Thursday, December 04, 2008

More on the C-J's layoffs from LEO's Stephen George.

LEO’s Stephen George considers the week’s layoffs at the Courier-Journal, and provides much needed context in the newspaper’s continual decline during the Gannett era.

Guillotine day at the C-J

My fundamental antipathy to Gannett notwithstanding — from USA Today to the C-J and its ancillaries, this company has perpetrated some unspeakable atrocities on the Fourth Estate — I really do feel bad about this, not only because some good people will lose their jobs, but because a dying newspaper suggests so many bad things for a city.
As Bluegill previously noted, Floyd County beat reporter Dick Kaukas is numbered among the voluntary layoffs. I learned yesterday that another of them is my old friend, high school classmate and former Public House bartender Buddy Sandbach, who departs the newspaper with just under 30 years of service. He gets a half-year's pay a benefits in return for cleaning out his desk.

Buddy saw this coming some years back, so it isn’t as if he re-enters the job market entirely unprepared. He recalls the very first company meeting under Gannett control, circa 1986, and the new management’s response when asked how to pronounce the name: “Gan-NET – as in NET profit.”

The thing that struck me while reading the timely coverage of the layoffs provided by the The ‘Ville Voice blog was the sheer number of comments from people doing a Hitlerian victory jig because the accursed left-wing liberal newspaper finally is sinking beneath the waves.

That’s profoundly odd, if not entirely unexpected given the propensities of the region. After all, most of what Gannett has done in its two-decade-long clearchanneling of the C-J has been for the benefit of the fascist fringe's carnivorous demand to be spoonfed material that reinforces preconceived superstitions and bile, not news in any sense of journalism.

If anything, my complaint would be that the C-J’s not been liberal enough since, say, 1985.

Then again, I'm an atheist, and not to be trusted.

2 comments:

John Gonder said...

I agree that the Courier-Journal has become a pale ideological reflection of what it was and could have been under the Bingham's direction.

It's unfortunate that this erosion in quality coincides with a general erosion in the economic viability of newspapers as they fall out of relevance due to the presence and immediacy of internet news sources. That double whammy makes it hard to visualize the Courier remaining in business let alone returning to journalistic excellence.

I did not look at any of the comments you cite made by the too-predictable right wing dimwits who still throw rocks at the edifice of the Courier-Journal as in some vestigial reaction to the written word when offered by people of intellect who possess a world view that makes room for a social conscience.

Although some of those people remain(ed?)the ship, under Gannett's direction,is clearly steering a more rightward course. Look at the op-ed contributors. They are mostly blog comments or right wing blather from the likes of Thomas Sowell. (http://mediamatters.org/reports/oped/?f=h_top)
What do the editors, who are the sole repositors of the Bingham legacy, think when they read the op-ed page of the Courier? Perhaps they think it's time to polish up their resumes.

E.S.C. said...

I wish Dick well in his quasi-voluntary retirement. Good guy.

A friend of mine at an East Coast Gannett paper just became a first-time father, then got the axe two weeks later. His wife still has a job there, and unless he finds something else soon I'm assuming she'll have to return to the paper after maternity leave. That'll be a blast, I'm sure.