Tom Keegan
Going, going?
It’s not gone, but let’s just say the ongoing cutbacks and exoduses by and from the Lawrence Journal World don’t bode well for the small town daily.
Case in point, longtime sports editor Tom Keegan slipped quietly out of town last fall with little more than a a few farewell sentences tacked innocuously onto the end of an innocuous sports story. No teary farewell column – not even a sheet cake sendoff for readers.
That after an earlier axing of investigative reporter Karen Dillon and a number of other behind-the-scenes types as the newspaper changed owners.
FCYI, Keegan and Dillon are the only two ink stain ed wretches I can remember the Newspaper ever running ing promotional ads for.
Another sign of belt tightening is the six to eight page USA Today insert that was added a few years back has shriveled down to a single page.
Making it far less likely that Journal World will continue to offer USA Today’s excellent mix of business, pop culture and national news coverage.
Karen Dillon
In the meantime the Journal World has adopted a decidedly liberal political editorial stance in contrast top the boorish politics of former longtime publisher Dolph Simons.
So what else is new?
Like most print pubs, the size continues to shrink (along with the readership) and the paper has started to try and put the squeeze on online readers to pay.
Hey, at least they’re not stuck having to give it away for free like there Pitch.
Now the good news: the good news is there’s no more bad news.
Long-time Statehouse reporter Peter Hancock was axed as well.
It’s a jungle out there…
I remember talking with KCTV’s former n news director Don North about the disparity between the local television news staffs and that of the Star when there were more than 2,000 employees.
Truth be known, the people that spent that past decade or three at a newspaper – with the odd exception for smaller regional papers like the Platte Coun ty Landmark that I write for – have no idea of the kind of workload that will be required by reporters and editors to run a profitable “print” publication.
Most of the oldsters (outside of the honchos like Mark Zieman, Greg Farmer, Mike Fannin and a few others) are history…or better yet, toast.
They were mostly horrified by how much extra work they had to take on as the layoffs preceded.
But truth be told, they had no idea of how easy they had it even at their lowest points.
Newspapers made so much money that they could afford to have dozens – hundreds – of “drones.”
During my time there, there were only a handful or tow of people who really put in the hours and effort. Being a reporter, editor at the Star was a very cushy job – low paying – but cushy.
Those days however are gone.
Now that the staffs have been pared down majorly, the larger issues that need to be solved are in the leadership area.
Wasting precious resources on a gigantic editorial staff that runs off as many readers and subscribers as it attracts is pure foolishness.
A day of reckoning is coming, but at this point in time it doesn’t appear to be coming anytime soon.
For the LJWorld to have any chance of survival in its little town in 2019, it _has_ to adopt “a decidedly liberal political editorial stance”, at least visibly. That’s in contrast to the KC Star, where driving off its remaining non-far-left-of-center readership has been business-as-usual for a couple of decades.
I overlooked Tom Keegan’s departure – but I suspect I pay less attention to sports than anyone else in FLK*, or anyone else who checks in on KCC for that matter.
https://www.bostonherald.com/?s=keegan&orderby=date&order=desc
http://www2.ljworld.com/sports/2018/nov/11/tom-keegan-coaching-search-thoughts-and-a-farewell-to-lawrence/
* FLK = Friendly Lawrence Kansas. It is mostly, as long as you don’t question the political orthodoxy of the “natives” in town.
Well, certainly the politicians in LA are all Dems, so there’s that…
However people have been paying for LJW subscriptions forever with Simons at the helm, which was conservative to a boring fault.
I can already see the Journal World shifting its political stance, but what I don’t see is the Star not being liberal enough.
I had meant to suggest that, given the breadth of political views in the metro area, the Star always had a _choice_ over the years in their ever-increasing leftward tilt. They chose badly and drove away subscribers like myself many years ago.
Power, or the illusion of it via approval of the “right” people on the left, appears preferable to profit at McClatchy.
Trouble is, the folks running the show are still living in a past wherein they more-or-less had a news and advertising monopoly and were raking in ridiculous amounts of dough.
One would think that having laid off 90 percent of their staff them past nine or ten years they would have come down off of those high horses and charted a more even-handed course of reporting and editorializing…then again, why wouldn’t they take a more balanced news reporting path no matter what?
In a nutshell, they’re living in a glass house and throwing every stone they can get their hands on.