| The Independent was not perfect, but it did make a commitment to cover town, planning and school board meetings that have not seen a daily reporter in years.
So, if you wanted to know what was going on at those meetings in your town, The Independent was the only way to find out.
But its pay sucked, so often those meetings were covered by young incompetents.
I has a run-in with an Independent incompetent at a school board meeting last year, where I challenged the board's decision to fire a friend of mine in favor of a more expensive contract service.
He wrote the story to make it more like stenography from the district's lousy superintendent, and misquoted me several times, including "It's a shame" when I said "It's a sham."
That one letter does make a difference.
In my e-mail to the incompetent's boss (who had strongly defended his reporter's obvious incompetence), I was more hopeful about The Independent's future than it turned out:
It's a shame that JRC has apparently limited your ability to hire entry-level reporters with basic skills.
Hopefully, that will change after JRC goes bankrupt in a few months and sells The Independent to someone who will provide the resources to do local journalism right.
Because you-get-what-you-pay-for guys like (the incompetent) are doing local journalism wrong.
JRC is, more than many newspaper companies, leveraged to the hilt.
Under former, late, and unlamented CEO Robert Jelenic, it bought, and overpaid for, dozens of daily and weekly newspapers in "strategic clusters" like the Capital District of New York, most of Connecticut outside Hartford, southern New Jersey and suburban Philadelphia, and suburban Detroit.
JRC was the subject of a devastating profile in the American Journalism Review in 1999 that had juicy bits like this:
When JRC purchased Rhode Island's Narragansett Times and several other weeklies from Capital Cities, Publisher Frederick J. Wilson, whose family had once owned the Times, stayed only five months.
"They don't care about the product. They don't care about the customer. They don't care about the employees," Wilson says. "And they don't know anything about the business."
He has since launched two weeklies with money from local backers that directly compete with JRC papers.
For years, former JRC employees have owned the company's Yahoo message board. Some of their stories are telling, like this:
Employees are being made to wait weeks at a time for reimbursement on mileage expenses. Some independent contractors are having to wait a month or more for payment where before they were paid weekly.
What does it say about a company that expects its employees and contractors to pay the expense of running a multi-million business out of their own meagerly paid pockets and then having to wait and wait for those expenses to be paid back?
And, after Jelenic died last year, there was little reluctance to speak ill of the dead for those who had suffered under him:
Let us shed no false tears.
He was not a good guy. He was not a nice guy. He was always mean and loved to belittle people, both in public and one-on-one.
His "vision" for JRC was to destroy the newspapers and pocket all the money.
He surrounded himself with yes-men who never challenged his thievery and his anti-journalistic ideas.
When there was no money left to pocket, he walked away from the company knowing it would soon fold.
He embodied the worst of American greed and corruption and he's lucky he never went to jail.
JRC went public in 1997, at $14 a share. That year, it paid job-killing Jelenic $11 million.
JRC's stock rose for a while above $20, then slid down, down, down, to its current status as less than a pennystock (today's close was a tenth of a cent).
JRC will go bankrupt sooner than later, and closing the once quite-profitable Independent will do nothing to stop that from happening.
There will always be a readership, and advertising support, for local papers that do the meeting/blotter grunt work.
But, to really succeed, they must be locally owned.
When such papers are owned by profit-hungry corporations from faraway, they always get worse, and they sometimes close. |
