"Anybody can steer the ship when the sea is calm."One of the things I have discovered since I was fired six weeks ago is that former editors of the Connecticut Valley Spectator do not constitute a particularly exclusive club and that, within the local community, I was less apt to be asked, "What on earth did you do?" than I was to be asked, "What on earth are they doing?"
Given the beating your self-confidence takes when you are unemployed, it is some comfort now to be confirmed in my sense that the owner/publisher should not have gone into the business without a background in newspapers.
Owning this tiny group of small newspapers was a retirement gig for a smart, genial, retired paper mill owner but his lack of experience made communications between us a constant problem -- things that should have gone without saying not only had to be spelled out but then were not necessarily accepted. Decisions were made that someone with "ink in his blood" would not have made.
Well, I guess good-natured dabbling worked in the good times. Now, however, is not good times. As the video below suggests, when the seas are angry, you really need a tillerman who knows how to ride the waves.
7 comments:
"Smart and genial," maybe, but evidently not very classy. Sad.
ouch! :)
A sign of bigger, scarier things to come?
Not that this isn't scary enough for you and yours.
I'm so sorry Mike.
Can't help but think not only of so many unemployed at once, but of the sudden and large number of readers whose paper just vanished. Seems to me that there's a big need begging to be filled by someone with both brains and capital.
We know where the brains could come from, don't we?
A sort of "belling the cat" issue applies here. Brains aside, somebody would have to supply a nice seven-figure grubstake to get the enterprise up and running.
Apparently, the owner had the papers on the market for a year, but I wonder how actively he was willing to dicker? The daily alone would be a decent investment, if you were prepared for some very minor retooling. The add-ons, including the weekly I edited, were labor-intensive dead weight by the end. Didn't have to be, but, as said, it takes an experienced hand on the tiller.
What is it with industrialists who want to own newspapers? The skill set to be successful at the former seems to be almost mutually exclusive with the skill set to be good at the latter.
Not to mention near-guaranteed built-in conflict with those who do have the skill set to be good at the latter.
Sorry you're the one that got caught in the fallout...
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