By: E&P Staff Until now, the cuts he was most concerned about were probably those made at the end of football training camp or after two rounds of a big golf tournament. But now Jeff Jacobs, sports columnist for the Hartford Courant, has taken on a different kind of cuts: jobs in the newsroom.
All last week he was "sick to my stomach," upset about three Tribune Co. colleagues at the paper losing their jobs. The sports department is "seven down and none up" the last two years. If you count Roberto Gonzalez, who moved to the news side earlier in 2005 after several seasons of covering minor league baseball and tennis," he wrote on Saturday, "we have lost 100 years of experience and sports knowledge in our latest swoop of voluntary buyouts."
He called this "knowledge not easily found," and experience hard to replace. "Oh, you can find some college kid who has memorized every Red Sox stat and who knows more than you do about everything, but he can't write a lick and his point of view extends no further than the nearest blog or chat room that culls information from newspapers in the first place," Jacobs declared. "Or, as has become our norm, you can leave the job unfilled."
He added that "our loss is your loss. ... In the world of a 24-hour news cycle, the best a newspaper can hope for is a virtual scoop via its Internet site. A story well told? A thought well considered? The pursuit of a perfect sentence in pursuit of explaining an imperfect world?
"If those notions are left to gather dust next to the old Royal typewriter, well, it's not a world where I want to be. ...
"Some day, the big dailies will figure out a way to maximize revenue from the same information superhighway that is threatening to make road kill out of us, maybe find a way to charge a nickel or a dime for each story called up and link the number of hits to advertising revenue. Unfortunately that day won't arrive soon enough to save many of us.
"Until that day, we are dinosaurs. Sometimes smarter, usually fairer and almost always more complete than those who would succeed us, but dinosaurs nonetheless.
"Until that day, the pursuit of good journalism and the maximization of profits through public stock ownership will continue an uneasy alliance. Chasing news and chasing the buck is a race not easily won together."
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