Cincinnati/Kentucky Post to cease to exist by end of year ...

Never met any of the folks from Cincy, but have been told by plenty near here that Rosecrans and Lancaster are good people. Hope all involved in Cincy land on their feet and it pans out for the best.

 

Pay us more, and we'll put more thought into it.

Can't really say anything than what's already been said. Cincy's losing one of the best in the biz.

 

I feel for the people in Northern Kentucky, which the Post did a much better job with than did the Gannettoids; my friends in that area always told me they preferred the Post. Whenever I was in the area, I picked up both papers and the Post was always a better read than the Inquirer.

 

I can't think of any.. by golly, you're right!
;D

 

Two taps on the heart for Trent -- one of my favorites -- and everybody else sad tonight in Cincinnati.

Now, sports editors, take a look at your empty desks, and then take a look at this crew. They have guns, and I'm sure as shit they'll travel.

 

Those 30 years of comparative numbers posted by Noonan really tell a story. That is unbelievable, but I do believe it, if you know what I mean.

 

I was forwarded this by one of my former Post colleagues and thought I would share. It's a blog post by former Postie and current Columbus Dispatch reporter Todd Jones. I especially love the Boomer line.....


July 17, 2007
Here's to "The Boast"
Scripps Howard announced today that the Cincinnati Post and the Kentucky Post will cease publication Dec. 31 after 116 years. No surprise. Anyone familiar with those papers knew for a long, long time that the day was coming. Still, the official announcement felt like a kick in the gut, like losing an old friend who had been sick.

My professional career in this wacky business of journalsim began 20 years ago as a summer intern at the Post. I was hired full-time there in March 1989, and worked as a sports reporter for the Post until joining the Dispatch in August 1997. So half my career was spent at Cincinnati's afternoon paper.

So many memories have come back to me today. I grew up reading the Post in Newport, Ky. Everybody in northern Kentucky read the Post and hated the staid Cincinnati Enquirer. The Post had a scrappy soul, and, more importanly to us, covered northern Kentucky high school sports and University of Kentucky basketball as well as the Reds and Bengals. Writing for your hometown paper was cool. Family and friends would remark about your stories. I miss that, and still recall the thrill of seeing my first by-line in the Post in May 1987.

Just being in the office that first summer was unbelievable. I remember walking into the sports department and seeing Jack Brennan and Bill Koch -- whose columns I read all the time while in high school -- and thinking I had arrived at some magical place.I was terrified to talk to them and the other writers I knew from stories I had read. I kept my head down, my mouth shut and soaked up everything around me. Funny, Jack and Bill are close friends to this day. So, too, are many, many others I worked with at the Post.

There's a running joke in sportswriting circles that at every major sporting event you'll run into three or four reporters or columnists who used to work for the Cincinnati Post. It's true. Here's a roll-call of some of the sportswriting friends I worked with at the Post, and where they're at now: Jack Brennan is public relations director of the Cincinnati Bengals. Bill Koch covers University of Cincinnati basketball and football for the Enquirer. Todd Archer covers the Cowboys for the Dallas Morning News. John Donovan is the baseball writer for Sports Illustrated's website. Jerry Crasnick is the baseball writer for ESPN. Mark Tomasik, our sports editor, is now editor of Treasure Coast Newspapers in Florida. The always angst-ridden Geoff Hobson is the writer for the Bengals' website. Paul Daugherty is the Enquirer sports columnist and host of WLW SportsTalk. Joe Posnanski is the sports columnist for the Kansas City Star. Chris Haft covers the San Francisco Giants for MLB.com. Tom Gamble and Richard Skinner became known in Cincinnati talk show circles as The Two Angry Guys. Michael Burns works for Ohio State. Bill Peterson has a myriad of journalism jobs near Austin, Texas. Jeff Horrigan covers the Red Sox for the Boston Herald. David Fleming is a writer for ESPN the Magazine. George Diaz is a metro columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. Jay Mariotti is the sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Mike Bass is the sports editor of the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. Janet Graham is a copy editor at the Detroit News. Jason Williams works in Cincinnati for MLB.com. Branson Wright covers the Cavs for the Plain Dealer. The list of former co-workers now spread throughout the country goes on.

Many other co-workers come to mind. There was Barry Cobb, Bob Queenan and the late Tom Kramer, a trio of old-school guys. There was Enos Pennington -- whose claim to fame was that he once professed to hate entertainment -- and Terry Boehmker. Some sportswriters who joined the Post after I left have become friends, such as Lonnie Wheeler, Jeff Shelman, Tony Jackson, Marc Lancaster, Rodney McKissic, and Sean Keeler. We share a kindred spirit through Post experience. Good friend Michael Graham was a sports columnist at the Post when I was in high school. There were reporters from other departments at the Post such as Nick Miller, Gary Rhodes, Michael Clark, Dan Horn, the late Al Salvato and current Dispatch reporter Randy Ludlow who shared beers and laughs. And Dispatch copyeditors Terry Mikesell and Herb Grant also worked at the Post when I did.

All those names, and some I've forgotten to mention, shared a passion for the job. The people worked hard and cared about the product. We had a reputation for digging in and fighting the good fight when big news was flying. Former Bengals quarterack Boomer Esiason, always astute to the media, once told me he loved the Post guys because we were the guerrilla warfare guys.We loved to outwork the Enquirer and stick it to them. We knew our ciruculation was smaller than the crosstown paper, but we put aside the forces out of our control and tried to concentrate on cracking news. Other times, we did what journalist do best: bitch and moan. Still, when duty called, we pulled together and took pride in what we were doing. Much of that credit goes to our sports editor, Mark Tomasik. We didn't always agree with everything, but we respected and liked Mark. We went to war for him because we knew he'd go to war for us. That's probably why his hair turned gray during his tenure.

I was fortunate to spend my early career at the Post. I was given a lot of opportunities to cover things many reporters my age only wished they could be part of. I covered many major sporting events while there, but it's the small moments I remember most. The office banter and gags. Those awful staff cars. Playing create story poker. Coveball and softball. The day Nick Clooney's column was pasted and published under Bass' mug shot. Pitching quarters at the Bengals' practice facility. Brennan's validating assessment that something was "Strong." Tormenting Jerry Stein. Filing tomes from the Astrodome at 4 a.m.Quennie growling with his Bear hat on. Joking about family chains. Circling the parking meters out front. "Wayne Perry you've got a call on Line 2." Gambo vowing for the 300th time that he was going to quit -- and this time he was serious. Dane Neumeister making bird calls. Rick Harmon talking to his wife and ex-wife on two phones at the same time. Bill Koch's "struggle in a sea of weakness." Sarge. Sheeeeeeeet. Beeeeeetch. Too many beers. Endless gags.

The Post was far from perfect and often a frustrating place to work. The paper is dying for many reasons. Ten years in, I had reached a point where I needed to go work somewhere else and ended up here. Still, as you get older, you realize nothing is perfect. So I'll always have a fond spot in my heart for my decade at 125 E. Court St. I learned a lot about my job, and myself, while surrounded by some of the best people and journalists one could call friends and co-workers.

I called Dan Hassert today. He's a friend from college and the Post, and still an editor at the Post. I wanted to let him know I was thinking about him on this sad day. He sounded really down. He ended our conversation with, "Well, I gotta go do a story."

Tonight, I'll raise a beer to Dan, to all those old friends, and to those those years at "The Boast". I'll probably laugh a little more, and try not to feel old.

 

Thanks, sarge, for posting that...

there are some heavy-hitters on that role call.

 

Hasn't he been through enough already? How 'bout some Graeters?

 

Easy, Lantaur.
Enquirer has been giving away the daily with a Sunday subscription.

 

and this one from a http://thesoulofbaseball.blogspot.com/ poz's blog

I was a sports columnist at The Cincinnati Post from 1994-1996, and those are three of the proudest and best years of my life. There are a lot of reasons for this. For one, it was my first job in a Major League sports town. For another, I had such great characters to write about, from Pete Rose to Bob Huggins, Marge Schott to Jim Bowden, Cris Collinsworth to the entire cast of the sad sack CIncinnati Bengals. For another, I loved the Cincinnati food. Right now, I'm craving a Skyline Chili three-way. Or at least a Blue Ash Chili double-decker.

For yet another, I worked at the Post at a time when we had an amazing staff. It's easy now, looking back more than 10 years, to see just how unique that staff was: We had Todd Archer (now Cowboys writer for the Dallas Morning News), Todd Jones (outstanding columnist/feature writer in Columbus), Jeff Horrigan (Red Sox writer for the Boston Herald), John Donovan (national baseball columnist for SI.com), Bill Koch (University of Cincinnati writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer) and Terry Boehmker (king of Northern Kentucky high schools still for the Post) among many other lesser-known lights (Bear, Tippy, Gambo, Skinny, etc). The sports editor was Mark Tomasik, who is one of the best newspapermen I've ever known and one of the great influences in my life.

Also NIck Clooney, George's father, wrote a lifestyle column for the paper. Nick was very kind to me -- he wrote me and called on occasion -- though in retrospect he never did set me up to write a script for George. So obviously, I will never forgive him.

That really was an amazing collection of talent. We were just a little afternoon paper by then -- circulation even by the mid 1990s had dwindled to about half of what it had been in the glory years -- but honestly, without arrogance, I would say pound-for-pound we had as good a sports staff as any paper in America.

But the biggest reason I cherish (and romanticize) those Cincinnati years is because, well, we were the underdog. And it's fun to be the underdog. Every single day we would take on the bigger, stronger, richer Cincinnati Enquirer. There aren't many old-fashioned, The Front Page newspaper wars left in America (and technically, even the Post-Enquirer competition wasn't really war -- the two papers worked under a Joint Operating Agreement, which meant they were sort of in business together. But, as you undoubtedly know, journalists don't understand business, and so we treated it like war).

The Enquirer had all the advantages, including the better time slot (they were the morning paper, we came out in the afternoon). And we tried like hell to beat them. We did pretty often, too. It was a rush. We tried to get stories first. We tried to deliver the money quotes. We tried to draw the more entertaining Bob Huggins insults. We tried to win the exclusive interviews. I remember when I lucked into a Pete Rose interview five years after he was suspended from baseball -- as we say in the business, I got him and I got him alone. And what I remember as much as anything was that amazing feeling of seeing that story in the paper and knowing that I just thrashed the Enquirer. It was my first victory over the Enqy. Every time I would see a fellow Post employee the next few days, I would get a big high-five. We were all in it together.

(Of course, in the end the Enquirer was a lot bigger and more far reaching. So the next two days, the Enquirer columnists -- both friends of mine -- each wrote Pete Rose columns using my quotes. They received much more acclaim around town than I did. That's how it was; we were pretty invisible. We had to take personal pride in a job well done. We drank also).

All of this comes up because Tuesday it was announced that at the end of this year (after 100 years of publishing), The Cincinnati Post will close its doors and stop the presses. None of this is a surprise as the word is commonly understood -- we all knew 10 years ago that the Post would die on Dec. 31, 2007, just after the Joint Operating Agreement ended. The last few years, for many complicated business reasons, the Post's circulation dwindled to a level that would make us Post alumni gasp. It was all chilling, clear-cut and inevitable.

But none of this, for some reason, makes it less surprising today. When you worked at the Post, you just sort of figured the paper would somehow be around forever. Today is such a sad day. It's an especially sad day for those talented people who work at the Post now -- in sports, that includes Trent Rosencrans, Lonnie Wheeler, Josh Katzowitz. Every time I would go to Cincinnati I would pick up the Post and feel so proud of the way they maintained the paper's tradition even in those awful, shrinking year. It was still damned good. The Post always did find talented journalists.

And for me, well, I guess I feel like a little bit of my youth is gone. I have lived in Kansas City for almost 11 years. I got married here, had two kids here, bought a house here, I mow my lawn here, this is home. But part of me will always be a Posty.

I have so many Post memories. I want to share two.

In 1996, I was at the Olympics in Atlanta. It was the day after the bomb went off, and more than 100 reporters surrounded a Cincinnati diver named Becky Ruehl. She was -- against all odds -- leading the competition after the first day, and she was just such a delightful and beautiful soul that all the reporters sort of fell in love with her. But the reason they all surrounded her on this day was to ask hard questions about terrorism and fear and shattered peace and so on. Becky could not have been more than 20 then, and she tried to hang in there, but after a while you could see she was pretty overwhelmed.

Finally, the diving press coordinator (yes, at the Olympics, there is a diving press coordinator) broke things up. Becky was a little shaken, and she started to walk away and then she saw me, and her eyes lit up.

"The Cincinnati Post!" she shouted and she rushed over. "It's so good to see a little bit of home."

The second thing I remember happened right at the beginning, on my interview with Mark Tomasik. We had a good dinner (of course -- it's tough to have a bad dinner in Cincinnati, unless you want pizza), and he was driving me back to the hotel. By then, I was pretty sure that he was going to offer me the job, he was pretty sure I was going to take it. He pulled up to the hotel door, I got out and then he rolled down the window and said, "There's something hard to explain about working for the Post. It's kind of magical. You'll see."

He was right. I did see. Cincinnati will never be the same.