South suburban Dallas paper officially a flop

Not quite two years ago, Today Newspapers in suburban Dallas, my previous employer, officially folded.

Well, the ad manager there, combined with an area real estate person, thought they could start a new one on the cheap. They had grand ideas of how big an area they could cover on news and sports with one-person editorial coverage. They asked me to be their (part-time) editor to start, and, being unemployed, I agreed.

Well, they didn't ask me whether any of their business, editorial or circulation ideas agreed with reality. So, I blogged about that. And, in part because I said the old ad manager/new publisher was part of the problem behind the ideas that weren't tenable, she (and the real estate agent friend) fired me.

Well, if you're doing stories about Dallas, not the suburbs, and stealing them from U.S. News, you're not really relevant to your suburbs. When you officially sign the paper up to join CrazyGood, which combines a bit of Facebook, a whole lot of multi-level marketing, and a whole 10 percent payout to charity, as part of trying to create citizen journalists, you're not going to be that relevant. When you're doing this because you've yet to hire even a part-time editorial person after canning me, you're not a newspaper in any real sense of the term.

You're a PR sheet. Nothing else.

And, when your comments in private, versus in public, about City of Duncanville officials, among others, reach high levels of hypocrisy, you're not even a very honest PR sheet.

Of course, all of this reflects demographic and other issues that led me to also blog, two years ago, that south suburban Dallas wouldn't get a real newspaper for years to come.

Focus Daily News could be that paper. But it won't. The commitment to local news and local sports is still spotty. The print quality, photography and other things are ... horrible. But publisher Marlon Hansen is committed to having a daily paper there so he can make money off national ads, but not with the same amount of news coverage as the paper once had, at least at times -- a full decade ago.