Wendell Barnhouse takes buyout

I just received a group e-mail from Wendell. The Pipeline is correct. He did take the buyout and he is going to work for the Big 12 website. The Star-Telegram is completely eliminating its national college hoops and football beat.

 

That's fucking suicide.

this industry is TRYING to kill itself. Hmm let's see, we're in a market where college sports are passionately followed...I'VE GOT IT!!! Let's get rid of the national beat!

Jesus Christ.

 

National beats are getting whacked everywhere... For the most part, they're the first to go...

 

They can get that stuff on ESPN.com. And they will, along with the rest of their sports news. Morons.

 

Five years and half of us are jobless...

 

The joke is on those of us who aspired to those types of jobs. Like getting on an elevator, having the doors close and then realizing it is headed down, not up. WTF!

 

You think it's going to be that bad for real?

 

Yeah, I do...

 

Damn. You mean sports people or just newspaper employees in general?

 

Local sports, local sports, local sports. We live in a selfish society, folks. People don't wanna read about LSU-Florida. They wanna read about their own little kids' baseball game. Scoff if you want, but you know it to be true. How many "crazy parent" threads do we have on here? Now - how many "crazy LSU fan in Seattle" threads do we have? It's an indication of interest.

Local newspapers gotta go find the stories the national news ignores. Put simply, they have write stories people want to clip out and send to their families. Quit putting a picture of Tiger/Phil at round one of the U.S. Open as your lead photo if you're 1500 miles away and running wire. Quit relegating the local legion baseball tournament to four lines in "high school news" while you run a 25-inch game story about game 5 of the Celtics/Lakers series. Quit covering every fart the college/pro football coach makes when every message board in America has already broadcast it 12 hours before.

There are hundreds of great stories in any given town of a decent size. Sports stories. Are they are on the scale your ego might prefer? No, maybe not. Might you have to be a little more careful with your words because you're aiming your journalistic guns at a celebrity target like T.O. Yes, you will. Might you have to sell an editor and a photographer on it. Yep.

I call it pro-bono journalism; once every couple months, every columnist and reporter on a major beat - y'know your theoretical best people - takes a "case" for free. That is, they go out and find a local sports story. It can be an issue, a person, whatever. Doesn't have to be a 70-inch feature or anything, but it does need to be a story/photo package of some sort. The rules on what sport, and story type are appropriately liberal. No gripes about "no time" or "my beat." You just do it, and give it the same effort you would for something you preferred to do.