Posted inUncategorized

The chickens come home to roost at Gannett

A reader asks, "how come you have not weighed in on the Gannett bloodbath that is going on with the layoffs all across the board? The Republic, as a big fish, should be pretty hard hit…I know there is no love lost there, on your part, but it is your hometown and your hometown paper and you still are friends with some of the folks there. Anyway, just curious."

I don't know many specifics, but the outcome will be bad. According to Gannett Blog, it is part of the largest mass layoff in newspaper history. The paper has been quietly cutting staff for two years, and the losses have been heavily centered on the most experienced journalists. In other words, the institutional knowledge and highest journalistic skills have been slashed. It's as if Microsoft fired its leading sources of intellectual capital. The result is predictable: a further erosion of the newspaper industry, whose journalism is a practice so vital to the health of the nation that it is enshrined in the Constitution.

I worked for the nation's largest "newspaper" company twice. Once as business editor for the Cincinnati Enquirer and then as a columnist at the Arizona Republic. In general, I was treated fairly, although this was certainly not the case with many employees. I was allowed to commit real journalism, although in both cases after a few years this was made impossible, and so I moved on. I learned a few things, chiefly that Gannett is not really a newspaper company. Yet it will be remembered as the company that destroyed newspapers.

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Posted inUncategorized

Endorsing John McCain

I long ago stopped reading the opinion pages of the Arizona Republic. The diversity of opinion that former editor of the editorial pages Keven Ann Wiley brought to the paper is long gone, replaced by a plodding, deeply unserious recycling of right-wing talking points and boosterism that would be hilarious if the stakes were not so huge. Yes, to declare an interest, I chose to leave the paper in 2007 rather than accept a new assignment that would have eliminated my centrist (“socialist) column.

Still, I came across a mention in the New York Times that wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III had won the endorsement of his “home” state newspaper.

The endorsement is remarkable:

We have seen the irascible McCain. The bawdy and irreverent McCain.
And, yes, the temperamental McCain. Likewise, we here in Arizona have
seen the former Navy pilot and war hero evolve – slowly and with lots
of fits and starts – into a statesman. We have witnessed John McCain become a leader – not only of a
delegation from a fast-growing Southwestern state, but into a national
leader with a reassuring habit of stepping to the front when things
seemed most difficult.

It’s almost as if we’ve been watching two different presidential campaigns. Obama has a big lead in newspaper endorsements, including many Bush ’04 editorial boards that switched sides. But not in Phoenix.

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