Cranbury Press Demise

[Weekly Reader]

The Cranbury Press, some time ago should have been renamed the Jamesburg-Monroe Press. Yesterday's front page, with a stale story on Ravi, and uninteresting stories on places other than Cranbury are examples of the lack of Cranbury coverage in the past months.
The Cranbury snub went even further with Ms Sedor's announcement that "Around Cranbury" was dead as of that issue. That was one of the few itsms worth reading in the shrinking weeky.
Editors have been changed at the rate of the diapers of a newborn babe. One editor is worse than the other. At least Hank, John and some before them were sensitive to Cranbury's needs and interests.
The next logical misstep would be the elimination of the traditional Retro columns. That move would sever the Cranbury connection completely.
May the more than century-old Cranbury Press rest in peace.
Subscribers beware!

[ouch]

The loss of Lorraine's column is a real blow to the town. I wonder if the paper chose not to replace her or if the could not find anyone willing to do the column?

Lorraine has done a wonderful job over the years and will be missed. Her kids are out of school now and she probably has other things she would like to do. I enjoyed her column immensely.

[LOL]

Saying Hank was "sensitive to Cranbury's needs and interests" is laughable. Just search this forum for previous posts on him. There are numerous posts from people canceling their subscriptions specifically because he was so insensitive to Cranbury. He never personally covered local news and his only personal interest or contribution was a weekly political editorial where he regularly argued against the interests of Cranbury's very existence, arguing in favor of consolidating small towns like Cranbury with larger ones and consolidating smaller school districts like ours. How exactly is that "sensitive to Cranbury's interests"?

What happening has nothing to do with Hank or the previous editors leaving and have been happening gradually for years. It is a larger issue of these tiny local papers barely scraping by and their parent organizations doing whatever they can to consolidate editions to minimize costs and maximize advertising range. The churn will remain high because the pay is extremely low and any talented reporter would quickly move on to larger opportunities, while bad ones would eventually decide there are better jobs.

How much coverage is Cranbury or not varies wildly from week-to-week. Some week's the cover is all Cranbury. Also, while it was nice to have a local column it was usually a cut-and-paste of the word-for-word press releases put out by the local orgs covered. Sometimes the exact same press release was printed twice in the same editions, once as a news story and once as part of the column.

[Dude]