Big loss for Projo

Looks like Art Martone is leaving.

http://www.wrni.org/blog/scott-mackay/arthur-martone-leaves-projo-sports-editor

 

Wow, huge blow. He's not a name you hear often in the best sports editor discussion but everyone I've ever talked to says he's as good as they come.

Didn't think losing Sean McAdam (another pretty lousy wordsmith) was at all a blow to that section, but this one about makes them irrelevant in that competitive sports media market.

 

I'm sure I'll be flamed for this, but Art not only stiffed me twice in two years on a stringing gig, but then forced me to send repeated emails to him and then his boss to get paid. My fault for not learning the first time.

It's said you can best judge someone by how they treat the ``little people'' in their lives. I was at the bottom of his list of concerns, obviously, and I didn't get treated very well at all.

Blast away...

 

Wahoo, not sure who you are, but if said stringing gig (and I have subbed out literally hundreds of such gigs for the Projo over the years) had passed through my fingers at all I can tell you that Art had little or nothing to do with your problem ... before they centralized their accounting out of Dallas, you could find your invoice sinking to the bottom of someone's inbasket, and it would take a search party to retrieve it ... don't think that I didn't have some checks come in late, too, because I did ... that side of it has improved ... I'm proud of my association and friendship with Art through the years, and am thrilled for the new horizon ahead of him ... I can tell you first hand how he treated "the little guys" ...

 

This is like the Furman Bisher thread. Someone with limited knowledge of the situation ("I read three Furman Bisher columns and he sucks!" "I didn't get paid $75 back in 2003!") pisses all over the carpet, and sometimes I wonder if they do so just to say that they did it. Realize, this is coming from Mr. Cynical, too.

For a paper not based in a major market, their section was amazing until Belo came on the scene and did things like suspend Art when he dared to slip a good stringer an extra $50 for covering a game (or whatever the infraction was). The Courant and ProJo pretty much had southern New England covered back in the day.

Needless to say, he'll be better off.

 

They used to be really good on preps and now it seems like you can't find more than a sentence or two, if you are lucky to find anything.

 

Yeah. That's too bad.

 

I am proud to say that Art Martone and I were both part-timers back at the ProJo back in the 70s, in the Gene Buonaccorsi days. He was a lot more established than I was, but we were in the same cohort.

Always a class act and always one of the best. I was thrilled Arthur rose so high there.

I am sad he had to leave, but that's the way things are these days.

 

I'm interested to see how they're going to replace him.
They had an opening about a year ago and never filled it; wonder if Divver takes over, McDermott moves up and they fill McDermott's spot.

And Billy, knock us if you want, but our weeklies - at least from the sports side - are doing great no matter how hard the bosses try to screw things up.

 

Rhody: The post was a little screwed up, but there was a big smiley there.

I cut my teeth at the Warwick Beacon. I remember 45-inch hockey stories.

I was being serious, in many areas, the only place to get solid preps coverage is to go to the weeklies.

 

The reason it's getting difficult to find HS/prep coverage in papers like ProJo is that some papers of that size have finally realized they can't be everything to everybody. If they circulate to several counties, they will have readers who don't know where 2/3s of their high schools are, much less care about reading about them. But many of those readers likely do care about the same big-league and major college programs, so you hit them at that level. This would seem to particularly true given the success of the Pats and Bosox this decade.

Also, papers the size of ProJo will have a lot of relocated readers who have no connection to the local high schools because they moved in from four states away.

This doesn't hold true, of course, at papers with smaller circulation areas and numbers.

But papers with regional circulations waited too long to realize all of this.

Of course, that's just one man's street sense speaking, not backed by a reader survey nor focus group.