By Jennifer J. Foster
Posted 06/10 at 11:37 PM
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If you’re Southern, you’ll appreciate this terrific column from J. Todd Foster (no relation), managing editor of the Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier.
My favorite line:
I pity today’s TV news reporters, with 24 hours a day of airtime to fill on cable. That’s about 23 hours beyond whatever intelligent discourse they can muster.
Smack. Down.
Read the column for the comment that gave rise to that remark, and this parting shot:
It takes all kinds to comprise a country. And along the way, we have to suffer a few Andrea Mitchells.
Backwoods redneck newspaper guy, 1; out-of-touch, carpetbagging, bloviating Beltway blowhard, 0.
By Jennifer J. Foster
Posted 06/10 at 10:57 PM
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Things must be worse than we thought for the newspaper industry.
So Scripps is planning to send “a fairly large contingent” of journalists to Denver to cover the Democratic National Convention—
SIDEBAR: OK, let’s stop right there for a minute. I thought the trend was to stop sending individual journalists to national events, especially when the parent company has a national/Washington bureau and can provide editorial content/photos, etc., to member papers. You know, all the cost savings and all!! But I guess I can understand, given that the Rocky Mountain News isn’t a Scripps pape—oh, wait! Yes, it is!! END SIDEBAR
—in August.
If you have spent any time in the newspaper industry, you know how strange it sounds to hear that a few journalists—much less, “a fairly large contingent” of journalists—are traveling anywhere.
It gets weirder.
RMN managing editor Deb Goeken is apparently soliciting local staffers to provide room and board for the visitors.
For fulfilling their obligations—“a bedroom, a shower, morning coffee”—RMN staffers can earn $50 per day for the seven-day period.
Blogger Michael Roberts points out that “the Sleep Inn in Greenwood Village wants $69.99 for a single-occupancy room on Aug. 23—and plenty of other hotels charge a whole lot more.“
Is it just me, or would it make better sense for Scripps, the mothership of all these vagabond journalists, to arrange a block of rooms at some local hotel, double (or triple, or even quadruple, in keeping with modern newspaper business-think) up the journos and pay half the boarding expenses it will if it has to shell out $50 for each staffer to sleep for a week in little Tommy’s bunk bed?
And industry fathers wonder why business is rough.
Good grief.
Read the RMN memo here.
