John North Editor & Publisher

The Asheville Citizen-Times
c/o President & Publisher
14 O. Henry Street
Asheville, N.C. 28801

Dear Randy Hammer:

This is to express my extreme disappointment with your decision to put real news back on the front page of the Citizen-Times. Who do you think you are?

As a small — but determined — print competitor, I was truly flummoxed when I read the headline, “We’re changing the newspaper back to the way it was,” in the Jan. 14 edition of your paper.

Your flipflop really frosted my coffee on that cold and dreary Monday morning.

In your front-page column to the readers, you alleged that the AC-T’s hyper-local emphasis — which was unveiled barely a year ago — “wasn’t the idea of former publishers Jeff Green (again, whatever happened to him?) and Virgil Smith (kicked upstairs, I guess), or Executive Editor Susan Ihne (still hanging on by her fingernails). Lots of newspapers made similar changes because of research and focus groups.”

So, are you saying, Mr. Hammer, that nobody will fall on the proverbial sword for this hare-brained decision? Or, are you saying, nobody in your corporate hierarchy even made the decision, implying that it could be chalked off to errant researchers misled by a bunch of hapless hayseeds in your focus groups?

“Can you say Classic Coke?” you ask in your column.

Your flippant question strikes me as yet another exercise in eluding responsibility and diffusing blame. Can you say classic corporate cowardice?

You’re a Hammer, Randy — why don’t you nail someone?

And are you comparing the illustrious AC-T over the last year to the insipid New Coke?

As insiders in the newspaper industry know, your parent corporation, Gannett Company Inc., has a reputation for look-alike papers and for pandering to readers’ most narcissistic tastes.

But, Mr. Hammer, I’ll bravely take responsibility for this latest change. It’s clearly in response to my last (and first) open letter to you in this column, sarcastically headlined, “Asheville demands more fluff.”

Obviously, I hit a sensitive spot with the AC-T muckety-mucks gathered around the boardroom table, who had a hard time defending a chirpy “your news,” “it’s all about you” approach. The AC-T was so locally oriented, people in this supposed “Paris of the South” began to assume there was no world outside Asheville and Buncombe County.

Now, we actually can read at least a smattering of the most important world, national, state and local news on your front page. Imagine that, in a daily newspaper serving a cosmopolitan city of smarter-than-average people! (Of course, the AC-T has retained its “Your News” section, so as to continue to cater to those who like to see flattering pictures and stories by and about themselves.)

And we hope, for the sake of your news staff, that you haven’t been hired to do to the AC-T what’s being done to the Los Angeles Times. Since just over a year ago, a succession of new corporate owners has fired more publishers and editors at that leading American paper than Nixon fired Watergate prosecutors.

The suits summarily canned these respected professional journalists when each in turn refused to execute their orders to cut millions of dollars from the paper’s budget by firing reporters. The new owners have been attempting to wring profits from their buyouts at the expense of the Times’ world-famous news coverage.  

No doubt they, too, like your predecessor, are using research and focus groups to justify replacing hard news with infotainment. I don’t know what Hollywood game show the media moguls recruit their research subjects from — but it’s clearly not from the ranks of everyday folks who read and need serious news.

And I’m still not convinced that some high-ranking cynic at the AC-T doesn’t ultimately think the newspaper should be an exercise in appealing to the narcissistic and the celebrity-obsessed.

While this no-brainer move by the AC-T will make it harder on the Planet and other local papers to fill the gaping news holes left by our local 300-lb. gorilla, it seems we’ve seen time and again that we can always depend on the Gannett paper to find yet another flimsy limb to go out on.

So hope always spring eternal for us — as long as the AC-T keeps shuffling through publishers faster than a card sharp on a cable-channel poker show.

Your friendly foe, John
•
John North, publisher and editor of the Daily Planet, may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .