It’s good to see so many refugees’ names in the paper regularly. Just today there are local news briefs by Dave Drury and Loretta Waldman, and Larry Smith have been doing regular work as well. (I’m not including Theresa Barger, who has her own freelance gig in high gear.)
The bad part is that there is not enough full-time work in journalism to go around, even for talented pros.
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And as a good mom, I must point out that Jeff wrote today’s Red Sox story, top of the page on the Sports cover.
I call us former staffers/current freelancers “the Shadow Courant.”
The paper and its readership benefit enormously from the skills and experience of Dave, Loretta, Larry and the others.
Of course, the paper dumped them as full time employees and now throws them chicken-feed freelance payments instead. The Courant leadership doesn’t deserve too much credit for doing that.
denis
Maybe The Shadow Courant should start its own newspaper.
Maybe if we did, Pam Mitchell would come back and join us. I see on Facebook that her job with Village Voice Media was eliminated yesterday.
I hate that word, it’s so bloodless.
FYI,
Another shadow: I’m been filling in as an origination editor on the state/city desk when others are on vacation. I’ll be back at the Courant tomorrow and Friday.
What does it say about the new regime’s respect for the role of copy editor that it doesn’t believe the paper EVER needs free-lancers to fill in for absent copy editors? On the features desk, they’re down to one editor on some days, rimming and slotting the same stories.
Cutting back on copy editors is a false economy. The other day, I was talking to a woman who was so upset by the number of errors in the paper that she called to drop her subscription. The final straw was not being able to locate the jump of a story.
Incidentally, to keep her, the Courant offered her two years for something like $89. I don’t remember the exact amount, but it was in that ballpark. The only catch, if you can call it that, was that she had to pay in advance. She was wondering — and I’m wondering, too — whether the Courant is actually losing money on a deal like that, unless it’s all about keeping up the circulation numbers to pull in advertising.
This, by the way, was not the first time I’d heard this complaint about the Courant. I’ve gotten an earful more than once. The people in Chicago might not think readers care about this sort of thing, but they surely do.
… i agree with paul … there are enough courant alumni out there to put out a pretty good local paper, at least online …