By Jim Hagarty
2016
I used to be the editor of a community newspaper in my small city in Canada. It was the second “weekly” I had been editor of. (Newspaper owners started calling their weeklies community papers to get away from the disparaging “weakly”.)
I had a fair amount of experience by the time I arrived at the last paper I would work for. Three years on a weekly, 13 years reporting and editing at a daily paper and six years teaching journalism at a local college.
The publisher at the newspaper had also been in newspapers his entire career and like me, loved the business. But whereas I came up through the news path, he came up through advertising. But he was a lover of newspapers and was knowledgeable about the editorial side of things as well. When he showed up at our office, he would stroll into the newsroom and comment on stories we had written, photo spreads we had done.
Eventually, however, he left and I was sorry to see him go. His replacement was a man who had started out delivering newspapers, a noble job if there ever was one. He worked hard at that and was eventually named circulation manager at his small weekly paper. In other words, he was the boss of all the newspaper deliverers.
The new publisher was ambitious and developed a knack for getting to know the right people and the right things to say to the right people. And one day, he was elevated to publisher of 12 small town papers including the one I worked at.
The years I worked for this man were not pleasant ones. He knew nothing about any of areas of newspapering other than circulation and he had no interest in learning. But he thought he knew. And that was worse than not knowing. He meddled where he shouldn’t have.
I worked for this publisher for several years and when I left the paper in 2008, I came away with the very strong feeling, though I couldn’t prove it, that he had never once read even one story that we published while he was in charge. He had no interest in our town and it showed. And no interest in his newspapers beyond the paycheques they provided him.
I checked the staff list printed on the editorial page of my old paper recently. My non-interested publisher is no longer there. No doubt he has moved on to greener pastures, impressing someone somewhere with his knowledge of how to deliver newspapers and still not reading them.
My old newspaper is still going, though it has moved a couple times and is now in a small space on the second floor of an old building. There isn’t much in the paper. I doubt it’s making money. But it has survived the leadership of a completely unqualified manager, so there is that.
My incompetent publisher reminds me of politicians and CEOs who have overachieved somehow and are in positions where they don’t belong. These people, male and female alike, are like the dog that finally caught the tire of the car it was chasing, then didn’t know what to do with it after the chase ended. Or why it was even chasing the car to begin with.
The thing about the dog that caught the tire on the moving car: It probably miscalculated and got its head run over.
Sometimes it’s not a bad thing to fail. Or to lose.
Or even to quit.
Let’s hope.
