A few weeks ago, a coworker passed along to me a link to this blog.
This fellow named Steve Greenburg had discovered that the Scripps company had decided to eliminate the copy desks at two California newspapers and one Washington State newspaper and send them to … you guessed it, Corpus Christi.
If this sounds familiar to some of you, you probably recall my own blog of that nature.
Greenburg lamented (a bit more poetically than me, I admit) that eliminating local copy desks eliminated the advantage of local knowledge. He did not take it quite as personally as I did, or condemn the Scripps officials to suffer eternally in hell as I have, but did note the short-sightedness of the decision.
I read his blog with no small measure of understanding, then I did something terribly unusual for me. I posted a comment on his blog, noting that this move came only after the copy desks of the Scripps newspapers in Texas were already consolidated to Corpus Christi (including my beloved San Angelo). Then I included a link to my blog.
Well, I got visitors. Lots of them. From across the country. Some of them, I'm sure, have explored the rest of my blog and were disappointed to find it was mostly me whining and moaning about football, or pictures of my kid.
Given that I wrote that San Angelo blog in the heat of the moment, after hearing about Scripps' decision about a year ago, these visitors might wonder if I still feel the same way. Though I spent the first three years of my desk career as a copy editor in San Angelo and another three years a bit later as news editor, folks might wonder if I have bowed to the business argument and drifted away from my personal feelings.
Hell no.
I stand by my open letter to the people of San Angelo, and I stand by my arguments. Not just that the copy editors in Corpus don't know enough about San Angelo (or Abilene, or Wichita Falls, or the Ventura County Star), but that they don't care.
So much of the debate over "desk consolidation" centers around local knowledge. Many point out that a commited copy editor with a deft touch with Google can do a good job working his or her way around that problem.
But the elephant in the room is that, over time, nobody in Corpus Christi is going to put in any love, any extra effort for the San Angelo product. Or some paper in Washington or California. These products are simply extra work for which they undoubtedly have not received enough (if any) extra personnel.
(I'm making assumptions here, but somebody in Corpus prove me wrong. Tell me how many extra copy editors and designers you will receive to offset the three new papers you will be producing. Tell me how many people on your desk have ever lived in San Angelo.)
When I was news editor in San Angelo, I loved that town. No, I'm not from there, but as an Army brat it was only natural that I would come to call some place home eventually. It was the pride of my career that I could inform the people of the Concho Valley after the Memorial Day storm ravaged the town in 1995 or after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The best configuration of employees I had was a fine team indeed for such a small paper in the middle of nowhere.
I had two lifelong residents of the area on my desk. One was a journalism veteran of many years. The other had started off working in the mailroom, working her way through the "paste-up" department before joining us as a "pagination technician." But both were incredibly valuable in helping the rest of us understand San Angelo's history, culture and geograpy.
We also had two large college graduates, one from a major journalism school who we were lucky to have and who stayed for 2 years before moving on, ironically, to Corpus Christi and shortly moving to Austin and marrying some fellow you might have heard of. The other was from San Angelo and had moved back, immediately raising the paper's quality with her fine work.
We had a graduate of the local college and another small college graduate — an idealist firebrand who had already worn out his welcome in Abilene, as I recall. We took him in and gave him some respect and he did great work. Last, but not least, was the non-journalist we hired from New Mexico who turned out to be a fantastic copy editor and designer.
Including me, that's a desk of 8 people, including 3 raised in the San Angelo area, who lived in that town, were committed to doing the right thing for its residents and really cared about making the San Angelo Standard-Times a fine newspaper.
You can't tell me that you can replace that with a few disinterested people in Corpus Christi.
To let the desk shrink with the paper's size and budget? Sure. No choice, I guess.
But to eliminate it altogether? Might as well buy a billboard on U.S. 87 that says "Your pathetic town merits no respect from us. Sincerely, Scripps."
Pretty damn shameful, I'd say.
Recent Comments