David Zeeck is leaving The News Tribune next month after 24 years at the paper, the last 10 as publisher. The McClatchy Co., which owns The News Tribune, made the announcement Tuesday. Zeeck also serves as publisher of The Olympian and The Bellingham Herald and oversees the daily print and digital business operations of the community weeklies in Gig Harbor and Puyallup.
Now, the second part of the story…For the major market of Tacoma-Seattle, the McClatchy company chooses to replace David Zeeck with Rebecca Poynter, from the Idaho Statesman. Poynter is vice president of local sales for McClatchy’s West Region.
I love the corporate double-talk and buzzwords she spews in such typical corporate climber fashion, “I’m looking forward to building on the solid foundation David Zeeck leaves in Washington,” she said in the release. “With this move, we have an opportunity to better connect our properties in the Northwest. These are vibrant, expanding markets served by talented teams of journalists and salespeople. “Maximizing our resources across the Northwest will allow us to better serve these communities, and to grow local journalism and local businesses together.”
Let me translate that: MORE LAYOFFS ARE COMING. How do you GROW local journalism and local business together? Would you slice a piece off local business and graft it onto local journalism, and watch it grow? Maybe she is talking about monetizing the dying newspaper business McClatchy has in the Northwest. Somehow getting local advertisers to buy space in the paper or online seems to be an impossible task for the Tribune sales team. The Tribune lost the bulk of their local advertisers many years ago. I believe this coincided with the Tribune discontinuing all of the fun features one looked for in a newspaper, like COMICS, CLASSIFIED ADS, TV listings with descriptions instead of an ugly grid, reasons one might buy a paper other than for yesterday’s news.
Radio and newspaper careers are a precarious path to take these days.
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