For folks into media soap operas — and who among us isn’t? — I stumbled across a doozy this morning from an Atlanta weekly.
It’s a devastating portait of the “death spiral” of some sort of publishing company out of the South. An insider at the shop alleges all sorts of greed and mismanagement and all around crappiness from top to bottom.
Things are tough all over in newspapering these days, but — man o mano! — do things sound awful around those offices. This insider says management wasted money on bad financial advice and focused on the “creation of porn Web sites”* while showing a “bewildering disregard” for writers and readers and watching its papers’ “content erode to a state that can only be called pathetic.”
And now the whole operation is ” dying due to the avarice of ‘more, more, more.'”
So, as we celebrate all that we’re thankful for during this holiday season, maybe we should also take a moment or two to pity the folks toiling at the newspapers discussed in this story, some company called “Creative Loafing.”
Hey, wait a minute! That’s us!
Gotta go!
*Porn web sites? Wow!