Tag: Memphis Daily News

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News News Blog

New Media Venture May Be Home for Calkins, Biggs, Herrington

CREDIT: G. Crescoli, Unsplash

G. Crescoli, Unsplash

Some new news-media venture is in the works in Memphis, sources close to the move said Thursday morning, and it may be the new home for some of The Commercial Appeal’s most-recognized bylines.

Though details are scanty, a read of the tea leaves in a Smart City Memphis blog post said that new venture might be the new home for sports columnists Geoff Calkins, food and dining writer Jennifer Biggs, and editor and columnist Chris Herrington.

Smart City Memphis said Biggs and Herrington have both resigned from The CA. Sports radio station ESPN 92.9 tweeted that Calkins, too, was leaving. Calkins has a show on the station.

New Media Venture May Be Home for Calkins, Biggs, Herrington

Smart City Memphis claimed that while the details weren’t readily available, the new venture seemed to stem from ”an aggressively expanding (The) Memphis Daily News.” However, sources said Thursday morning the new venture is not an outgrowth of that newspaper.

Eric Barnes, publisher of The Daily News, said he could not comment on the situation.

The Smart City Memphis piece harshly criticizes Gannett Co.’s stewardship of The Commercial Appeal, noting “that (Gannett) has in only three years, eviscerated even those fond memories of a time when (the newspaper) mattered so much to the Memphis region.”

A source said the new venture involves many people disappointed in what The CA has become.

Neither Biggs nor Calkins had formally announced their moves Thursday morning. However, the Smart City Memphis post accurately pointed to the resignation of Chris Herrington, an editor at The CA and author of the daily online “The 9:01” column, and of a new place for him to ply his trade. Herrington announced on his personal blog, “Sing All Kinds,” that Wednesday was his final day at The CA.

“In the absence of another compelling opportunity within this city, I may well have been there as long as they would have had me, though, like most Memphians I lament the paper’s shift toward being a corporate cog in a Nashville-centric Tennessee network,” Herrington wrote.

He said, while he can’t divulge much about his new employment situation at the moment, that “I’ll re-emerge later this summer, writing about many of the same topics in many of the same ways, but in different formats and at different frequencies.”

The Flyer will continue to follow this development and will update this story when new information comes to light.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The “Newsroom of the Future”

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Gannett, The Commercial Appeal‘s corporate overlord, began rolling out the company’s “Newsroom of the Future” concept in Memphis last week. Apparently, the newsroom of the future will fit into a nice-sized basement rec room. Twenty journalists were laid off, including many folks whose bylines are familiar to all of us. The CA is now reportedly down to 48 people in its editorial department.

Gannett treats its papers like McDonald’s franchises, and its Tennessee franchises have been consolidated into a network that will create and share content, most notably from the Nashville Tennessean and the Knoxville News Sentinel, which also suffered layoffs last week. Gannett’s flagship paper is USA Today, which supplies national content to the chain’s regional news properties.

The truth is that the Newsroom of the Future should be called the “Newsroom of Shareholder Value.” Gannett is cutting costs to boost (or maintain) its stock price and earn a profit margin that will please Wall Street.

In the wake of last week’s layoffs, I heard and read comments from many Memphians that they were going to cancel their subscription; that the CA was worthless; that they could get all the local news they needed from television, The Daily News, the Memphis Business Journal, and the Flyer.

No, you can’t.

Sure, you can get good reporting from all of those news outlets, but none of them are staffed adequately to provide what a good daily newspaper — even one that’s been “right-sized” — can bring.

But the paper is just a shell of its former self, you say. Yes, it is, but it is still essential and invaluable. Let’s take a look at Tuesday’s CA.

On page one, there was a story about Wiseacre Brewing declining to expand into the Mid-South Coliseum; a feature about a Memphis saxophone player Dr. Martin Luther King spoke to from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, before being hit by an assassin’s bullet; and a USA Today Network story about our Nashville legislators double-dipping on their expense accounts.

The rest of the front section featured mostly national news, much of it reported the day before on the web. But if your job doesn’t allow you to surf the net all day, the Tuesday paper had a good aggregation of major national and world news.

The Business section was all local reporting, much of it fresh. The Local section broke news on Memphis Judge Jon McCalla’s ruling on billboards as “free speech,” which will likely be contested all the way to the Supreme Court. A solid story not reported elsewhere.

We also got stories on musician David Porter and the “penny for your parks” issue in Mississippi, David Waters’ column about the late Benjamin Hooks, the police report, and two pages of obits. All local.

The “M” section, which used to be about Memphis society, food, and general soft features, is now basically all generated from elsewhere. You want a chicken thighs recipe from the Associated Press? Got you covered. Also Chess Quiz, Horoscope, Answers (from God?), Ask Annie, Today in History, Jumble, Crossword, Sudoku, and Daily Bridge Club. (Bridge? Seriously? Okay.)

So none of that is local, but it goes well with coffee. Then there’s the Sports section, which features local reporting on the Grizzlies and Tigers and lots of national and regional wire stories.

No, the CA is not The New York Times (which isn’t failing, by the way), but it’s still a vital part of the fabric of the city. Without a daily paper, we might as well be Covington.

So, folks, don’t cancel your subscription to the CA. And if you don’t have a subscription, then go online and pay the small charge for access.

If you don’t support the organizations (however corporately flawed) that are reporting the news in Memphis (and that includes the Flyer and other local print media), they might not be around when you need them.

And we do need them. Every day.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1346

96X Raps

RIP 96X. Long live Boomin96! Just when you were getting used to hearing that one James song you’d happily forgotten years ago, WIVG-FM’s throwback X-radio format has been changed to a throwback hip-hop format. Thanks to Flinn Broadcasting for continuing to make the drive-time radio experience like a scene from The Walking Dead where one of the main characters runs into the reanimated version of someone they dated back before the zombie apocalypse.

Pun[ishment]

The Fly on the Wall team is sorry to hear that marketing consultant and Memphis Daily News columnist Dan Conway has a nasty cold, and we hope his condition improves (or that somebody stops him) before he pens more articles like his December 5th column that began, “Just when you think your cold is getting better, it snot.” Not “feeling much like writing a column,” Conway had opened his email to discover a list of old puns forwarded to him by a friend that reminded him of other old puns forwarded to him by friends and decided to pass along favorites like, “I stayed up all night to see where the sun went, and then it dawned on me,” and “I changed my iPod’s name to Titanic. It’s syncing now.”

Time Out

Time magazine recently suggested that not every reader nominating a “Person of the Year” takes the honor seriously. “Over the years, there have been some nominations that are fairly farfetched, surprising, or silly,” we’re told by the news magazine so serious it once singled out “You” for the honor. The list of unserious candidates included cartoon character Li’l Abner, fictional construct The Man in the Moon, and Elvis.