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.
