What's happening in Nashville (important update)?

Re: What's happening in Nashville?

Well, I have a different inside team in place now than I did when i first got here and I feel pretty good about them. I'm able to get out of here at night quite a bit more – bad news for my wife's boyfriend.

 

Re: What's happening in Nashville?

Him and me both. i could use a new gig = )

 

Re: What's happening in Nashville?

I am advised that Larry Taft has been introduced as the new sports editor in Nashville.

This is a dramatic step forward in addressing one of the problems there -- Larry has been at the paper since the 1970s and he knows, for instance, who Ray Mears is/was.

After rotating a lot of out-of-towners through the job, I'm impressed with this move.

 

what was Larry doing before this?

 

What happened to the sports editor who was just replaced? Still there in some capacity?

 

I don't know who Spinning is, but I can tell with 99 percent certainty that Bryan Mullen was promoted to a feature writing position that also had him traveling as the SEC football writer. He had been trying to get off the beat for a year, and his paper knew he was too good of a writer to be on a beat. (And no, duh, I'm not him.) Just an FYI, Chris Low was also offered a chance to get off the beat, but he declined. The Tennessean, at that point, wanted to put its best writers in prominent positions. That was before the cuts came and a travel budget was slashed.
I'd be surprised if Bryan was handed the UT beat, though at a Gannett paper, it would make sense and save money. Seriously, who can afford a feature writer anymore...?

 

Was given two weeks to pack his stuff, as far as I know, but anyone is free to correct that.

Larry was working on the Web side – again, that was my understanding.

 

previous sports editor had some family health problems. I believe Taft has been the preps sports guy for last 2 years. Doing fantastic job, especially with that high school spring sports championship in Nashville. I heard he won some kind of huge newsroom award for efforts recently.

 

Larry Taft is a good newspaper man and a better person.
Up until a few years ago, he was involved with tennessean.com in some different capacities, but was switched to be over the online preps effort. From that he became more directly involved with the daily section and was effectively the preps editor, even though he may not have been titled as such.
This is a really smart move by the Tennessean, where the sports section was slipping since Bradley left. It certainly isn't the best section and I'm not even sure if it is in the top three.
You got some really good people who work there, but day in and day out, they just didn't have the space.

 

When I started at The Tennessean back in the early 1990s, Larry Taft was my preps editor. During one of my final weeks at the paper I covered a high school football game and wrote a moderately negative depiction of the losing quarterback's play. In the ensuing days I received dozens of calls and notes—angry, angry stuff. I was young (24) and taken aback, and I certainly wanted nothing more to do with the school.

To his credit, however, Larry forced me to cover that same team's game the following week. It was my first real lesson on the responsibility of a journalist to show his face after writing something negative, and to this day I appreciate it.

In an era when newspapers and magazines are becoming increasingly corporate, it's excellent to see a real ink-on-the-hands journalist get rewarded for a lifetime of hard work. Larry deserves this.

- JP

PS: Funny sidenote. At the end of that follow-up game, the quarterback and 20 or so of his teammates surrounded me on the sideline. The kid said, "Don't you ever come around here again." That just happened to be my final assignment for The Tennessean before leaving for my next job. I can't help but think that kid has always felt responsible for driving away a journalist. Oh well.

 

This seems to be a sign that The Tennessean is going to go even bigger on preps, and Larry's the perfect guy for that; my understanding is that he knows everybody at every school.