by William Skink
The Missoula Independent has been bought out by the corporate media beast, Lee Enterprises. After turning Montana dailies into shit by firing, consolidating and regionalizing content, Lee has turned its corporate crosshairs on Missoula’s weekly alternative rag.
Will the Indy now bring us important, cutting edge stories like this one about how the Air Force is struggling to remove a Humvee stuck on a muddy road in Montana? We can only hope.
Selling the Indy to the corporate raiders at Lee is just one more sad sign of what Missoula is becoming. But don’t worry, Indy journalists, your new corporate bosses will let you keep your jobs, for now.
I guess when it comes to reporting on things like bonuses for the Lee executives responsible for degrading our media landscape we’ll have to rely on online startups like Missoula Current.
JC
At least the GFT is reporting on this mess. http://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/local/2017/04/03/wind-farm-tax-feud-leads-financial-crisis-toole-county/100006968/
Thought I’d dust this off and update it a bit.
https://reptiledysfunction.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/not-free-thinking.jpg
The interview with Matt Gibson on MTPR really sucked. When he says that he isn’t concerned about what the Missoulian might do in the future, or taking editorial control, I knew it was going to be a big problem. Gibson just cashed in his retirement fund, and I’d give the Indy maybe a year till the Missoulian kills it by either bringing it in house and turning it into a weekly insert for the Missoulian, or just outright killing it. Of course, the turf is ripe for another group of folks to come in and start up some good competition!
http://mtpr.org/post/did-missoula-just-get-little-less-weird
Anybody notice how Missoulian went from four carefully chosen lifts from newspapers like LA Times/week, to two lifts per month. Everything else lifted from AP. Operation dull edge!
Lügenpresse
Ed Kemmick at Last Best News has a great read about the Indy emasculation today and lots of links and quotes from others:
Kidston’s article at the Missoula Current about the Indy purchase raised an interesting point:
“Advertising challenges.” Uh-huh! Indy’s advertising challenges are something I know about. My partner’s business has had a yearly advertising contract with the Indy until this year. Over the 4 years we did business with the Indy, it had many challenges. Those challenges included advertising reps that continually made huge mistakes like printing the wrong ads, forgetting to print an ad, not doing callbacks when messages were left, charging the wrong amounts.
Basically, the advertising crew at the Indy were inept, or poorly managed. I’m sure that will change when Lee takes over. The whole advertising business will move in house at the Missoulian to “improve efficiency.” Otherwise, the milking of the Indy for ad dollars will fail. Or maybe the plan is to let the advertising routine at the Indy fail so bad that the paper is nuked.
But the final straw came this winter. When it came time to renew the contract, we had heard that the Indy’s rep that we had worked with had left the company. So we waited for the new rep to take over the portfolio and get ahold of us. But no call ever came. And our ads quit running the week after the contract expired. And we had had enough of the incompetence at the Indy and decided to spend our advertising dollars elsewhere. We were a small contract — weekly ads in the small-mid range size, not high dollar placement. But that smallness to the the Indy was not small to us. It was an essential position for us that we reluctantly gave up.
And it was several thousand dollars a year that the Indy left laying on the table. Sheer incompetence. No wonder Matt Gibson was in a hurry to cash in his retirement fund.
Look on the bright side. George Ochenski’s columns may appear in the Indy again. Of course, that would be ironic considering that very short term editor Robert Meyerowitz “forced out” Ochenski back in 2012, and a few days later Ochenski was picked up by the Missoulian.
http://mtlowdown.blogspot.com/2012/06/found-ochenski-hes-at-missoulian.html
I think the stink we made when that happened may be one reason the Indy chose to ignore this blog’s persistence after Jay Stevens ran us out of 4&20 Blackbirds.