Sad State
posted by LW, Tuesday, January 12, 2010
It's no revelation that these are tough times for the newspaper business.
Staffs have been shrinking for years. More recently, papers in some of our country's major cities have closed up shop.
Closer to home, the sad state of affairs in newspapers has certainly been apparent in our beloved Palmetto State for some time. But the rather mundane occurrences of cutbacks and the like did not make yesterday's bombshell from Columbia any less jolting or easier to take.
The State newspaper has opted to ditch the Clemson beat, no longer covering the Tigers' day-to-day happenings with one of its staffers.
This news hits close to home on a personal level because Clemson's beat guy of the last four years, Paul Strelow, is a close friend. I've known him for the better part of a decade, and my family has gotten to know his family. So the chief concern at the moment is hoping and praying that a friend is able to land on his feet and support his family in these perilous economic times.
On a professional level, this is truly grim news for an industry I chose to leave in the fall of 2008. In lieu of paying someone to live in the Clemson area and be on top of all the Tigers' sports news, The State will now rely on the Greenville News for its Clemson coverage.
It's similar to the Greenville News' decision a few years back to eliminate its reporter who lived in Columbia and covered the Gamecocks. Now, it's common for The News to use The State's Gamecocks coverage.
Once upon a time not long ago, The State and the Greenville News considered themselves staunch adversaries. Now they're joining forces in hopes of keeping their sinking ships afloat.
The number of people who actually pay for newspapers is rapidly dwindling, and that's one of the reasons newspapers find themselves a flimsy shell of what they once were. (The other major factor, as has been discussed on this blog, is newspapers' self-impaling practice of offering their content for free online for more than a decade.)
But what kind of message is The State sending to its subscribers who happen to be Clemson fans? You can only assume the paper's circulation will simply dwindle further as a result of this move.
Maybe it makes good business sense for The State to devote all its resources to covering the hometown Gamecocks. You can certainly see how that could be the paper's cash cow, and you can see how that falls in line with the paper's recent philosophical move away from covering stuff that happens outside of Columbia.
But if you're an executive or an editor at The State, I don't see how you can look a Clemson fan in the eye and tell him or her, with a straight face, that The State is the place to go for coverage of the Tigers.
Not anymore. Not even close.
Moving on...
Ron Morris apparently still has a job, and today he tells us why it's time for the Palmetto State to stage a bowl game.
I just don't buy the idea -- we need fewer bowls, not more -- nor the premise behind it.
Ron suggests that a bowl in Columbia would be an ideal vehicle to reduce or eliminate negative perceptions people have had about this state for, oh, forever.
It would be the perfect chance for South Carolina to show the nation it is ready to move away from its sordid past and push forward in progressive ways.
I'm all for folks across the country learning that South Carolina is actually a pretty cool place, but is it not a wildly idealistic notion to think promotional efforts in conjunction with a third-rate bowl game are going to make people across the country realize they had us all wrong?
I watched the Papajohn's.com Bowl from beginning to end, and my view of Alabama is about the same as it was before the game.
Same with the Independence Bowl and Shreveport.
I grew up in Columbia and happen to like the city, but let's be honest ... what the heck is there to do in Columbia in December? The fact that the zoo is the first thing that entered my mind serves as a pretty damning indictment.
Morris closes his column with an idea that is, uh ... how to say it ... a bit grandiose.
There is one major hitch to bringing the Palmetto Bowl to town. The Confederate flag. The flap over it would prevent a game from being played here.
Nevertheless, a bowl game could provide a grand opportunity. It would be the perfect chance for South Carolina to show the nation it is ready to move away from its sordid past and push forward in progressive ways.
At halftime of the first Palmetto Bowl, state officials could officially remove the flag from the Statehouse grounds, ceremoniously place it in a glass-enclosed case at midfield at Williams-Brice Stadium and permanently retire it to a state museum.
Everyone would come away a winner.
Travis Sawchik of The Post and Courier says don't overlook Georgia Tech this season in his ACC basketball notes.
In the Greenville News, Clemson gears up for tomorrow's visit from North Carolina.
More bad news for Georgia Tech football (in addition to Demaryius Thomas leaving early): Dwyer, Morgan and Burnett are gone to the NFL, too.
More on that here.
In the ACC Sports Journal, Barry Jacobs gives a comprehensive look at what has ailed the inexperienced Tar Heels this season.
The problem areas the coach identified in the fall – guard play and 3-point shooting – remain vexacious. UNC made one of 21 attempts from 3-point range over a span of more than 77 minutes against Charleston and Virginia Tech before Will Graves connected with 7:49 to go against the Hokies.
In compiling a 12-4 record – all the losses came on the road — the Heels have struggled against zones. While they are surprisingly accurate from 3-point range (37.9 percent), only 17 percent of their points come from beyond the arc. That compares unfavorably with an average of 23 percent over Williams’ first six seasons.
Overall execution has been inexact, decision-making suspect. A former ACC coach marveled at the Heels’ lack of basketball smarts. Commenting on freshman Dexter Strickland’s decision to drive for a layup (he missed) rather than attempt a tying 3-pointer as time expired against College of Charleston, he said, “It was like they didn’t know the difference between three and two.”
Guard play has been erratic. Revealingly, Carolina has committed more turnovers than its opponents this season. That only happened under Williams in 2006, when the program was similarly rebuilding in the wake of a title and massive roster upheaval.
Ken Tysiac of The Charlotte Observer says the ACC is wide open this year.
Duke is more experienced than the Tar Heels and might have a slight edge as the best team in the ACC. But the conference race is much more wide open than it has been in the past two seasons, when North Carolina was the preseason national No. 1 in The Associated Press poll on the way to two straight Final Fours, with an NCAA title in 2009.
"I think it's a little more wide open because there isn't that one team that has a lot of returning veteran players," Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt said Monday. "Duke has some veteran players, but obviously from a depth standpoint, they have their issues there. But everybody's got an issue or a flaw."
And in the Orlando Sentinel, Jimbo Fisher says he wants more lightweights on Florida State's non-conference schedule.
LW
Click here for the "Eye On The Tigers" blog archive.
Link to this entry - Discuss this entry - Return to Blog Home
It's no revelation that these are tough times for the newspaper business.
Staffs have been shrinking for years. More recently, papers in some of our country's major cities have closed up shop.
Closer to home, the sad state of affairs in newspapers has certainly been apparent in our beloved Palmetto State for some time. But the rather mundane occurrences of cutbacks and the like did not make yesterday's bombshell from Columbia any less jolting or easier to take.
The State newspaper has opted to ditch the Clemson beat, no longer covering the Tigers' day-to-day happenings with one of its staffers.
This news hits close to home on a personal level because Clemson's beat guy of the last four years, Paul Strelow, is a close friend. I've known him for the better part of a decade, and my family has gotten to know his family. So the chief concern at the moment is hoping and praying that a friend is able to land on his feet and support his family in these perilous economic times.
On a professional level, this is truly grim news for an industry I chose to leave in the fall of 2008. In lieu of paying someone to live in the Clemson area and be on top of all the Tigers' sports news, The State will now rely on the Greenville News for its Clemson coverage.
It's similar to the Greenville News' decision a few years back to eliminate its reporter who lived in Columbia and covered the Gamecocks. Now, it's common for The News to use The State's Gamecocks coverage.
Once upon a time not long ago, The State and the Greenville News considered themselves staunch adversaries. Now they're joining forces in hopes of keeping their sinking ships afloat.
The number of people who actually pay for newspapers is rapidly dwindling, and that's one of the reasons newspapers find themselves a flimsy shell of what they once were. (The other major factor, as has been discussed on this blog, is newspapers' self-impaling practice of offering their content for free online for more than a decade.)
But what kind of message is The State sending to its subscribers who happen to be Clemson fans? You can only assume the paper's circulation will simply dwindle further as a result of this move.
Maybe it makes good business sense for The State to devote all its resources to covering the hometown Gamecocks. You can certainly see how that could be the paper's cash cow, and you can see how that falls in line with the paper's recent philosophical move away from covering stuff that happens outside of Columbia.
But if you're an executive or an editor at The State, I don't see how you can look a Clemson fan in the eye and tell him or her, with a straight face, that The State is the place to go for coverage of the Tigers.
Not anymore. Not even close.
Moving on...
Ron Morris apparently still has a job, and today he tells us why it's time for the Palmetto State to stage a bowl game.
I just don't buy the idea -- we need fewer bowls, not more -- nor the premise behind it.
Ron suggests that a bowl in Columbia would be an ideal vehicle to reduce or eliminate negative perceptions people have had about this state for, oh, forever.
It would be the perfect chance for South Carolina to show the nation it is ready to move away from its sordid past and push forward in progressive ways.
I'm all for folks across the country learning that South Carolina is actually a pretty cool place, but is it not a wildly idealistic notion to think promotional efforts in conjunction with a third-rate bowl game are going to make people across the country realize they had us all wrong?
I watched the Papajohn's.com Bowl from beginning to end, and my view of Alabama is about the same as it was before the game.
Same with the Independence Bowl and Shreveport.
I grew up in Columbia and happen to like the city, but let's be honest ... what the heck is there to do in Columbia in December? The fact that the zoo is the first thing that entered my mind serves as a pretty damning indictment.
Morris closes his column with an idea that is, uh ... how to say it ... a bit grandiose.
There is one major hitch to bringing the Palmetto Bowl to town. The Confederate flag. The flap over it would prevent a game from being played here.
Nevertheless, a bowl game could provide a grand opportunity. It would be the perfect chance for South Carolina to show the nation it is ready to move away from its sordid past and push forward in progressive ways.
At halftime of the first Palmetto Bowl, state officials could officially remove the flag from the Statehouse grounds, ceremoniously place it in a glass-enclosed case at midfield at Williams-Brice Stadium and permanently retire it to a state museum.
Everyone would come away a winner.
Travis Sawchik of The Post and Courier says don't overlook Georgia Tech this season in his ACC basketball notes.
In the Greenville News, Clemson gears up for tomorrow's visit from North Carolina.
More bad news for Georgia Tech football (in addition to Demaryius Thomas leaving early): Dwyer, Morgan and Burnett are gone to the NFL, too.
More on that here.
In the ACC Sports Journal, Barry Jacobs gives a comprehensive look at what has ailed the inexperienced Tar Heels this season.
The problem areas the coach identified in the fall – guard play and 3-point shooting – remain vexacious. UNC made one of 21 attempts from 3-point range over a span of more than 77 minutes against Charleston and Virginia Tech before Will Graves connected with 7:49 to go against the Hokies.
In compiling a 12-4 record – all the losses came on the road — the Heels have struggled against zones. While they are surprisingly accurate from 3-point range (37.9 percent), only 17 percent of their points come from beyond the arc. That compares unfavorably with an average of 23 percent over Williams’ first six seasons.
Overall execution has been inexact, decision-making suspect. A former ACC coach marveled at the Heels’ lack of basketball smarts. Commenting on freshman Dexter Strickland’s decision to drive for a layup (he missed) rather than attempt a tying 3-pointer as time expired against College of Charleston, he said, “It was like they didn’t know the difference between three and two.”
Guard play has been erratic. Revealingly, Carolina has committed more turnovers than its opponents this season. That only happened under Williams in 2006, when the program was similarly rebuilding in the wake of a title and massive roster upheaval.
Ken Tysiac of The Charlotte Observer says the ACC is wide open this year.
Duke is more experienced than the Tar Heels and might have a slight edge as the best team in the ACC. But the conference race is much more wide open than it has been in the past two seasons, when North Carolina was the preseason national No. 1 in The Associated Press poll on the way to two straight Final Fours, with an NCAA title in 2009.
"I think it's a little more wide open because there isn't that one team that has a lot of returning veteran players," Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt said Monday. "Duke has some veteran players, but obviously from a depth standpoint, they have their issues there. But everybody's got an issue or a flaw."
And in the Orlando Sentinel, Jimbo Fisher says he wants more lightweights on Florida State's non-conference schedule.
LW
Click here for the "Eye On The Tigers" blog archive.
Link to this entry - Discuss this entry - Return to Blog Home
Donnie Patterson. Donnie Patterson is the founder of Patterson Tax Service, located in Easley, S.C. He has been active in tax preparation since 1970, and offers a full range of tax and bookkeeping services.
Larry Williams. Larry has covered the daily beat at Clemson since 2004. Williams, who worked for the Charleston Post & Courier from 2004-08, joined Tigerillustrated.com in November of 2008. He may be reached by email at ldubya08(at)gmail.com. Replace (at) with @.