McClatchy moving Raleigh, Rock Hill production to Charlotte

Didn't mean to be insensitive. But this is one reason why I never bought a home, just rented.

And, yes, I've moved more than 1,000 miles for a job only to be laid off less than a year later and be stuck in a strange city far from anyone I knew. Life isn't easy sometimes. But these situations are not unique to journalists.

As far as the bigger issue of consolidation is concerned, I would tell people working in copy editing and design at larger chains to expect it and don't be caught off guard.

 

This sucks, obviously.

It's also the main reason I bailed on my last desk job. Loved the job. Feared the future.

Some of us don't want to move all over the country. We love where we live. Our families are engaged in our communities. And we don't particularly like the thought of trying to sell our houses and move elsewhere. I feel horrible for the Raleigh deskers who own homes, have families and have some tough decisions to make.

Consolidation of jobs had to happen in the digital era. But it's so damn heartbreaking and depressing to see this.

 

As if the elimination of jobs wasn't bad enough, they sell it with b.s. such as this:

I'm sure the first-rate newspaper will look good when someone who lives 200 miles away misses a mistake that anyone who lives in Raleigh would have caught.

Once upon a time, the most valuable asset a newspaper had was its ability to be THE authority, THE source of local news and knowledge about a community.

Decisions like this literally make a newspaper less valuable and less important.

 

Like the time when a designer in Lynchburg had someone drowning in the James River on the top of 1A of the Danville paper. Too bad it was the Dan River.

 

Isn't Cox getting ready to do this, too?

 

Holy crap ....

 

The answer to this moving thing is exactly what you mention here: become a landlord. While the real estate market is crap, the rental market is great because all those people who can't get home loans have to live somewhere, so they are renting. It's what I had to do when I got a new job back in 2008. I sat in an apartment in the new city for a year while I failed to sell my old house, then we rented it and bought a house in my current city in 2010.

I don't like being a landlord, particularly a landlord living in another city and having to contract a property management company (money out of my pocket). But it covers my mortgage. The market is supposed to turn around by 2014 in the city where my rental house is located. If I'm smart, I'll remain a landlord until then.

This is probably the best way to deal with relocation right now. It was the only way I could pull off buying in a second city (yes, I have two mortgages now).

 

Mrs. Editude and I did that for a little while, but it's tough. We were quite relieved when the house sold and we could be landlord-free renters. We own now, but I don't envy those moving even 100 miles away; there are no good options. And back in the day, I really enjoyed the Raleigh sports section.

 

I was going to mention this one. The girl who made the mistake is a friend of mine who is from nowhere near Virginia, and she felt horrible about it. There was no excuse for the tons of people who proofed pages for Danville not to catch that on A1 though. None.

 

I can't speak for Danville-Lynchburg, but I know at our place -- with tighter deadlines and fewer copy deskers -- proofing is often a luxury.

However, that mistake probably doesn't get made in the first place in a section designed in Danville.

 

Oh, there's no doubt about that, lone star. At the Lynchburg CEC, a lot of eyes get on the pages, especially on the section fronts. That has to be caught. Someone can have a brain fart and put it on the page, especially when you're doing Danville one day, Lynchburg the next and Waynesboro the next. I put the blame more on the six people who looked at the front and didn't realize the James River goes nowhere near Danville.

 

I once worked with a desker who came to us from three hours away. He kept his house where he was from, rented a place on the cheap for the five days he was with us, then went home for his two days off.

One day on desk, a story moved on the wire about some athlete gone bad from his city ("Athlete arrested for drug possesion," or something like that. He ran it out front (it should have been a brief for us) with the headline "Local athlete arrested."

That's what happens when deskers have an identity crisis. Now we are institutionalizing that identity crisis.