The Denton Record Chronicle is now officially worse than the Gainesville Register

At least on print editorial management.

The Register, about six weeks ago, finally junked the idea of running three days worth of comics and other lifestyles stuff in each of its two semiweekly issues. Instead, it cut down to one page of puzzles and lifestyle stuff while keeping comics on its website.

That's not perfect, as people who really want comics, and beyond the ones you may have there (the print edition version in the past was slim) can find various free or paid online sites, but it's a good start.

The DRC, which cut fairly quickly through all the stages from seven-day daily down to weekly, not semiweekly, in the year of COVID, still isn't there.

I looked at an issue recently in a library, after having not peeked in months.

The ridiculousness is actually worse.

They are still running comics and all. But? NOT six days. BUT, not one or two days of non-comics lifestyles either.

Instead, it's four days a week, at least in the issue I looked at, even though there are six days outside of Sunday in the seven-day print week and outside of color Sunday comics in the former seven-day print world.

Ad hole still sucks.

Throw out four-plus pages of Readers' Choice / Best Of tout ads, which surely are sold to businesses on a discount rate, unless there's a bunch of dumb Denton businesses there. (Some online-only publication, here's your chance to cut in, by the way.)

Throwing them out, and the total page count with that? Twenty pages.

Of that? Five pages is ad hole. Of THAT? Three pages is classy. You could be better on classy. You should be better on ROP.

Of course, if I toss four pages of comics et al, if I cut to two, you're 5/18, which is 27.5 percent instead of 25. Or toss comics entirely and you're 5/16, which is a bit over 30 percent.

Or if we count your Readers' Choice at 50 percent, but the space at 100 percent, you're 7/24, which is back under 30 percent even with the goose of Readers' Choice. 

And, while you're not asking for my advice? While I'm here, get rid of the daily e-edition. The Register did that too. Unless you're the Arkansas Democrat handing out iPads to e-reader subscribers and otherwise getting aggressive in promoting it, it's a waste of time. 

Scott Pelley keeps speaking out while Lesley Stahl, other vets, staying for now

Here's Pelley talking to the NYT. Let's start with the Nick Bilton hiring and his take.

Nick Bilton wrote an email to the staff, introducing himself. And it was so insulting. He told us that it wasn’t 1968 anymore, and he helpfully noted that gasoline doesn’t cost 32 cents anymore, suggested that we had all been frozen in amber in 1968 when the program first went on the air, and that nothing had improved. He said in his email that it was “strange” that “60 Minutes” is only on the air at 7 o’clock Eastern time on Sunday once a week, when we’ve been on the air 24-7 globally, online, for well over a decade. It betrayed the fact that Nick Bilton didn’t know anything about us, didn’t know anything about our culture, and yet was being imposed on us as our new leader.

Well, there you go. 

Next, like a Trump-fired federal government employee, on the video, he talks about peers who are still "trapped." 

As for the speaking out, and why him? This:

First of all, our entire senior staff had been wiped out. They’re not there. I looked around the room. I’m the only correspondent there, which surprised me very much. I learned that my colleagues were out shooting stories, as they should be in the month of June, but I’m the only correspondent. And I looked at my friends and colleagues in the room and realized I was the senior person.

Summarized it. 

He notes also the insensitivity of many staffers there being fired right after the Emmys and right before Bilton was hired. He notes the lack of experience of Bilton. 

He notes it was like losing "family." As he starts tearing up:

It was the wholesale nature of it. Senior staff wiped out after a triumphal year. One of the things Nick Bilton said in that ill-fated email to the staff was that he was excited — I’m paraphrasing here — to tell the staff about the new crop of correspondents. And when I saw that, I thought, “They’re going to fire all of us, eventually.” So that’s why I use these admittedly, for a journalist, hyperbolic terms. They capture the scale of what happened.

Again, nails it. 

More, from the video: 

When someone wipes out — murders — a large number of your family members, people are hurt and shocked and in disbelief and just desperate for some explaination.

Ouch.

I think that's what pissed him off above all. The lack of explanation. Pelley went on to refute Bari Weiss on this. 

There still has been none.

None as in no explanation. 

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The second half of the header? This, from Deadline.

The three remaining fill-time correspondents on 60 Minutes — Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim — said Friday that they will remain with the show. 

“We feared that our returning might be construed as an endorsement of the existing power structure,” they wrote in a joint memo on Friday. “That is simply categorically not the case. Here’s why we are staying: We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.”

OK.

Isn't "60 Minutes" as you previously knew it already dead?  And, if you're actually believing what Nick Bilton is promising, I have beachfront property in North Dakota for sale.

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As for calls by Pelley for CBS or its Paramount parent to fire Weiss? Not happening and Scott knows.

That said, beyond the ideological agenda she's foisting on the network's news? She has nowhere to go.

She's not going to peel off significant numbers of MAGAts from Fox, and the post-MAGAts to the right — Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc —are already lost over the strident Zionism. I don't know about the never-full-MAGA types like Dan Crenshaw, where he's at on Israel and Gaza, but surely not totally in Weiss' ballpark at a minimum.