Sportswriter fired for tweet critical of op-ed run in the newspaper

Well, it works for the former president.

 

They won’t all get jobs….in journalism. Bet you the lucky one who lands a job in marketing will get twice the scratch

 

Told the story of my life, going from newspapers to marketing at a national retailer. Double the pay, and with very few exceptions, nothing expected after 5 p.m. or on weekends.

The quality of life improvements are just as important as the improved pay, IMO.

The number of newspaper people who contact us for job inquiries (that we don't have) is staggering. But the people here love the versatility and dependability of journalists.

 

Man, I don't check the journalism board often enough.

This happened in my back yard and I know several of the people involved and am only just now learning about this, let alone that the Chatham N+R got bought by the NSJ. I have a ton of thoughts

Until recently, I sat on a board with one of the N+R's owners/founders. It was a really good community newspaper that was started just a few years ago in a market where the longtime community paper was all but dead, but also where there is tremendous growth potential. Developers are building a massive new planned community in Chatham County/Pittsboro that will take a sleepy town of a few thousand to a city of 60,000 when it reaches buildout. VinFast is building its first American auto assembly plant there and on the other side of Chatham County, Toyota is building a major EV battery plant in an area where the most reliable jobs were chicken processing plants.

The North State Journal is a conservative house organ for the state GOP that is itself not that old. It bleeds money, but its owners don't care because they're in it for the influence. When it started they hired a bunch of decent journalists from across the state. As far as I can tell, all of them have left and the people there now are straight up partisans.

John Robinson, whose tweet was quoted upthread, was my boss at the Greensboro News & Record when I worked there. During his entire tenure as opinion editor and later executive editor, the GNR ran weekly unpaid op-eds from a local conservative columnist named Charles Davenport Jr. whose pieces could not survive a basic fact check on any topic. It was a G-D embarrassment then. The paper is still inexplicably running his columns 10+ years after JR was laid off. Like most former N&R folks, I love JR, but I find the comparison between what Charles Davenport wrote regularly on his watch and what the Moms for Liberty writer at issue here wrote to be particularly apt.

I'm sad to learn the Chatham N+R sold out, though I assume that was always the founders' endgame. It's just sad to see a decent, relatively new, community paper get swallowed up by a pseudo-journalistic partisan enterprise.

I'm guessing the writer at the center of this knew he'd likely get fired for that criticism and just DGAF. I'd have had a hard time staying on after the NSJ purchase, I know that.

 

Were you the morning DJ at W.O.L.D.??

 

You would think after hearing that song as a teenager, I'd have chosen a different profession. But that was pretty much a summary of my radio career -- with the notable exception of an ex-wife and two kids. Harry Chapin nailed the industry in 2:55.

 

As kids, my sister and I mocked the hell out of Harry Chapin songs such as “WOLD-D-D-D” and (especially) “Taxi” when our Mom would play those records. But as an adult I realize he wrote some damn good songs.

(OK, even as a smart-ass teenager I liked the song about 30,000 pounds of bananas!)

 

Just enough time left for :05 legal id into CBS top of hour.

 

The "world famous" CBS tone doesn't even sound exactly at the top of the hour anymore because of satellite delays, etc. Couple it with station signal delays and it sounds variously between 11 and 15 seconds past the hour.