1929 Rebellion at the Denver Post

The before and after staff pictures were taken in 2013 and earlier this month. There, in two photographs you can see the staff cutbacks at the 125-year-old Denver Post newspaper, which serves an area of 700-thousand people in Colorado.

It’s not unique.  But the staff response to it is.  On Sunday, April 8th, the paper’s editorial director published a series of op-ed pieces about the takeover of the paper by the New York based venture capital company, Alden Global Capital.

The headline: “As Vultures Circle.”

The Post is to fire more people today.

This kind of rebellion is growing at other papers, large and small, as big corporations take them over and gut them.

But lately it shows signs of pandemia.

Yes, it’s a tough business. Yes, the internet has forced readership away from print. Yes, advertising revenue has shriveled everywhere from the mighty New York Times to the puny Centre Daily Times of State College PA.  

Yes, many in the news business consider it a calling rather than a job and maybe it isn’t.

Here’s one thing for sure:  You don’t want to be Chuck Plunkett this morning.

 Who?

Plunkett is the editorial page editor. And he is the mastermind of this.  As of this writing, he’s a hero in the newsroom. Monday, the vulture capitalists 1800 air miles due east will have picked his carcass.

In some ways, this rebellion carries the vibe of students rebelling against the food in a middle school cafeteria.  In other ways it has the vibe of when a priest visits prison to walk the death row inmate to the gurney.

The rebels can’t win.  They couldn’t win at Aviation Trades High School Cafeteria, where the food still is worse than what the kids will get when they’re adults and working for an airline. The priest can’t crimp the tubes running into the arm of the inmate.  And the staff of the Denver Post can’t win against the moneybags and MBAs at the vulture capital firm because to them, a newspaper is like a news stand or a widget wholesaler only bigger and less portable.

Big important papers sometimes find sugar daddies.  The Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and to go back to ancient times, the New York Herald Tribune are examples.

So, to the rebels: Polish your resumes.  And your job jargon.  Learn these phrases: “You want fries with that?” “Welcome to Wal-mart.” “Shine, Mister?” “Thank you for choosing Uber.” “High, I’m Marty and I’ll be your server.”  “Hey, baby, want a date?”

SHRAPNEL:

--To what do we owe this stunner?  Nancy Grace is back on TV, with a live audience that applauds as she and Dan Abrams evaluate and debate “big” cases.  A&E has also put another failed prosecutor on, but Marcia Clark is at least tolerable and doesn’t cause the TV to vibrate like it wants to jump off the wall-mount.

For further reading on Ms. Grace, click Here for earlier thoughts on Gracenoxious from July 2016.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“The most alienated among us load up on weapons and express their soul-sickness in blood. Finland, Norway and Denmark are not without problems, but researchers say what sets the happier nations apart is the premium their cultures place on the time spent in nature and in harmonious, intimate contact with friends and family.”  --Editor-in-chief William Falk of The Week magazine on growing alienation Americans feel.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is parody.

© WJR 2018

1928 Sinclair Broadcasting Viewed From the Ground

Marty Radovanic retired a few months ago.  Marty worked for a local TV news department in the Altoona-Johnstown area of central Pennsylvania for 43 years. His station had been purchased by Sinclair Broadcasting about five years ago.

As you no doubt know, Sinclair is the largest owner of local television channels in the country.  Just shy of 180 of them. And they’re working on acquiring the 43 more -- now owned by the Chicago Tribune.

As you no doubt also know, Sinclair’s been in the news lately for forcing right wing propaganda stories produced at headquarters on its local outlets. And for putting what amount to partial truths into the mouths of its anchors and reporters… partial truths about “fair” and “real” coverage what would have had George Orwell and Sigmund Freud’s heads spinning.

Ah, yes. It’s only business, as Don Corleone would say.

But what does all this have to do with Marty? Good question.  Marty was the posterboy for Trusted Local Newsguy.  A little rumpled.  A little out of fashion.  But you knew him.  You watched him. You believed him.

You waved to him from across the street. He had no idea who you were but he’d wave back.

He reported on the relatively big stuff -- a Johnstown flood in the 1970s.  And little stuff -- like his own cancer diagnosis.  The Martys of the TV news world get to be family.

Did his retirement have something to do with age… or with the diagnosis… or Sinclair’s ham-handed handling of its acquisitions?

Open questions. No real answers. But none of the answers would surprise anyone. They’d all be legit.  The Martys of the world take their jobs seriously.  Sometimes, they get bigger than their stations.  And stations (and networks) don’t know how to handle that. But they know they don’t like it.

CBS couldn’t handle Rather or Cronkite or Murrow.  NBC couldn’t handle Huntley or Brinkley or Brokaw.  ABC couldn’t handle Jennings. And the day is not too distant when Fox can’t handle Shepard Smith.

So though he’d likely deny it, Sinclair couldn’t handle Marty.  Unhandleable newscasters? The only way to quash them is to make them disappear.  That they can do. Is that what happened here?  Maybe.

Marty ain’t Lester Holt (NBC) or Anthony “Captain Dull” Mason (CBS) or even the infantile motormouth David Muir (ABC.) And Altoona isn’t exactly big time. It’s the 107th largest TV market in the country.  But in context, it’s big stuff.

Yes because they’re force feeding America fairytales. But let’s fact check the happy ending.

SHRAPNEL:

--Have you noticed the recent proliferation of headlines that ask you something instead of telling you something?  It’s not just the little papers in flyover country. It’s some of the biggest papers in the country.

--The New York Times, the Associated Press and they’re starting to creep onto the front page of the Washington Post.  Click bait.  And easy to write, which is a good thing since most papers and wire services no longer have specialists to do the heads.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is parody.

© WJR 2018

1927 A Private Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is the secret weapon of the productive. Oh, yes, it can be misused. But it also can be a valuable weapon in the arsenal of getting stuff done. Just not too fast.

Take Klopnick from the paving contractor. He's in charge of buying raw materials and getting them to the job site.

It's pretty cut and dried stuff. You buy tar or concrete or whatever, according to the job specs. Then you get it loaded on your truck and send it to where the work is being done. Sounds simple enough. But you don't know Amalgamated Builders, where Klopnick has worked for the last 30 or 35 years.

Used to be he'd read the specs, call the supplier and supervise the receiving. No more. Now, they have an order department, a receiving department and a distribution office. And Kloppy. as they call him, reports to the Supervisor of Orders, the Supervisor of Receiving and the Supervisor of Distribution, three guys who don't get along. Well, it's not that they don't get along. They don't even talk to each other.

The whole plant stops for lunch each morning at 11:45. The three supervisors all eat in the company cafeteria. Each always picks a table that's at the greatest possible distance from the other two. Bonus points if all three backs are facing each other -- so no one even has to look.

Kloppy never can get a straight answer about anything from any of the supervisors because there's always what the shrinks call a "sub text."

When Kloppy goes to the Supervisor of Receiving, for example, and asks a simple question like "can you get in 40 metric tons of 'crete into the house if it arrives after 3PM tomorrow?" The supervisor doesn't hear that question. What he hears is "I've been ordered by the Supervisor of Orders to buy 40 metric tons of concrete and he expects delivery at 3 tomorrow afternoon. How can we screw him up? Close early? Get short-handed? What?"

Klopnick knows this, so he doesn't bother with the Supervisor of Receiving. He gets the order from the Engineer in Charge, fills it, and has it delivered. The Supervisor of Orders gets post-facto notice. The Supervisor of Receiving gets a receiving bay full of trucks, but no notice, and the Supervisor of distribution has to go question the other two supervisors about where the stuff is supposed to be distributed. He has to do this through an emissary because, as you know, he doesn't talk with the other two guys.

Eventually, one by one, they'll sidle up to Kloppy's desk and ask how the stuff got bought, came in or went out. Kloppy will smile and say he's only a clerk, that they'd better ask the other two supervisors because all he does is follow orders. And, of course, this they won't do.

The head guy at Amalgamated knows this is going on. And he knows two things about it. Thing one: Kloppy won't live forever, so these guys have to have at least some knowledge of how this all works and thing two: the job will get done, despite the supervisors of ordering, receiving and distribution.

If Kloppy had to work through the bureaucracy, no job would get done.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is parody.

© WJR 2018

1926 Imus

Some of my radio colleagues have urged me to say a few words about the now defunct Imus show. OK.  Here they are. Imus influenced many of us in the business and he made possible the saying of things on air that weren’t sayable previously.

He was one of a kind, though in his later years, he kind of phoned it in.  Actually, he really did phone it in. From his ranch in Texas.  Being away from his cast and staff in New York didn’t help the show any.  A guy like that needs live bodies to bounce off.

I think after nearly 50 years, some people listened to him for the same reason they watched Dan Rather or Jack Paar or any other loose cannon.  They were waiting for the trainwreck.  And it came often enough.

Everyone in this business gets fired.  If you don’t -- quoting someone, but I can’t remember who -- you aren’t doing your job.

Don Imus was better at it than most.

During his first New York run he was exiled to Cleveland for a couple of years.  Bad behavior. But he bounced back. And he returned to WNBC radio, a dog of a station that had no idea what to do with it’s amazing 50-thousand watt signal.  Imus knew.  And he did it.

When WNBC was sold and became WFAN sports radio, Imus was the only holdover.  And he managed to build an audience there which probably wouldn’t have happened without him, at least not nearly as fast as it did.

Then came the Rutgers University Women’s Basketball Moment of Infamy. He used a racial slur in describing the team and he was out on the street, pronto.

When WABC picked him up, he was kind of past his prime.  But even past his prime there was something about him that made him occasionally top shelf and mostly mid shelf, but never the “well” or bottom row of bottles at the bar.

The funny bits left with McCord’s departure, or at least many of them did.  Most of his humor in recent years was kind of Don Rickles-ish but where Rickles went for the laugh, Imus seemed to mean it.  I suppose if you agreed with his assessment you thought it was funny. 

Billy Sol Hargis, the McDonald’s order, that kind of thing was truly funny.  The political interviews in the Tim Russert era bordered on brilliant.

We will miss Don Imus.  But he will miss us all the more.  He’s a hard habit to break. But so are we.

His hard to swallow, self aggrandizing farewell was an emotional arm wrestle.  Listen, Don, you were on the radio. That’s all. It was not the Second Coming or any other major event.

We liked you. Some of us loved you.  Some of us tried to be like you. But as another Wizard of the Airwaves, Howard Cosell said, “it’s only radio.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is parody.

© WJR 2018

1925 Self Cleaning Cars

 

© Colorbox

Self driving cars?  Forgeddaboudit. What America doesn’t need is a car that drives itself.  It needs a self cleaning car.

Oh, we’re almost there.  You drive to the car wash. You run through the little tunnel and the car comes out more or less clean.  Like everything else these days, you have a choice. You can have a plain ole soap and water wash. Or you can add waxes and protectors and anti-bug-on-the-windshield spray.

But that does nothing about the interior. That time you sneezed on the inside of the windshield 1200 miles ago? It’s still there.  So are the little snowflakes of what you’d think were dandruff but are really stuff that caught in the air filter and now cover the top of the dashboard where no head dares go these days even in a crash.

And let’s not forget about the floor mats.  Even if you have those high tech mystery plastic, custom fit (and not cheap) floor mats, they’ve collected a winter full of gunk.  So the first step toward a self cleaning car is the installation of an undercarriage retractable door mat. 

Click “open” on the key remote and the door mat lowers and extends. You wipe your feet just as you would entering the house or apartment.

Then that windshield problem. You have a washer for the outside, why not a washer for the inside.  And let’s talk about a teeny tiny windshield wiper for the lens of the backup camera, you know the thing that shows you pictures of what you’re about to back into and gives you a funny looking grid where none of the lines tells you anything.  The car makers strategically locate those camera lenses in the trunk lid where they’re sure to be covered in mud every time you drive through a puddle.

A hat tip to Honda which once offered a built in vacuum cleaner for one of its minivan models and may still, though you don’t hear about that much anymore.  But think about this:  A minivan is really a little truck whose cargo is generally mid-sized groups of squirmy little kids with open bags of chips or Doritos or one of the eight trillion variations.  Kids spill stuff. Usually that stuff is (1) solid (2) small (3) impossible to pick up by hand.  So the built in vacuum cleaner was pretty clever.

But stuff those chips and Doritos are coated with comes off on little fingers and then little fingers find their way to seats and windows and door handles.  So the vac was only a first step.

Rolls Royce had a similar idea.  One of the optional accessory packs included a live in elderly English couple who would emerge from the trunk and wash, vacuum and dry the car immediately upon its arrival at your destination.   There were some issues.  The couples would sometimes complain about having to live in close quarters in the trunk.  The wages were low.  And sometimes their visas expired and they’d crab about that, too. What ever happened to the British stiff upper lip?

Plus Rolls Royces are kind of expensive and most of us don’t own one.

So Dear GM, Ford, Fiat, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Jaguar, Audi, Benz, Porsche, Google, Uber, Kaiser, Fraser, VW, Volvo, Mitsubishi, and Mazda, you can keep your self driving cars, but the first one of you that launches a self-cleaner will clean up in the marketplace.

Now. Anyone got some Cheetos?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them.  Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is parody.

© WJR 2018

1924 Don't Stop

Retired US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is reframing the debate on guns.  His article recommending the elimination of the second amendment will, of course, go nowhere.  But it has already started redefining the borders of the conversation.

So let’s talk.

Okay, Second Amenders, no one is trying to take your guns away.  We want you to have them if you’re qualified to use them. But let’s talk a little about that amendment you so cherish, you know, the one you think means any doofus can own a tommygun and use it as he or she sees fit against any random evil doer like that Florida girl with the Sinead O’Connor hair-do.

That’s not what this is about.  This is about the bad guys with guns, a decent phrase devised by your fraternity, the National Rifle Association, which at one time served a useful purpose but has left it behind as hysteria overtakes it and it dives into an open cesspool.

The kids who live in fear of the next Nikolas Cruz took to the streets this weekend just passed.  They marched by the thousands in Washington and hundreds of other locales asking only that they be safe in their schools.

Gun laws and the frozen in amber legislators with no range of motion in their brains are the centerpiece of their campaign.  Those legislators are petrified in both senses of the word.  And if the kids (and their parents) keep pounding on the cube of amber, they might just replace Congress and some state legislators in this fall’s election.

Justice Stevens rightly points out that there is no constitutional bar against controlling who gets what gun.  And like many other critics of the way things have become, he’s not looking to stop you from owning reasonable weaponry.  But he points out that the second amendment states some requirements that the court later decided weren’t really there… you know, the part about the “well regulated militia.”

Even the anarchist verbal bomb-thrower Antonin “Tony Ducks” Scalia had no problem with the well regulated idea.  It looks like Tony was too liberal for the NRA. 

We also note with faint amusement that the company that now owns Remington has put it into bankruptcy. We’d like to believe that it’s because Remington isn’t selling enough guns to be profitable, that people have come to their senses about stockpiling personal weaponry.  But that’s not the case. 

A wrecking ball -- AKA private equity outfit -- has saddled them with almost a $1 billion in debt it can’t repay.  It’s what private equity firms do.  But worry not.  They’ll restructure that debt, which is another way of saying they’ll kick the can down the road for the moment.  And if they run true-to-form they’ll start squeezing money and benefits from their remaining workers.

The PE firm is Cerberus Capital, the same folks who turned Chrysler into a hot mess, using the same time tested recipe.

So, cheers to Justice Stevens. And to Emma Gonzalez the brilliant brush cut kid from Parkland, Florida and all the other Emmas out there.  And their parents.  And their teachers.  And everyone else with the wherewithal to maintain the present momentum.

Keep on keeping on.  Don’t stop.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is parody.

© WJR 2018

1923 Madame La Zonga's Workaround

Note: R- rated content follows. Some readers and listeners may find it unsuitable.

Craig Newmark

So Craigslist has eliminated it’s “personals” section.  Well, isn’t that righteous.  No more ads for “casual encounters” some of which may have facilitated sex trafficking.

Oh, wait a minute.  There’s a new law that makes it possible for municipalities and individuals to sue companies that help making trafficking possible.  It is a good law.  A long time missing piece of the war on this crime.

But more likely it’s the lawsuit part that troubled the owners of the internet classified page than a sudden reawakening of its vestigial conscience.

The Wessays (™) Department of Social Research would occasionally scan the site in anticipation of the shutdown. Here is what we found:

--ads written in third grade level English that promised bliss but first you had to “verify” that you were real by signing up for a web service and giving your credit card number.

--ads written by computer robots that promised bliss but first you had to verify that you were real by signing up for a web service and giving your credit card number.

--telephone numbers in non-existent area codes.

In other words, they’re  come-ons that sought your personal information and maybe steal your good name as someone writing as William Shakespeare once said.

The sex for hire ads were little different from other ads on Craigslist that sought your personal information.  But there was one major difference:  if you were scammed by “Women Seeking Men” or “Casual Encounters,” you were unlikely to make a big fuss about it.  After all, who wants to admit to being a man seeking a woman? Especially the married “pillar of the community” types.

Perfectly OK if you were scammed by someone selling a dining room set or who offered discount diet advice or cheap fake tickets to hot ticket events.  But sex? Perish forbid.  What would you neighbors think if you took Madame LaZonga to court?

Madame is a madam. She runs a beauty shop where you can get your nails and other body parts polished. She’s been in business for years.  “Everyone” knows what goes on there.  But so far she has evaded capture. 

There could be reasons the cops look the other way.  Can’t think of what they might be right now, but …

Nevertheless, Madame L is no dummy.  She’s already found other sections of Craigslist in which she can legally drop hints about her business.  The Wessays Research Department may have to mine some data on the subject but it’s a one person department and he disappeared right after issuing that report we mentioned up top.

SHRAPNEL:

--Our old pal Sick Rantorum is at it again.  This harebrained scheme of the moment: Teach kiddies CPR so that when the next Nicolas Cruz comes calling the children can revive the dead and injured.  If there’s such a thing as Braineo Resuscitation, someone find Rantorum and if there’s no do-not-resuscitate tattooed, then do not resuscitate.

--Our old pal WestraDamus ® is at it again. He broke his retirement silence to announce that Bolton would not last long in the trump administration because he’s insufficiently hawkish. That said, please remember the ‘Damus’s unfailing failure to predict anything, even the past.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“I can't say that my disability has helped my work, but it has allowed me to concentrate on research without having to lecture or sit on boring committees” --Stephen Hawking

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is parody.

© WJR 2018