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But it is pretty clear, and has been for some time, that much of the old guard in Long Beach has long been out of touch with most things that don't involve their own individual ability to continue to draw a paycheck. The timing and tone of Hennessy's joke of a Wrigley Field column could not be worse.
Dean Singleton is merely the greedy cynic who applied the final stab to the PT’s back . Archbold and his management minions, who each received an extra 30 pieces of silver (from seller Knight-Ridder) to stay on following Dean’s initial bloodletting in 1997, facilitated the paper’s long decline, making it ripe for Singleton’s rape.
Fawning coverage of City Hall’s elected and appointed leaders, along with blind boosterism for every stunt they backed or proposed (DisneySea, the Ice Dogs, fly-by-night minor league baseball teams, the many permutations of the Queen Mary, and an economically anemic Navy base reuse rip-off) rendered local coverage useless and suspect to the readership. Opponents of such boondoggles, along with many residents concerned with the quality of life in the LB area, were, when they rarely made it into the paper, generally mocked.
Instead, we were treated to such debacles as a salute to a visit by President Bill Clinton (with a huge A1 banner headline “Welcome, Mr. President”), despite the fact that Bill had signed off on the dismantlement of LB’s military-industrial economic base. We also learned more than we needed to know about the Friends of the Library, Leadership Long Beach, the life and times of Beverly O’Neill, John Morris (the recent subject of another PT Valentine) and of course, thanks to the intrepid Hennessey, the Chicago Cubs.
The Wrigley Field column and the puffy “new publisher” blurb that followed Friday’s bloodbath pretty much sum up the PT’s real and long-running problem. Forget the economy, new media, the price of newsprint and all that other crap. The PT’s leaders have long had – and continue to pursue – a death wish while deftly escaping the carnage themselves.
Shelton was from Texas--like someone we wrote about in our Halloween issue: P-T reporter Bill Hunter--and he knew and used a ton of colloquialisms, most of which I've probably forgotten.
(This is why our language is becoming more drab every day: because these expressions are being forgotten.)
The one I remember came out when we were having a discussion about breaking rocks in prison--which Shelton characterized as "making little ones out of big ones." I'm not sure why we were talking about that.
Levinson was a really kind and gentle person who gave the impression that, having seen everything in his time at the P-T, nothing would ever surprise or alarm or even overly concern him ever again.
He also had a signature line (I don't think Shelton did): "All will be well," (even though we had our suspicions it would not), and he would use it frequently in passing, or if you stopped by his desk.
Shelton and Levinson--two stand-up guys who probably forgot more about Long Beach and newspapering than we'll ever know. Newsrooms were once full of people just like them.
Then as now, though, much of Wielenga's angst was justified. I was at Long Beach for close to 10 years and never felt as if I was working at a real newspaper. Something in the way Rich Archbold conducted business made you uncomfortable, primarily because it seemed he valued rubbing elbows with the Long Beach muckety-mucks more than he valued providing credible journalism about them. He seemed so enamored with longtime Mayor Beverly O'Neill that it made you wonder if he regretted not meeting her 40 years earlier so he could have married her. I'm only half-kidding when I say that.
To paraphrase Clint Eastwood, Rich Archbold seemed to be a man who knew his limitations. Once a reporter of note in the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, he was unable to rise to the capabilities demanded of a big city newspaper editor, so he didn't even try.
Instead, he convinced himself that Long Beach was a small town with a big population and therefore pursued small-town journalism. He was aided in his quest for mediocrity by a knack of surrounding himself with people who, for a variety of reasons, tended not to challenge his approach.
Thus emboldened, it often made him -- and some members of his posse -- a bit supercilious, with the results often just silly.
It's possible that the Press-Telegram was a victim of market conditions more than anything else, but it would have been nice to find out how things would have gone with more dynamic leadership than Archbold and a list of Knight-Ridder farmhands
Someone once said to me during the P-T that the paper was run like they were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but there are two differences:
1-The Titanic sank quickly after plowing into an iceberg at full-steam. The Press-Telegram sank slowly, a droll, rudderless vessel flowing half-speed, neither her nor there, bereft of direction.
2-The captain of the Titanic went down with the ship. Capt. Archbold, who would have made a million clams on the "Survivor" TV series, is still treading water.
We used to joke at the P-T that Archbold was able to stay at the helm because he had some compromising photos of one (or more) of the Ridder family.
But considering he still is around after a decade with the Singleton company, one must conclude that he has compromising photos of Dean Singleton and the Ridders together. There can be no other explanation.
As lame as it was to write about Wrigley Field when the paper is essentially folding (and boy, was it lame), isn't it being a little naive to think most newspaper columnists would risk their job to mount an assault on how bad the paper has become?
Perhaps Hennessy was journalistically fiddling while Rome burned, but how many people do we know that are so ideologically pure that they would write about the decline in the quality of their paper when they knew it would be the end of their job? And yes, I think he would have lost his job if he did that.
Could it be that he just decided to continue writing the types of columns that had made him popular in the first place? Maybe he didn't think he was big enough of a deal to turn the tide, anyway.
It may seem improbable to people like you and me that he couldn't see it, but maybe he didn't think the paper had fallen that much. Even if he did, I ask again, isn't it at least understandable that someone would decide not to tell there employer how much the product sucks?
I think, therefore, that this quote from you about Hennessy is a tad unfair:
"I alleged that this cowardice was a conscious decision made so that, like Archbold, he could stay in the good graces of his ruthless corporate bosses."
I think classifying Hennessy as a coward is overstating the case, a projection onto Hennessy, if you will, of someone else's view of what should be done.
Bottom line, Hennessy is/was a worker bee at the Press-Telegram. The person more responsible for any drivel coming out of it, past, present and, it seems, future, would be Rich Archbold. He's the guy who helped set the tone over the years way more than Hennessy.
If they wanted hard-hitting columns and an ombudsman approach about the quality of the P-T from Hennessy, Archbold could have set that tone as well. Hennessy probably would have done it, too, especially if Hennessy is/was the toady that you suggest.
I suggest the odds are at least even that Archbold told/asked Hennessy to write that Wrigley column. Sycophantic or not, it might have come down to the fact Hennessy likes a paycheck.
I ask you this: would you let one of your columnists write bad things about the quality of your own publication? Maybe you would, but most publishers or editors wouldn't, double-standard or not.
I completely agree with most of your assessment of the P-T's demise, but using Hennessy as a poster boy is decrying the symptom and not the disease.
No one has been a bigger blight on the face of the paper than Doug "I will drop your name, if you buy me a drink" Kirkorian....
His rambling manifestos of crap that at times take up more column inches than he is tall has been all but forced upon people because he is Rich's friend... Not because it's a good thing to write, or timely, or anything a columnist should be...
He recycles columns, every few months we get the Lasorda column, the Misty May Column, the Anti-gambling one, the bananas Bob Foster one.... The I don't care about football/basketball/baseball any sport columns while vacationing for months at a time in Europe while all his co-workers scramble to keep their jobs....
Don't just spit the venom at Rich and Tom, Doug deserves it just as much...
I've been making that prayer for a while now. The thing people don't hear about is that the PT is more than profitable. If you knew how much cash Singleton has wrung out of that purchase, only to destroy the paper later, you would have to conclude that journalism was never his goal in the first place. Newspapers just happen to be a troubled industry where assets are undervalued, so investors can pick up properties on the cheap and gut them for piecemeal sale later. He's a corporate raider, pure and simple, and the fact that AP decided to honor him as a journalist underscores just how crazy this industry has gotten.
One final point: Am I Swaim Daddy? Or does this refer to my father?
The short answer to your question is simply no--this doesn't happen. The longer answer is a question: What in the hell would make you think it has happened?