I am just now picking my jaw off the floor.
A friend of mine has just informed me of something that GateHouse Media, the new owners of the Amarillo Globe-News and the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, have done. It has posted a job opening for a “regional associate editor” who will be in charge of the opinion pages of both newspapers.
Ponder that for a moment.
The G-N and the A-J already have a “regional” publisher and a “regional” executive editor. The publisher resides in Lubbock; the exec editor lives in Amarillo. They spend time in the “other” city, I guess to make sure they’re “in touch” with them.
Now we have this idiotic notion of hiring someone who will serve as a regional “director of commentary.”
GateHouse purchased the papers from Morris Communications while promising to maintain a local journalistic presence, committing itself to local news.
What absolute and utter crap!
This latest decision by GateHouse tells me something quite different. GateHouse is trying to run the papers on the cheap. Why hire two people for these executive posts when they get can away with hiring one individual to cover both of them?
Oh, but what’s the cost? It’s plenty! I’ll speak to the commentary that both papers will deliver to these respective communities.
GateHouse seems to presume that Amarillo and Lubbock are identical. That they have identical needs and concerns. That their local issues mirror each other.
Good grief! They do not! How in the world does a regional director of commentary acquaint himself or herself fully with each community by having to split the time between them? He or she cannot do the impossible! GateHouse, though, is asking whoever they hire to do precisely that.
I worked as editorial page editor of the Globe-News for nearly 18 years. It was all I could do to stay current with issues involving Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle. To ask the new person to develop cogent editorial policy for two disparate communities 120 miles apart is a prescription for the destruction of both communities’ editorial voice.
In the old days, that voice was a critical component of daily journalism’s relevance to the needs of a community.
I believe I am hearing the death knell of daily journalism as we’ve known it in a part of the state I grew to love.
The local newspaper is facing an agonizing death. Lat weekend’s circulation statement showed a loss in both hard copy and online subscribers. I’m sure more will not be renewing their subscriptions.
Oh, John. It’s so much worse. While I’ll admit I don’t know how to save local papers, this is certainly not it. They’ve made the switch from “news” to “content.” Day after day, everything above the P1 fold is handout stuff. When it’s not, it’s usually written by a Lubbock-based reporter. They ran an editorial on opening day for WTAMU and TT urging people to attend the Tech game. I feel sorry for the poor reporters. We’re lucky we got through before we had to be “content providers.”