A tribute to departing Chronicle staff

Forgive me if this is a d_b, but I got it today in an e-mail. Sad day in San Francisco.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/category?blogid=28&cat=1301

 

That makes my stomach turn.

It's like ... why even try to build a career and a life as a journalist or a writer? What's the point? So you can get laid off at age 40 or 45 despite the kind of unbelievable credentials most of these reporters have?

 

Bullshit, everyone one of those people have skills that a college graduate wishes he or she had.
Complete bullshit.
How does the Chronicle expect to replace all these people? I bet they just wont and the newspaper's going to suffer because of it. They'll be reaping what they brought on themselves.
Fuck the Chronicle, fuck publishers who care less about quality and more about money and fuck Lean Dean Singleton, who I know very little about other than he's behind the lay-offs at the Chronicle and at several other daily papers.

 

Fuck Singleton, Murdoch, Jelenic and their ilk with an unlubricated broom handle.

 

A SPLINTERED unlubricated broom handle.

 

The same one, too, for all of 'em. Heartless, money-grubbing cockgoblins.

 

Nice tribute. Should be done everywhere there are layoffs, cutbacks and early retirements. It humanizes a story that often reads like a numbers story instead of a people story.

 

God, that's depressing.
Classy as hell. But depressing.

 

Great people. Don't let the door hit you.

Why, again, are newspapers dying?

 

Inexcusable. Absolutely inexcusable. You could start a damn good paper with half of these people. You could put together an incredible one with all of them.

And the Chronicle had them and is casting them aside. And for what?

Meanwhile, I heard two other pieces of equally cheery news: 1) the OC Register has more layoffs planned in the very near future, and 2) the St. Petersburg Times just let one of the good and talented guys in this business -- Bob Harig -- go.

Once again, a rational business model is urinated on by the brain-dead folks who are allegedly "managing" a business. Managing a business in a way that any management professor at a business school worth its tuition would flunk you for submitting.

And the eating of its own continues.

 

Heartbreaking. Just devastating, because these stories are the norm everywhere, not the exception.

There's a couple of youngsters in my current place that would have a very bright future if they only had the timing to get into this business 20 years ago. But now, I'm not sure how talented people can find a way to get their proper due the way they used to. So many people who would have been great journalists (and who were and are great journalists) are lost to this business, thanks to shortsighted ownership, and shortsighted management.

I'm a little fuzzy on Singleton's properties right now. I know he has the Mercury News and most of NoCal (Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times I believe). Ironic and sad; I know there are people who left quality situations in SoCal to escape the inevitable Singleton-caused decline, and now their new places are just bought up by that robber-baron.

But I would have thought that having a hand in the Chronicle would mean he has a monopoly, and that shouldn't be allowed to happen. Thought the Chronicle was the last bastion up there.