So weird (but welcome) to see the ugly mundane details of the journalism industry on HN. I used to work at a McClatchy paper long ago but I have trouble musteri

So weird (but welcome) to see the ugly mundane details of the journalism industry on HN. I used to work at a McClatchy paper long ago but I have trouble mustering outrage about its CEO because the excesses of other companies seem far more egregious. The Tribune Company/Tronc (which owned the Chicago Trib, the LAT until recently, and the Baltimore Sun, which caused David Simon to ragequit journalism) was by far the most scandalous IMO [A]. The previous McClatchy CEO (who was there when I was there) made several million a year, despite being the CEO responsible for making the deals that absolutely eviscerated McClatchy with debt [0]. The standard line is that without good pay packages, a news company would have no chance of attracting competent executives to helm the sinking ship. But what was most frustrating to me at the time was the inescapable cynical belief that not only would the CEOs fail to right the ship, but that they had no real skin in the game and would just move on to the next high-paying job once the time was right. The fantasy that a news CEO would sacrifice his salary to save some vital newsroom jobs, or fund a company-saving initiative, and join us in the trenches and fight till the bitter end to save the company or at least go down with the ship was never even a remotely believable fantasy. Equally frustrating is there is also no possibility that the company could be saved by hardworking diligent faithful employees. The investigative stories of journalistic lore are virtually always loss-leaders. In recent years, winners of the Pulitzer had already left for other industries by the time they got their medals. Roger Ebert’s brand and special site would not have been enough to save the Sun-Times (even if he hadn’t died). Adrian Holovaty created Django while working at the Lawrence Journal World; Django is the backbone for tech companies as big as Instagram, but the LJW switched last year to WordPress [2], having lost the resources to innovate on or maintain its Django backend. [A] https://splinternews.com/tronc-executives-rewarded-for-incompetence-and-miscondu-1825051977 https://splinternews.com/tronc-executives-rewarded-for-incom... [0] https://archives.cjr.org/the_audit/the_aps_weak_coverage_of_its_n.php https://archives.cjr.org/the_audit/the_aps_weak_coverage_of_... [1] https://apnews.com/dc312a7e503f4b7bb61a62013fea852d https://apnews.com/dc312a7e503f4b7bb61a62013fea852d [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/8v0fpb/the_lawrence_journalworld_where_django_was/ https://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/8v0fpb/the_lawrence...