Tag Archives: Lee Enterprises

New-media blogger doesn’t tell the whole story

Ehrlick

Ehrlick

Maybe this will turn into a battle of bloggers, but that doesn’t need to happen.

Thursday, I read this blog, which a former employee of mine had posted on his Facebook page. Since it tars Darrell Ehrlick, another of my former newspaper employees,  I was interested in what the blogger had to say. I had even gone so far as to write a comment in response. And then I decided to just post it here on my woefully neglected blog:

I’ve never met Kerry Drake and don’t suppose I ever will. To him, I say: Good luck with the website. I hope you will use it to practice better journalism than what has been demonstrated here by Gary Villeneuve, someone else I don’t know and likely will never meet.

I do know Darrell Ehrlick, who is editor of the Casper Star Tribune. Once upon a time, when I was editor of the Winona Daily News, I hired him to be the city editor. It was one of the best hiring decisions I ever made. There are many good things I could say about Darrell. For now, all I will say is:

  • Calling him a hatchet man for Lee Enterprises is borderline libelous.
  • Publishing that kind of anonymous criticism is not the kind of reporting Darrell does. Especially without giving the person being criticized a chance to respond, which is what appears to have been the case with this story.

 I’ve never worked with anyone who cares more about the community in which he lives or tries harder to do newspaper work the way it is supposed to be done.

 I worked 21 years for Lee Enterprises, including 12 as an editor. That ended in February 2012, when my job was eliminated  in yet anther round of budget cuts. I totally understand laying on the couch in the fetal position and wondering “what am I going to do with my life here.”

 More than a year later, I have a job outside of newspapers that I really enjoy. I’ve moved on. Today, I can say the publisher who let me go is just a guy trying to do a hard job the best he can in a rapidly changing industry. It doesn’t help that he is trying to do it for a company whose many mistakes have been well documented. And I wouldn’t want to trade places with him.

 That the same thing could maybe be said about Darrell Ehrlick is about the worst thing I can think of to say about him.

 For Mr. Drake’s sake, I hope he will someday be able to see his situation this way, too

On his blog, Mr. Villeneuve identifies himself as a graduate student in new media who also works in the mental-health field. I wish him well in his endeavors. But in the future, I would encourage him to do a better job of telling both sides when he reports on stories like this one.

There. The loud sound you just heard is me stepping down from my soapbox.

On a personal note: Wow, it’s been six weeks since I posted something here, which means this may be read by 11 people. One of them, I’m pretty sure, will be Darrell Ehrlick. Hang in there, Ehrlick. I didn’t realize just what a big shot you had become until I read you are nothing more than a Lee hatchet man. I always told you I’d wind up working for you someday.

And with that, I am done for now. I’ll try not to wait six weeks before I come back.

Catching up with the times

Buffett headlineAny good newspaper reporter knows well the terror of waking in a cold sweat at 2 a.m. and dreading an error that’s about to land on readers’ doorsteps.

So it’s not too hard to imagine how someone in Greensboro, N.C., felt Friday when he or she realized the News & Record had misspelled its new owner’s last name in a headline on the front page. BH Media Group, a subsidiary of billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway, bought the 122-year-old newspaper, which sells 58,000 copies daily and 86,000 Sunday. It had been owned by Landmark Communications of Norfolk, Va., since 1965.

Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett

The newspaper announced the deal in a one-column headline that said: Buffet media buys paper.

Of course, misspelling the last name of one of the world’s richest men attracts plenty of unwanted attention in today’s world of social media. I read some snarky comments.

It was the timing of the mistake I found interesting. It comes on the heels of an announcement made this week in the newsrooms of at least some Lee Enterprises newspapers, including the Quad-City Times, to eliminate copy editor/page designer positions at those newspapers. Those jobs will be consolidated, I’m told, at regional hubs in Lincoln, Neb., and Madison, Wis. Copy editors and page designers at the hubs will paginate pages for the Times and the other newspapers, which most likely includes the Muscatine Journal.

To the best of my knowledge this has not been announced publicly by the company or any of the newspapers involved. And I didn’t call to confirm it, but if anyone with knowledge would like to have a say, I’ll approve on-the-record comments that appear in the moderation queue for this blog.

The move to regional design hubs isn’t a big surprise. It has already been done by other companies, including Gannett Co., which has a regional design center at the Des Moines Register. I spoke Friday with a former Lee colleague who now oversees a regional publishing center for another newspaper chain on the East Coast. And Lee had already been experimenting with a design hub in Munster, Ind.

For the companies, it makes sense because it can help keep their expenses more in line with revenue, which has diminished in the past decade. And if you are the editor of a newspaper, losing your copy editors — as bad as that may be — is still better than losing reporters, the people who gather and report news. Good reporting isn’t something that can be done from far away.

But make no mistake, this will not be good for the newspapers or the communities they serve. For the same reason a copy editor in Greensboro didn’t know how to spell Buffett, it’s likely a copy editor in Madison, Wis., may someday misspell Eisele Hill or any of several other Muscatine landmarks with names that are difficult to master. These mistakes are easy enough to make as it is and will become more common as more and more copy is read by faraway eyes.

Institutional memory is a hard asset on which to place value, but it will be lost over time, I fear, when editing and design work is being done far away — often by people who are young, inexperienced or hurried because they have other pages to produce for other newspapers.

The other big downside to regional design hubs is what the move may mean for deadlines. Most likely, deadlines will be earlier than they are now because not everyone can have the last pages to be done at night when many newspapers are all being produced by one crew in a central location. Moving deadlines to earlier at night could mean that a lot of high school and other local sports might not get into the next morning’s newspaper.

And that could alienate readers at the expense of cost savings for the company.

It all makes me happier than ever to no longer be a part of the only profession to which I ever really wanted to belong. To me, it was always more than just a job. But I don’t miss going to work every day and wondering if it would be my last to have that job. That is the dark cloud under which I imagine many of my friends and former colleagues still go to work every day.

I wish them well and I hope they find better days ahead. But for many of them, I don’t think those better days will include regional design hubs.

A few thoughts as 2012 winds down on Brome Hill

cropped-steinbach-road.jpgDec. 31 is always a good day to look back — especially since downtown Muscatine is so slow today you almost can’t cross the street for fear of being hit by the tumbleweed.

The Powers that Be at WordPress.com prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Of course, they’re encouraging WordPress bloggers to post something about these stats. And if I am nothing else, I am an obliging guy.

Becoming a blogger

No. 3 with a bullet.

The report shows that this blog had 36,000 page views in 2012. Nearly all of those happened after my old job was eliminated at the Muscatine Journal on Feb. 27. And one of the early posts I wrote about that experience ranked at No. 3 on my list of most-read posts this year.

A little-known fact is that I actually started what would become this blog at least two or three years ago. And then I ignored it, turning to it only when I had no other outlet to write whatever was on my mind. Since Feb. 27, I have written 225 posts (counting this one) on Brome Hill.

Journal twitterWithout trying to sound overly bitter or critical, the way I used to think still seems to be the mindset of many of my former newspaper colleagues — and not just those at the Journal. There are still too many editors who think about the newspaper first without paying enough attention to what they are doing online or with social media. To cite one example, take a look at the Muscatine Journal’s twitter feed. The automated tweets deal exclusively with headlines from the paper’s website. There isn’t a recent breaking-news tweet in the feed. And whoever manages the account doesn’t use it to follow anyone.

On the eve of 2013, how can anyone think this is the way local news should be done?

As the year ends and the hurt of losing my old job dims with time, I can say I’m better off because of it. I have a new job that I like. I didn’t have to leave Muscatine. And I’m not commuting to Iowa City or the Quad Cities. The eight months I spent in between jobs — while filled with anxiety — gave me time to try new things such as Crossfit. It also gave me the opportunity to learn more about blogging and social media than I ever knew before. What I have learned can be boiled down to: Post early, post often and post regularly if you want to build and keep an audience. And tell that audience something it doesn’t know.

top postsIt’s not as easy as it sounds and I don’t do all of these things well. But all of my most-read posts in 2012, according to WordPress, dealt with local news stories that I tweeted and reported here well ahead of my former employer.

To me, that helps illustrate the conundrum of producing news in the online world. It’s not hard to out report the traditional media. In fact, sometimes it may be surprisingly easy. Nor does it cost much to jump in and go. It’s not as if I had to buy a printing press.

What is hard, though, is to make money at it. My solution to that challenge has been to get a job and blog when time allows.

Since I’m no longer at the Journal, I’m not privy to its plans beyond charging for access to its website. Whatever those plans are for 2013, I hope they succeed for the sake of my former colleagues. I wouldn’t wish for any of them to experience the anxiety and self-doubt I wrestled with in 2012. Well, I might wish it upon the occupants of some of the big corner offices at the Lee Enterprises corporate offices in Davenport, but I try not to dwell on those negative thoughts.

Still, I can’t help but be pessimistic about the local news business, especially for newspapers owned by the big publicly owned chains, so I will close with some worst-case scenarios for what could happen at the Muscatine Journal in 2013:

  • More jobs will be cut. In fact, this is already happening with Ron Steffeson, a longtime graphic designer whose job is being eliminated, I’m told, even if it hasn’t been reported.
  • Don’t be surprised if the Journal tries to sell its building at 301 E. Third St. and lease a smaller office elsewhere, a decision that would make a lot of sense.

I hear from many Journal readers who fear their newspaper will someday be absorbed by its larger sister newspaper in Davenport. That’s not likely to happen, if you ask me. What is more likely to happen is that the Journal will continue to cut staff and eliminate publication days from six per week to maybe three or four.

I’m glad to be done with it and I’m looking forward to better things in 2013.

Happy New Year to those who found this blog in 2012. Thank you for continuing to come back.

Serving up a hotdish blog

No, not that kind of hotdish. Photo: Suvi Korhonen/Wikipedia.

Well, I survived giving birth for the second week to an edition of the West Liberty Index. The stories are maybe best left untold — or saved for my column in next week’s issue if I get desperate.

Speaking of my return to writing a weekly newspaper column, here is what I wrote this week to introduce myself to Index readers:

When life hands you lemons, so the old saying goes, make lemonade.

That explains how I arrived at the West Liberty Index on May 11 as interim editor, taking over for Geoff Rands, who left this week. How long I will be here has yet to be determined.

So far, however, I’ve been enjoying myself. And that’s not something I’ve said lately with much regularity. On Feb. 27, my job of nearly five years as editor of the Muscatine Journal was eliminated in a cost-cutting move by Davenport-based Lee Enterprises, the company for which I had worked since 1991. The Journal’s publisher took on the added title of editor and I found myself out of work for the first time since I was a boy on my parents’ farm in Lucas County.

In the months since then, I’ve filled my time by working out, bicycling, blogging, working on some volunteer projects and applying for jobs.

About a month ago, I started getting emails — from City Councilman Sean Harder, former Index Editor Sara Sedlacek and Index Publisher Jake Krob among others  – telling me that Rands was leaving the newspaper.

I exchanged a few emails with Jake, who had been following me for a while on Twitter, the social-networking website. After meeting one afternoon over iced tea, we agreed I would take over as interim editor for maybe even a couple of months. This should give Jake and his business partner, Stuart Clark, editor and publisher of the Tipton Conservative, time to find the right editor for the Index.

I’ve told a few people around town what this means is that I’ll be here until Jake and Stu find someone better, which shouldn’t be too tough.

So, why would I do this? Well, West Liberty has always been my favorite small town in Muscatine County. Jake has also offered to pay me more than I could collect in unemployment. And, there is no other way to say it, I was bored to death without having an office to go to every morning.

The experience of being out of work has made me think often of the best boss I ever had — another longtime Lee guy who used to joke about the term, strategic business unit, or SBU. In the Lee lexicon, SBU is the term for newspapers that are clustered together to consolidate expenses for things such as human resources and printing and distributing newspapers. The Muscatine Journal and the Quad-City Times in Davenport are part of the same SBU.

My favorite former boss used to say SBU really stood for Sure Beats Unemployment.

After a little more than two months, even ditch digging would beat unemployment, in my book. And this is much better than digging ditches. I’m grateful to Jake and Stu for the opportunity and very happy to be here for however long I may be at the Index.

One more thing: Over time you and I will get to know one another better. I’ve named this column Brome Hill, which is also the name of my blog. If, for some reason, you would like to speed up the process of getting to know more about me, feel free to read my blog at www.bromehill.com or follow me on Twitter @csteinbach.

*****

If you are an Index reader or a resident of West Liberty, Atalissa or Nichols, please feel free to stop in at the newspaper. Especially if you have a good story idea. I can tell you that the Rev. Dennis Martin — the soon-to-be-retired priest at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church AND a bicyclist, so he’s obviously a good guy — stopped in today with a good story tip. He rode his bike and was in a jersey and bike shorts.  (When I first looked up, I thought my Muscatine riding friend, Chuck Vesey, had made the trip to West Liberty.)

Anyway, if you need to reach me at the Index, the phone number is 319-627-2814. The email address is index@Lcom.net.

If you need to reach me for reasons that have nothing to do with the Index, please keep using my personal email address and cell phone number if you know them.

Reaching new Crossfit milestones: Today, I raised my max in the back squat to 200 pounds. Max is short for maximum — the most someone can lift once. While 200 pounds may not sound like a lot for a big lug like me, it represents a 21 percent increase over the back squat max I set a few weeks ago. I was pretty happy.

The rest of the workout consisted of:

1. Super squats done at 70 percent of my max (140 pounds). We did 20 squats, one every 20 seconds.

2. 3 sets (21 repetitions, 15 and nine)  of overhead squats, pull-ups and burpees.

About this, all I can say is:

1. Overhead squats still suck.

2. Doing a total of 45 burpees is, at best, only half as bad as the 90 burpees we did Monday. And burpees still stink no matter how many — or few — of them you do.

And finally: You may have made it this far and wondered: What the heck is hotdish?

Think of it as speaking Minnesotan, because in The Great White North, hotdish is the word for casserole.

If you’re not from the Midwest, you might be unfamiliar with the idea of eating a casserole. And if so, I can’t help you. But I think this blog post qualifies as the equivalent of a word casserole — a little of this and a little of that.

But that’s it for today. I’m supposed to go play volleyball tonight. There ought to be some funny stories to tell later about that experience.