Daily Archives: July 22, 2008

Post & Courier offers buyouts to employees

The Post & Courier is offering to buy out their employees to help cut back salaries without layoffs. This scares me. We need newsrooms; despite the rise of citizen journalism, there is still an important place for the trained, professional newsgatherers who hunt the stories, who have the access and the discretion necessary to advance a story objectively. Newsrooms still drive the agenda in the country. The blogosphere gives us an unprecedented opportunity to provide a check and balance against an increasingly corporate media, but the blogosphere still largely thrives on the newsrooms. Newspapers need to stop focusing on the medium and start focusing on the message; becoming platform-agnostic is the only way newsrooms will survive, and it’s frightening how many publications simply do not get this.

A scorcher in store

Charleston’s got another scorcher in store for today, with a heat advisory in effect once again from noon until 9 PM for heat indices over 105 degrees. With such heat and humidity, thunderstorms are a distinct possibility, much in the way they fired up over Charleston yesterday. Keep an eye to the skies — preferably from indoors or in the shade with lemonade if you must be outside — it’s going to be a typical July day in Charleston.