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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

What matters

With the announcement of a new newspaper owner coming to town, a post I did back in March still seems pertinent:

So whenever the new owner of The News-Sentinel and Fort Wayne Newspapers is known, we should understand that its directors and shareholders are going to worry about things like corporate redundancies and cost synergies. But we -- print journalists and newspaper readers alike -- need to focus on what matters to this particular place in this particular time.

Fort Wayne needs to be taken apart periodically and put back together by people who have a passion for what they are doing and a love for the reason they're doing it. I know a newspaper can do that. Or at least it once could. If a newspaper doesn't, I don't know what other institution is ready to step up.

As I said in yesterday's post, I don't know much about Ogden Newspapers yet (but I'm sure we're going to be flooded with everything good and bad that is knowable about the group in the next few weeks). For now, I'm glad we're no longer an orphan and that we were bought by a newspaper company instead of a widget maker looking to diversify. The last paper I worked for was publsihed by a family-owned group like Ogden, and there was good and bad in that. There tends to be less corporate gobbledygook, but you can also be the prisoner of your owners' eccentricities.

An interesting aside, to me at any rate, is that in addition to its newspapers, Ogden also publishes both the Mother Earth News and Grit. Now, Mother Earth News is not something I'm likely to peruse -- it's slogan is something like "the original magazine of sensible living," after all. But Grit is something else again. I've written before about coming full circle; delivering The News-Sentinel at age 12 was the first job I did for money in this city. When I was growing up in rural Kentucky, Grit was my first introduction to the world outside our town. I guess it's technically a magazine, but I thought of it as a newspaper.

Posted in: Our town
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