Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Things may be looking up at the FJ

Either the bottom line is floating up from the bottom or Booth is making a last gasp effort to right the ship.

Some good news yesterday with word that a former sports writer has been rehired to the staff. My previous complaints about poor local golf coverage may be over. Also Brendan has long covered the local IHL team - the Flint Generals - and is a writer that fans either love, hate, or love to hate.

It's good news for Brendan and for the paper that he's back.

You can check out some comments from yesterday, but it sounds like employees are going to get dinged for their health coverage and the rumors are persistent that there may be an additional publication day added to the schedule.

Also from first and second hand accounts there is word that the circulation department is calling up former subscribers - subscribers that the PAPER cancelled - and asking them if they would be interested in coming back if they re-established some of their rural routes.

That's going to be a tough sell as folks tell me they are now over the daily newspaper habit.

Went over to AnnArbor.com last night for the first time in six weeks. Yaaaaawn!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

They also brought back Bruce Gunther, the former sports editor, and promoted Bryn Mickle, an excellent reporter, to an assistant community editor post. Both good moves.

Now if they can find solutions to the copy editing and design mess they've created with the off-site page production, they might be headed in the right direction.

Dave Forsmark said...

Maybe now, in the high school football prediction grid, you won't have things happen like the winner between Lapeer East and Lapeer West being-- Swartz Creek!

But will they still provide more than just the score and mean it?

Anonymous said...

One person suggested I apply to the Journal/News, but I wonder if things will indeed look up or if I'd get hired and then laid off in a few months.

Anonymous said...

With some of the stupidity I've seen in the sports page (most of which comes from Saginaw), I think I'd prefer just the score. I mean that.

Anonymous said...

So does this mean The Flint Journal believes better sports coverage will cover up for the incredibly bad news coverage?

The reporters left spend more time writing "features" than covering news, all this after they got rid of some of the best feature writers in the state.

Why do they insist on giving us feature stories by the two or three good writers they kept when we want breaking news. Real news.
Today they ran a front page story about lunch with a guy from the Brady Bunch.

If they thought keeping 1 columnist was going to make a difference they have been proven wrong. Most of us know he's working in Lansing fulltime and it shows in his writing. The stuff they call features are fashion stories that everybody I talk to seem to hate.

If they want people to believe they are making a real effort they should put their money where their mouth is and hire back or find new, experienced writers and cover news in one place and features in another and dump the fashion crap.

But even if they did,it would be too little, too late. Like many others, I got used to not getting the paper 7 days a week, then fell out of the habit of reading an now don't care if I even see a paper.

Anonymous said...

What???? The then first place Tigers on the 4th page (maybe) and another big running story on the front page. What's wrong with that?