BLOOMFIELD FREE PRESS - Is Greene County Big Enough for More Than One Newspaper?

SOMETIMES THE MEDICINE IS BITTER

Rather than continuing to flog a dead horse, I will only briefly touch on the other guys’ advertising staff’s actions which were at least unethical and more than likely restraint of trade.

Early on in our publishing adventure, the advertising staff of the other paper actually tried to cut deals with a number of local businesses, offering them huge discounts as long as they completely refused to advertise in the Bloomfield Free Press.

Fortunately, our local business men and women are smarter than that and saw through the sham.

Should I be surprised? Not really, considering this is the same staff that have used our copyrighted yard sale listings and map for the last two summers without our express written permission - just like they do our news items on a regular basis.

THE END IS NEAR (AT LEAST IT IS FOR THIS EDUCATIONAL POSTING)

Now that you have read through nearly 2,000 words explaining the current and past news war going on in Greene County, you might be scratching your head and wondering why is all of this information being presented, and what the underlying problems and solution could possibly be.

Well, I’ll lay it out very plainly and simply – I’ll even put it in bullet points so the corporate newspaper types can actually understand it.

It is obvious that the staff of the Linton (Missouri-based) newspaper are unprofessional at best and wouldn’t last a day in the real world of journalism.
It’s further obvious that publisher List has absolutely no control of any of his employees in the building on Linton’s South Main Street. This is either because he can’t control the group or simply doesn’t want to.
Schneider is running a newsroom into the ground because he and I could not get along more than a half-dozen years ago when I was running the Evening World in Bloomfield. When Schneider quit the Evening World, he did so over Memorial Day weekend, failing to cover any of the events he was scheduled to cover and leaving a four-word note in the newspaper’s mailbox. It said ‘You win, I quit.’ Professional, huh? Maybe that explains why the man has had no less than five different jobs with newspapers since 2001. (We won’t go into why he left at least two of those jobs.)

THE FINAL SOLUTION
So, here is the solution and my offer (which should have been done by the guys on the other side of the river a long time ago):

You ignore me and I’ll ignore you.
Quit the shenanigans and I’ll quit calling you on it.
Start acting somewhat like professional adults and I’ll stop blathering about the fact that you’re making all of us in the journalism profession look bad on a daily basis.
Quit lying, cheating and generally acting like someone whose mother didn’t raise them right.

List and I had this exact conversation about nine months ago at Good Tiems Restaurant on a Thursday afternoon, and he assured me that he would get control of Schneider, Pruett and the rest of 'staff' in Linton.

We see how well that worked. So, now, I leave it to you, the reading and intelligent public.

The bottom line is that Greene County is, in fact, big enough for more than one newspaper – as long as everyone acts like grown-ups instead of bratty children.

My promise to you is that we will continue to provide the most honest and accurate news in Eastern Greene County – because we actually look at this business as being about more than money, personal power and popularity.

R. Michael Johnson
Publisher
Bloomfield Free Press