Several years ago, Lex worked at the News & Record.
Unfortunately, the job lasted all of about ten seconds before someone put the kibosh on the idea of involving citizens in reporting just as Lex was about to get the ball rolling.
I don't know exactly what happened. I suspect that when they saw the kinds of stories the public wanted to pursue, upper management decided they did not want to share control of the agenda with the hoi polloi. Lex won't offer details other than to say he doesn't think he was treated poorly. Still, it seemed like pretty shoddy treatment from the outside and an opportunity missed by whoever the bonehead was that shut it down.
Lex carried on though, and his blog serves as an example of the kind of substance one wishes was in the newspaper anymore.
Thanks for the kind words, Roch.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, I had three additional assignments between leaving the citizen-journalism post and before leaving the paper: regional editor (my second time around in that job); then, after the first round of layoffs, general-assignment reporter, with a concentration on veterans' affairs, and finally health/medical reporter.
To this day I do not know for certain why I was reassigned from the C-J position, but on the basis of what I do know, I think the likeliest explanation is more prosaic than yours: The initiative had bumped up against the ceiling of what it could accomplish without significant additional resources, and the news operation needed the bodies.
"The initiative had bumped up against the ceiling of what it could accomplish without significant additional resources, and the news operation needed the bodies."
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense though considering that citizens would have supplemented the news operation, adding to it, not depleting it.
I'm talking about the entire initiative, not just the citizen reporting part of it. A lot of other things, technical, content, you name it, also went by the boards at that point.
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