Star's opinion editor departs

Ventura County Star opinion-page editor Marianne Ratcliff has decided to take a buyout from the paper. Former Star cartoonist Steve Greenberg reports:

Marianne is still fairly young, with two kids (ages 6 and 9), and her immediate focus will be to spend more time with them and with her husband Kevin, who’s had to take on more of the child-rearing duties given his wife’s unrelenting deadlines. Some suspect she left the Star over dismay at all the cuts in personnel, features, budgets and overall quality, but she declares she just needed a breather and more family time. She states, “I have no idea what I will do next” but expects to be connected with journalism in some way.

(found via fishbowlLA)

Layoffs at the Ventura County Star

The layoffs continue at the Ventura County Star. Sports columnist David Lassen got word Tuesday that he'd been fired - a month shy of his 25th anniversary with the paper. He's posted a two-part farewell to readers (links here and here). Here's an excerpt:

The meeting was brief, mostly because I was stunned. I was told the envelope contained the “involuntary separation plan,” information on filing for unemployment, and my final paycheck — two weeks’ pay en lieu of two weeks’ notice, plus settlement of outstanding vacation time. And details of the severance package — which could be worse, but could obviously be a whole lot better for someone cast out into a state with 10 percent unemployment, and a resume of work in a dying industry that dates to age 14. ...

I e-mailed the Lakers to cancel my seat request for Thursday’s game with Boston, one of four assignments that had already been on my schedule. The other three were high school playoff games — exactly the kind of thing that are supposed to be crucial to the “hyperlocal” strategy that is the buzzword of most newspapers, but that would no doubt go uncovered now, because there was one less person to cover them. ...

Newspaper layoffs aren’t really that big a deal any more, in the grand scheme of things. There’s not anyone in the business who hasn’t seen a friend downsized, or a face-of-the-paper veteran summarily dismissed, even though those are the kind of people that give papers their distinguishing features, make them unique in a corporatizing climate of sameness.

The County Star's sports and features editors reportedly received pink slips this week as well, and the entire copy desk and design department got laid off as the Scripps-owned paper prepares to outsource all news desk functions to a "universal copy desk" in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Former San Bernardino Sun sports writer Paul Oberjuerge penned a farewell to Lassen here.

Interstate copy editing

E.W. Scripps plans to consolidate the copy desks for its California and Washington newspapers and locate the centralized desk in Texas, according to former Ventura County Star cartoonist Steve Greenberg.

He writes:

The E.W. Scripps Company, publisher of my former employer, the Ventura County Star, has decided to “consolidate” the desk functions — including the page designers — of its three West Coast properties (the Star, the Redding Record Searchlight and the Kitsap Sun in Washington) into one department in… Corpus Christi, TX. Yup, Texas.

At least 15 copy editors and page designers (some people do both jobs) dealing with news, features, business and sports will see their positions eliminated, along with the news wire editor. Supposedly they can apply for jobs in Corpus Christi… but then, that means living in Corpus Christi.

-snip-

What does this mean to the newspapers? It means there won’t be local people to catch local place names, history or other regional idiosyncrasies that good local copy editors can catch, nor any real “institutional memory” of local people and institutions.

For example, the city of Ojai (pronounced OH-high) in Ventura County has a now-closed burger shack, the O-Hi Frostie. An out-of-town copy editor likely wouldn’t accept the deviant spelling of the latter to see print even though it would’ve been correct. Would they know that “Mandalay Bay” and “RiverPark” are part of Oxnard? Would they think the name “Oxnard” is too weird and maybe it should be “Oxford” instead?

As Greenberg notes, MediaNews Group pioneered the consolidated copy desk, having merged multiple news desks into one for its Southern California papers and one for its Northern California papers. The company has yet to cross state - or international - lines.

(Comment on Greenberg's post: "Is it true that the Ventura paper is changing its name to the Ventura County Lone Star?")

Bad judgment

A Ventura County Superior Court judge has issued an order to block the Ventura County Star from publishing details of a gruesome murder contained in a police search warrant. Judge Kevin Riley apparently refused to hear the paper's First Amendment arguments before handing down his decision. Said Star editor Joe Howry:

"Judge Riley's illegal order is a blatant violation of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled time and again that no branch of government, including the judiciary, has the right to prior restraint of the publication of information, except in extreme situations such as war. Further, Judge Riley issued this order in a closed hearing that did not allow The Star any opportunity to present its case, nor did he recognize the fact that the information was already made public by another media. We will fight this illegal action vigorously."

Earlier, Judge Riley took the unusual step of sealing portions of the warrant and its supporting affidavits at the request of attorneys in the case. An appellate court overturned his decision at the Star's request.

(via LA Observed)

Ventura County Star cuts*, **

The Ventura County Star, owned by E.W. Scripps Co., will lay off 17 newsroom employees - equal to about 20 percent of the editorial staff. This appears to be a Scripps-wide trend, according to TJ Sullivan at Native Intelligence.

*Sullivan updates his post from earlier today... and "will lay off" now becomes "laid off".

**Reuters on the cuts, Scripps-wide.