St. LOUIS – One afternoon just before Thanksgiving, a group of reporters and editors clustered around a table in the 5th floor newsroom of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as part of a farewell ceremony for business reporter Tim Barker. There was a sheet cake to cut and pieces to distribute. Beyond that, there wasn’t much…
ST. LOUIS – Tod Robberson, a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News, will become the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page editor shortly after the first of the year. Post-Dispatch Editor Gilbert Bailon said Robberson would succeed Tony Messenger, the editorial page editor who moved into a columnist position a few months…
When Taylor Pensoneau cast the characters for his novel “The Summer of ’50,” he modeled his fictional hardboiled newspaperman, Jake Brosky, mostly after a reporter Pensoneau remembered from his early days at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Straight out of the University of Missouri School of Journalism in…
COLUMBIA, Mo. – At the world’s oldest journalism school, the professors for the most part are long on academic credentials but short on in-the-trenches reporting experience. Still, the University of Missouri School of Journalism prides itself on offering “real world” opportunities for its budding journalists. It’s called “the Missouri method” which combines “a strong liberal…
By TERRY GANEY / Since Lee Enterprises acquired Pulitzer, Inc. and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2005, there’s been a steady departure of well-paid, veteran professionals who over the years had made the newspaper one of the most valuable journalistic assets in the country. With hundreds of millions of dollars in debt from the acquisition, the burden of paying off the loans fell on the shoulders of employees at Lee’s 46 newspapers who faced layoffs, furloughs, frozen wages and the elimination of benefits. A quick way of cutting costs was to buyout senior journalists at the Post-Dispatch. The latest round taking effect today includes Bill McClellan, who for more than 30 years has been the newspaper’s popular, hardworking, four-day-a-week columnist. His work has been compared with Mark Twain’s. By itself, McClellan’s departure would be enough to shake the foundations at 900 North Tucker, the headquarters building Lee Enterprises wants to sell. But McClellan is not alone.