Greeley (Co.) Tribune lays off sports department

I'm not sure. All the mountain papers (Aspen, Vail, Summit County, Steamboat, Craig, Granby, Glenwood) are printed in Gypsum, on I-70 40 or so miles west of Vail. I think Greeley has a press, but, yeah, definitely not for long.

 

I pulled the thread up on the Youngstown Vindicator being merged into the Warren, Ohio paper. According to the thread Warren picked up three editorial staffers. Now the same thing seems to be happening in Greeley.

Unlike Youngstown Greeley is a thriving, rapidly growing community with a population of about 107,000. If an independent paper can not make it in Greely I wonder how much longer other independent papers have until they are merged into some sort of regional cluster.

 

If a newspaper is dumb enough to lay off all its sports reporters it deserves what it gets. The playground (sports, comics, puzzles, Dear Abby) are why "a lot" of people "bought" newspapers.

 

One thing that drives me crazy is if papers and "suits" put as much effort into making the paper successful and profitable as it did about cost-saving measures/layoffs, communities and papers would be a lot better off. At least the papers would go down with some pride. Now, by the time these places have been suck and bled dry, readers don't really miss the paper because of the trash product it becomes by the end. On what planet is laying off your sports department a good fucking idea?

 

Pretty sure there are no leagues or games on Neptune. At least in the cold months.

 

At least he didn't say, "Stick it up Uranus."

 

Pluto says you only cover them when they get relegated from the Planet League.

 

Maybe a big city paper could survive dumping high school coverage. But these smaller papers relying on citizen journalists to cover sports is just a bad idea. Just think if a parent brings in a picture of some kid scoring a basket. Just to make that picture runnable, the news employee or desk person who accepts said picture is going to have to call the coach or AD, find out information about the kid, the game the kid played in, who actually scored more than the kid in the picture. It'll make the desk person or news editor pull out her/his hair trying to get enough information to run a simple photo. And the photo half the time will be a kid in a JV game, opening up all kinds of cans of worms.

 

And, remember, JV kids try just as hard.

 

In the grand scheme of things in 2020, who cares? Run the photo as is. It's space you won't have to fill and at least one person will buy the paper that day. In fact, a whole page of contributed photos will get more eyeballs than a bunch of recaps.

 

I run every contributed photo sent me. Stuff like that is popular with readers.