New development in Allentown

Besides the stories on the new hockey arena, not much of a reason to pick up the Morning Call. I wonder how the paywall is working out for the website. Is there any reason to spend money to cover the Philly teams? I haven't seen any original analysis or news lately.

 

Philly teams? Sounds like they have enough trouble covering their OWN teams.

Seriously, one of the fun parts of the job used to be trucking a few miles to cover pro and major college teams in your region. Even on your own time/dime. It gave you a chance to make contacts, see what the inside of a pro locker room and press box were like and feel like a big pup for a day. And it made your 25,000-circ. paper better than just running the AP stuff.

OK, so I see where/why the suits put an end to that. Why send your own guys/gals when we're already paying for AP? I don't like it, but I'll live with it.

Now, the cuts have gone to the extreme that in many places you can't even do your basic job anymore. High school or small college team playing a couple of hundred miles away? Yeah, just take a phoner and write up six graphs and call it good. To me, this is one of the biggest changes in the business since I started some 20+ years ago.

Excuse me, but I did NOT invest several years and several thousand dollars in university education to sit by the phone in podunk and do a phoner on everything!! I became a journalist because I wanted to travel, witness important events firsthand, meet interesting people and tell their stories. Oh, the decline in this industry.

 

Allentown is a good place. Bill is good people. He got a shitty deal. I'm afraid this may be just the beginning of more changes in A-Town.

 

As a kid I considered this a destination paper. Paul Reinhard gave me a courtesy interview in my early 20s. On the same vacation I had courtesy interviews at Hartford from Jim Smith and Bergen from Don Sherlock. Logically, Allentown should have ranked third on that list, but it didn't. They were each an equal thrill for me. If you learned how to lay out newspaper pages in the late 1970s or early 1980s, Allentown was a place you watched.

 

Um, if you thought it was meant to be funny, you may require a refresher course on reading comprehension.

 

Can I nominate this as post of the year?

 

93k daily circulation, 123k Sundays. That's plenty big enough to justify real coverage of Philly pro sports and Penn State, not just as a novelty act.

 

I gotta say a few things here, since I'm directly involved in this.

First off, Stitch, I resent that remark about pro sports. But that's your opinion and I guess you're entitled to it. I've had plenty of original analysis and enterprise even news, though not as much as the Philly papers, on my Eagles beat. As for the rest of the sports, I can say the same for Phillies beat, but we don't cover Sixers or Flyers at all anymore (except for jumping on the Flyers in the second round of playoffs).

Second, it was simply a salary dump. The reason given to us was "decreasing ad revenue." In the newspaper business, we obviously cut from the top all too much when slashing costs.

Third, we're all kind of on pins and needles right now, waiting for the other shoe to drop (pardon the cliches), and there's no doubt in anyone's mind that this process has just begun. It's obviously a very uncomfortable situation.

It was pitched to us that we all have to do a little more to make up for the loss of an editor, and I'm sure that's the case everywhere else when similar cuts happen. But needless to say, there's a lot of uncertainty now.

Fourth, and most important: this sucks for Kline, a guy who I like personally and respect professionally, and I've already made a few calls to people I know seeing if they might have any openings now or down the road for him.

So, if anybody knows anything, please let me know.

Nick Fierro

 

Thanks for the insight.

Seems like it's always about "declining ad revenue". So when are they cutting ad staff rather than editorial?

 

I think there's more turnover in ad sales, plus it's commission-based at a lot of papers.