Hayes and Bryan Strickland (Duke beat/golf beat) are solid, which makes you wonder if they'll hang around there much longer. The columnist never will leave unless forced.

The paper just redesigned its Web site and must have done it with the cheapest advice it could find. For three or four days, you could see the weather "forcast" at the top of the page.

 

Forget pass. Take that job offer and punt it away. Better yet, put it on a tee and gave a long-drive specialist drill the sucker.

 

It wasn't a G4 laptop, it was a G3.  I hear it hasn't been used in years. 

Paxton is a pretty cheap company.  If you can get past that, I think your work experience will largely depend on the ME at that particular paper. 

 

Jack Daly is actually from the area - NC State grad - then was out in Wyoming for a couple years. Him and Nolan are too good for that paper, and I hope for their sake they move up soon. The SE is very disorganized and slow, though I was impressed they sent people to Edmonton for the Canes and Omaha for UNC's College World Series bid.

 

I'm not impressed because you shouldn't be impressed when a newspaper does what most readers would expect. But with Paxton, you have to be surprised. Keep in mind, they sent no writers on the road during the Eastern Conference finals.

 

I suppose "surprised" would have been more apt than impressed.

 

Paxton is one of those chains where you should be surprised if they do anything right.

It's the ol' pattern of hiring dumbfucks as MEs, and then the dumbfuck MEs go to work on hiring people even dumber than they are.

The penny-pinching goes hand-in-hand with the dumbfuckery.