 |
Um............no. |
Her columns are so painful to read, it makes my hair hurt.
And the biggest improvement The Inquirer could make is to simply print on the front page "Place Fish Here. Wrap."
Posted on 08/12/2002 1:27:09 PM PDT by Temple Owl
Posted on Mon, Aug. 12, 2002
Lillian Swanson | Sweeping changes are planned for Inquirer
By Lillian Swanson
Inquirer Columnist
This fall, The Inquirer will undergo more change, at a faster clip, than at any time since The Bulletin folded in 1982.
Editor Walker Lundy upended the chessboard, unveiling a new strategy that will assign three dozen more reporters - a 60 percent increase - to cover the Pennsylvania suburbs and South Jersey.
At the same time, the paper will add more space for news across much of the paper, and improve its city neighborhood, business, sports and investigative coverage. Forty journalists will be hired.
In a shift in strategy, some traditional coverage, including national politics, will be thinned. The national and foreign desks will be combined, but more reporters will be dispatched from Philadelphia to cover spot national and foreign stories.
To put more muscle into local newsgathering, Lundy will replace two-year intern reporters in the suburbs with experienced journalists, and furlough some support staff.
"The staff deployment was not aligned with what the mission of the newspaper ought to be," he said at a staff meeting July 30.
From a journalism standpoint, there is much that is fresh in the new direction. For the first time, there will be environmental, poverty and immigration beats in the suburbs. More attention will be paid to suburban sprawl and the paper will nearly double the number of reporters covering suburban education.
Lundy said the plan was intended to boost circulation and "get more feet on the street" to report stories where most of the paper's readers live.
But because the changes will be made within the newsroom's current budget, there was personal pain attached to the plan, troubling many staffers.
Ten part-time editorial assistants, most of them working more than 30 hours a week, will lose their jobs. The Newspaper Guild, a union representing the support staff and journalists, vowed to fight the newsroom's first layoffs in recent memory.
In addition, 23 positions, many of them held by veteran editors in the main newsroom, will be eliminated. They will be redeployed as part of 80 new reporting and editing assignments, most of them in the suburbs.
Here's what readers can expect to see, beginning about Oct. 1:
The daily "B" section will be larger, with up to three more pages of space for news. It will be zoned five ways, based on geography. The paper currently zones the section three ways.
The largest zone, with the most readers, will be made up of Philadelphia and older, adjacent suburbs. It will focus on news of the city, the Main Line, Delaware County and as far north as Abington in Montgomery County. The four other zones are Chester County; Bucks County; Upper Montgomery County, and South Jersey.
Each zoned section will contain a complete metro report. But the farther readers live from the city, the less Philadelphia news they will receive.
High school sports coverage will increase, and will move back into the sports section. Death notices will continue throughout the full run of the paper, while obituaries will continue to be zoned.
The Thursday Neighbors sections in Pennsylvania will be eliminated. The eight Sunday Neighbors will have a very local focus: community voices; a dining out feature; lists of community events; arts and history columns, and real-estate transactions.
Based in the city, reporters will work new beats - including small business; sports business and investigations.
Four neighborhood beats - covering South Philadelphia; North Philadelphia; West Philadelphia and the Northeast - will be added. A fifth neighborhood reporter will continue to cover Center City.
The financing for the plan comes from collapsing the suburban reporting internship program; the layoffs; the redeployment of 23 positions, and a cut in expenses.
The suburban plan was conceived over four months by a committee of 13 editors and reporters picked by Lundy for their suburban experience.
"When we met, it was a true wrangle, a daily fistfight" over different approaches, said Metro editor Matt Golas, who chaired the task force. It was Lundy alone who decided which positions would be cut.
In early September, when samples of the new zoned "B" sections are created, I will invite members of the readers' roundtable to review them and help us fine-tune them.
Meanwhile, get ready for a paper with more room for news and a much richer local report.
These people obviously have not gotten the message that has been sent to them--their circulation has dropped more than any other so-called main-stream daily. It was up to close to 600,000 in 1982 when the Bulletin closed. They are now claiming something like 350,000 but those figures are fudged. I think they are under 300,000. The Inquirer is dying and it is too late to save it.
Only one paper survived - the Democrat which bought out the Gazette. The combined papers are now called the Arkansas Democrat Gazette - and a fine paper it is.
The last editor the rode the liberal Arkansas Gazette into the ground and out of business?
Ta Da!
Walker Lundy.
Awesome!. . . until it closed. I saw it change from a really great newspaper to the liberal rag it became at the end.
Sigh . . . did the liberalism cause or result from the circulation decline?
Just thought I'd bump your comment again for those who missed it! Ha!
|
Um............no. |
Her columns are so painful to read, it makes my hair hurt.
And the biggest improvement The Inquirer could make is to simply print on the front page "Place Fish Here. Wrap."
The Inquirer, by the way, announced the hiring of Anne Gordon as its new managing editor. Ms. Gordon who had been deputy managing editor for arts and features came highly recommended. She served as communications director for the Colorado Democratic Party during the First Pervert's 1992 presidential campaign.
Why not? Journalism is politics . . . has been ever since Jefferson and Hamilton duked it out with their own house organs. The First Amendment can be seen to be almost exclusively about political freedom.When they proclaim their "objectivity," it's up to us to check the Barbra Streisand meter. 'Course when the FCC tells us that the broadcast journalist is "broadcasting in the public interest," that is over the line . . .
Cataldi's rants always come across as tongue in cheek and not to be taken seriously -- not surprising when he has three co-hosts to rip him. I can handle the others, probably because they tend to be polite most of the time and actually listen to dissent.
But the above group are rude and love to hear themselves pontificate. To be honest, I've never figured out why anyone would call them to disagree with them -- those hosts will simply insult them, talk over them and then hang up. Once 3 PM comes along, I switch stations. Even listening to WFAN and Yankees talk is preferable (and I despise baseball, especially the Yankees).
I also find the rips on Ms. Smith by the WIP hosts to be a bit self-interested since most of them used to work for the Inquirer.
Eskin, for all his arrogance, has good sources w/ the Eagles and Sixers. He's Andy Reid's butt boy. Howard is basically the house organ for the Eagles. When you hear him criticizing a player (i.e. Trotter) he is getting that from the coaches. But I'll agree he's too arrogant.
Missanelli's all an act to. He's the 45 year old rich white guy trying to be hip, who often says things simply to stir up the pot. I like that though, it's entertaining.
I think the rips at the Inky and Smith are on the mark. Look what happened to that paper when all those people left for WIP. Most said that the Inky editors were so brutal they were happy to leave
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.