Dave Rasdal announces he’s ramblin’ on: Your take
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Columnist Dave Rasdal, who started at The Gazette in 1979, announced in a column published Monday that he will be moving on in March.
“There’s a saying in newspapers: Once the ink gets in your blood, it’s there to stay,” Rasdal wrote. “But, sadly, the ink isn’t what it used to be.
“As computers hit the market some 40 years ago, experts predicted the impending death of newspapers. For a long time that seemed to have been greatly exaggerated.
“Today, you can read on your computer how newspapers have died, how they’ve cut back on staffing, how they must refocus.
“… In the past few years, some of my friends and co-workers have left for other pursuits, retired or had their jobs eliminated. Nine of them were let go last month.
“I too am leaving The Gazette, the newspaper business, behind. Sometime in March I will write my final Ramblin’ column. So, I will be here a while longer.
“For now, I have come to another fork in the road,” he concludes. “I know not where it leads.”
What do you think of Rasdal’s announcement?
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I regret to say that I can’t cite a single Rasdal column that has lodged in my memory. Maybe this is a sign of age-related forgetfulness; or maybe it is a sign that the separation is long past due. Good luck, Dave, in your new endeavors.
Can Hemmingsen, the current resident master of irrelevancy, be far away from getting her walking papers?
To continue the thread of “irrelevancy”, I have to ask the Gazette: why is the Grifter Bob video interview still showing up? In political terms that dinosaur has been well on his way to putrefaction since the first week in November.
I think he is correct in what he is saying, unfortunate as it is. News papers used to provide a functional part of our daily lives, they have decided to throw in the towel because the medium has changed. They have allowed their staffs to decline into poorly trained and badly monitored scribblers, and done away with reporters who used to get a story and work it until they had everything. Now we get the AP wire service and little else. There is no independent news anymore, it is all colored by the politics of the organization or who owns them and what axe do they have to grind. Nothing could make the oligarchs happier than to do away with real news and the people who can write and report without bias. Dave’s columns I have always appreciated, his leaving only makes the Gazette a little less of a paper, and there is darned little remaining as it is.
For a brief period of time, our two corridor newspapers—the Gazette and the Press Citizen—allowed readers to comment on articles, opinion pieces, letters, columns online. It was chaotic but it was also a great source of local news.
The Press Citizen moved to limit comments to subscribers; the Gazette restricted comments to a handful of pre-approved topics.
Newspapers are understaffed, staff is overworked and underpaid, coverage of local news disappointing. Reader input, with all its problems, did fill in a lot of gaps
There are still reliable sources of well researched national and international news. But local?