It’s a sad time for anyone who cares about journalism and newspapers.
People don’t really care, though, do they? I mean, Gannett doesn’t care about journalists and newspapers, so why would anyone else? Like all corporations, it cares about only the bottom line and fuck-all-else. Most people see journalists getting laid off and feel the same way about it as they would a burger-flipper getting laid off. They’re just glad it’s not them.
Perhaps that’s true. We’ll be infinitely poorer as a city if Gannett lets The CJ decline much further. The Op-Ed page has been somewhat bonkers of late, and change was needed there, but getting rid of newsroom staff is backwards. If your product isn’t doing well, improve the product. Reducing the newsroom to a skeleton crew does the opposite.
The world is run by soulless accountants with no appreciation for, or understanding of, the creative process. Good businesses succeed because they create, which in turn is nurtured by good management. If you know you’re going to lose your job at any moment based not on your creative ability but on the whim of a bean-counting Bellarmine grad, why bother being creative?
Worries me, though. A lot of good people doing terrific, important work at The CJ — obviously despite management, not because of it. I wish there was a local owner, someone who actually gave a shit about the city. Makes me retch when I think of the Bingham heirs sitting about basking in their family’s good name and their inherited wealth. I’m sure it would make Barry Sr. retch, too.
Hard to disagree with that, but in their defence I’m not sure the paper would be doing any better if it were still owned by the family. Everyone’s struggling in the industry, and you can point the finger of blame all over the place. Craigslist killed small ads, in many ways the sweetest plum in the pie, and nobody says they’re a bunch of wankers.
Unlike the people running UofL, who everyone says are a bunch of wankers. The student newspaper lost school funding, saving a pittance compared to the amount Ramsey and his cronies looted.
Don’t get me started. Ramsey and his goons combined pulled in less than Pitino makes for four months of actual work — a bloke who’s disgraced the university’s name while only winning one half-important amateur title in 16 years; hardly student-editor material, and, more relevantly, nothing close to the calibre of Willihnganz et al.
You digress. I’m not sure that editing a student newspaper is a great grounding for a career in journalism, anyway. Makes 21-year-olds think their opinions are worldly and worthy, and most of them end up turning into Dinesh D’Souza or Ann Coulter. Like the world needs more of their ilk.
Still, petty and pointless, just like Gannett. They should stick to pulling the funding from silly degrees.
Oh, so you’re all in favor of Bevin’s call to end further-education funding for the arts?
Don’t be stupid. Of course I’m not. I use my arts degree to help run a business in Kentucky — rather than relying on a good birth lottery to inherit a bell factory in Massachusetts. That may be the perfect metaphor for a nor’easter bell-end like Bevin, but it isn’t practical for most Kentuckians.
Why not have a serious conversation about higher education, though? If he wasn’t incapable of doing it without the same degree of grace as Ted Nugent talking about Hillary Clinton, now would be a great time. Far too many meaningless, useless degrees — and I’m not just talking about yours — resulting in far too many kids dropping out or graduating with nothing but a framed piece of paper and a shit-ton of debt to show for it.
We should take a gander at the German model: apprenticeships in trade and manufacturing. Actually do something good for Kentucky. But Bevin can’t and won’t. I mean, just take the S in STEM. Science, right? You can’t go around saying science degrees are valued while at the same time denying science right, left and center.
Yeah, go ahead, spend years doing science degrees and actual science, only for an ignorant tosser with an East Asian Studies degree pronounce that you’re wrong. I mean, he denies climate change science, evolution, probably carbon dating (because you can’t believe in Creationism and carbon dating at the same time) and so on. What sort of support for science is that?
Not content with believing in whatever his snake-handling science-denying pastor tells him, he wants Kentucky kids taught the same mumbo jumbo. That’ll bring tech jobs and firms like Amazon flooding into the state.
What Bevin means is sure, study science, so long as your conclusions agree with the primitive superstitions of some Medieval scribe whose only qualification was that he could use a quill. Why seek new knowledge when some idiot pol can just deny it because it doesn’t fit in with their religious views?
Utterly absurd. But then so is Kentucky putting this dotard in office in the first place.
“Dotard”?
Some of us still read the paper, mate. Try to keep up.
