Tag Archives: Muscatine Journal

Dealing with disappointment?

newspaperThe Greater Muscatine Chamber of Commerce & Industry held its annual meeting Tuesday night.

And I have two observations:

  • Jon Stetson

    Jon Stetson

    Jon Stetson was the best after-dinner speaker I’ve ever seen at this particular banquet. I don’t know how he did the things he did, but I’m very glad he did not call on me to reveal the dark secrets kept hidden inside my bald head.

  • A table mate teased me about excessive blogging, saying she only reads some of this nonsense because she doesn’t have enough time to read all of it.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t think I had been posting that much stuff here. But my dinner companion is in luck because it may take at least a few days to recover from the disappointment I feel today. And that may mean no more blogging for a while.

Why am I so blue?

Well, I’m a little behind in my reading so I didn’t realize until today that the local newspaper on Tuesday published the photo of Muscatine Mayor DeWayne Hopkins shown here at the upper right. He was pictured with Eugene Newton and Jeanne Pankow.

me and hoppiI thought for sure this picture of, from the right, Pankow, Hopins and some big, dumb guy would be the one to get published.

Maybe next time.

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.

Blogging about the good work at MCSA

If you are reading this, you are one of the hundreds of people who have been kind enough to read this blog since I started it in earnest after my old job as editor of the Muscatine Journal was eliminated earlier this year in a cost-cutting move.

Being a regular reader means you probably also know I started a new job last week at Muscatine Center for Social Action, where I am deputy director. In my new job, I will be blogging some about what happens at MCSA. This is the first blog post written for the MCSA website.

I plan to keep blogging at Brome Hill and I hope you will stick around, too. But I’d like to build an audience for the MCSA blog, so I’ll being linking to posts there in the future. I hope you will enjoy those, too.

And, again, thanks for reading.