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TOM HENNESSY BREAKS LONG BEACH’S HEART AGAIN

Dave WielengaSun. March 02
 

‘Mr. Press-Telegram’ cries over Wrigley Field while his newspaper is stolen away


ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY

It was March 1, the morning after the corporate kidnapping that took the Press-Telegram away from Long Beach, and a resident was telephoning The District in distress. She was devastated that MediaNews Group, Inc., had turned over Long Beach’s 110-year-old daily newspaper to the publisher of the Torrance-based Daily Breeze. “We’ve lost our hometown paper!” lamented First District City Councilwoman Bonnie Lowenthal as she struggled to start her Saturday. “I’m heartbroken.”

Tom Hennessy is heartbroken, too. Of course he is! He was the paper’s daily columnist for nearly 30 years. Three months since semi-retiring due to a mild stroke, he’s still the Press-Telegram’s most-recognizable face, its most-constant voice. It’s not going too far to call Tom Hennessy “Mr. Press-Telegram.” Hell, during his farewell in December lots of people were calling him “Mr. Long Beach.”

So the melodramatic words that Hennessy wrote to begin his Sunday after-the-massacre column were no surprise. Read them, and weep: “This is about a magic place that may be on the brink of losing its magic; a place whose memory may become as remote as the sands of Carthage.”

Hennessy’s next sentence was no surprise, either, but that didn’t make it any less sad. Read it — and break down completely: “This is about Wrigley Field, home of the hapless Chicago Cubs.”

That’s right, two mornings after Long Beach lost the Press-Telegram — a community asset and pillar of local journalism for more than a century — the most-prominent voice in Long Beach journalism wrote a column bemoaning the fact that Wrigley Field — a baseball diamond in Chicago — may be selling its name to a corporate sponsor.

Amazingly, it gets sadder. Here’s Hennessy’s next paragraph:

“What does any of that have to do with Long Beach? Well, strange as it may seem, there are Cub fans right here in town. Two, maybe even three of them. One is the P-T’s executive editor, Rich Archbold. His baseball joys and sorrows, mostly sorrows, fluctuate endlessly with the fortunes of the city and team he left several decades and 2,000 miles ago. This is a tough time for Archbold, for all Cubbie stalwarts.”

A tough time for Rich Archbold. Really? Archbold wasn’t among Friday’s body count, which killed off a significant portion of the already-skeletal Press-Telegram staff, including publisher Dave Kuta and managing editor John Futch, along with nine designers and copy editors, a photographer, a web editor and two reporters who resigned. Archbold gets to keep his job as executive editor of the Press-Telegram — gets to keep the paycheck, anyway, even if he’s just a puffed-up title at a name-alone newspaper.

Archbold is doing what he’s always done — what all henchmen do — which is to survive by implementing the wishes of the powers that be, however odious those wishes may be and whoever’s throat must be cut or back must be stabbed to do it. Archbold’s tenure at the Press-Telegram — three decades as managing editor, editor-in-chief and executive editor — corresponds with the steady demise of the paper, and that’s not a coincidence. If his conscience occasionally bothers him … well, maybe that’s the “tough time” that Hennessy says he’s going through — beyond the little worry about Wrigley Field, that is.

When Hennessy took his semi-retirement in December, I took some criticism for interrupting everybody’s endless accolades to point out how he had abdicated the responsibilities that accompany his position as the most-prominent journalist in Long Beach. I criticized Hennessy’s long record of failure to alert his many thousands of readers that the Press-Telegram was sliding toward oblivion as its corporate owners chopped away at coverage and bled away its profits. I asserted that Hennessy had ducked his obligations — to his profession, to his colleagues, to his readers and ultimately to Long Beach. I alleged that this cowardice was a conscious decision made so that, like Archbold, he could stay in the good graces of his ruthless corporate bosses.

Today, Hennessy validated all of those points. Heartbreaking, isn’t it?

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  • Dwight K. Snider
    Once again Mr. Wielenga hits a homerun while the opposing team can do nothing but strikeout.
  • Chris Ziegler
    nice work, dave
  • Rachel Powers
    fantastic piece, dave
  • Matt Zimmerman
    If I were to give Hennessy the benefit of the doubt, I would wonder if maybe this was his attempt to use another corporate situation involving a newspaper owner to illustrate what has happened in Long Beach due to poor management and a Union that seems to have been blindsided.

    But it is pretty clear, and has been for some time, that much of the old guard in Long Beach has long been out of touch with most things that don't involve their own individual ability to continue to draw a paycheck. The timing and tone of Hennessy's joke of a Wrigley Field column could not be worse.
  • rebecca
    Yeah, what Matt Z. said. It HAD to be a muted cry--cowardly, mewling, but his widow's mite attempt at sticking it to the man . . . obliquely. Didn't it? Didn't it? No? Aw, fuck.
  • w3
    As one of the dearly departed, I'd like to say thanks Dave. If I could afford it, I'd buy you a beer. This town deserves a hell of a lot better than either of these clowns has provided.
  • Beachcombover
    I find it somewhat amazing that Rich Archbold survived the scrapping of what was once a great newspaper, an important voice for LB area residents and an good place to work. I find it totally amazing that he has the of lack pride to continue to preside over the flaming hulk for which he is largely responsible.

    Dean Singleton is merely the greedy cynic who applied the final stab to the PT’s back . Archbold and his management minions, who each received an extra 30 pieces of silver (from seller Knight-Ridder) to stay on following Dean’s initial bloodletting in 1997, facilitated the paper’s long decline, making it ripe for Singleton’s rape.

    Fawning coverage of City Hall’s elected and appointed leaders, along with blind boosterism for every stunt they backed or proposed (DisneySea, the Ice Dogs, fly-by-night minor league baseball teams, the many permutations of the Queen Mary, and an economically anemic Navy base reuse rip-off) rendered local coverage useless and suspect to the readership. Opponents of such boondoggles, along with many residents concerned with the quality of life in the LB area, were, when they rarely made it into the paper, generally mocked.

    Instead, we were treated to such debacles as a salute to a visit by President Bill Clinton (with a huge A1 banner headline “Welcome, Mr. President”), despite the fact that Bill had signed off on the dismantlement of LB’s military-industrial economic base. We also learned more than we needed to know about the Friends of the Library, Leadership Long Beach, the life and times of Beverly O’Neill, John Morris (the recent subject of another PT Valentine) and of course, thanks to the intrepid Hennessey, the Chicago Cubs.

    The Wrigley Field column and the puffy “new publisher” blurb that followed Friday’s bloodbath pretty much sum up the PT’s real and long-running problem. Forget the economy, new media, the price of newsprint and all that other crap. The PT’s leaders have long had – and continue to pursue – a death wish while deftly escaping the carnage themselves.
  • Dave Wielenga
    Very good, Beachcombover. I'd forgotten some of that stuff. You're right on with your analysis -- and maybe nothing better represents your point than your "30 pieces of silver" comment, in which, as you remind us, Archbold and most other management types received one-year bonuses to stay with the P-T and assure some stability during the changeover between Knight-Ridder and Singleton -- at the same time as the rank-and-file staffers were all fired, forced to re-apply for their jobs, brought back at an average 21 percent pay cut and drastically reduced benefits -- and with a castrated union. That union, by the way -- even in its weakened state -- has proven itself the ONLY voice for good, local journalism at the Press-Telegram.
  • Journalista
    I damn near lost it when I saw Tom's column Sunday. Dave is so right. After witnessing the bloodbath at the P-T Friday, I thought Tom would at least write that he was sorry to see good people go or say some nice things about Futch. SOMETHING, ANYTHING would have been better than that column he wrote Sunday. Employees here have never felt more alone.
  • butterfly soup
    Well, the P-T sold out the Pike so the Ridders could make some more bucks. It was the Skid Row of journalism when I worked there, but the wonderful David Levinson--who wouldn't follow Ridder orders--taught me a lot of what I know. It's hard to care any more...but this is a huge opportunity, seems to me, for The District to become THE paper of record for LB.
  • Theo Douglas
    When I joined the Press-Telegram in 1990 at age 19--as a typist, no less!--the very first people I met were two copy editors: a man named Bill Shelton, and David Levinson.
    Shelton was from Texas--like someone we wrote about in our Halloween issue: P-T reporter Bill Hunter--and he knew and used a ton of colloquialisms, most of which I've probably forgotten.
    (This is why our language is becoming more drab every day: because these expressions are being forgotten.)
    The one I remember came out when we were having a discussion about breaking rocks in prison--which Shelton characterized as "making little ones out of big ones." I'm not sure why we were talking about that.
    Levinson was a really kind and gentle person who gave the impression that, having seen everything in his time at the P-T, nothing would ever surprise or alarm or even overly concern him ever again.
    He also had a signature line (I don't think Shelton did): "All will be well," (even though we had our suspicions it would not), and he would use it frequently in passing, or if you stopped by his desk.
    Shelton and Levinson--two stand-up guys who probably forgot more about Long Beach and newspapering than we'll ever know. Newsrooms were once full of people just like them.
  • jdubb
    I spent several years at the Press-Telegram, much of it while Dave Wielenga was there, and if you think he is railing against the paper now, you should have heard him then.

    Then as now, though, much of Wielenga's angst was justified. I was at Long Beach for close to 10 years and never felt as if I was working at a real newspaper. Something in the way Rich Archbold conducted business made you uncomfortable, primarily because it seemed he valued rubbing elbows with the Long Beach muckety-mucks more than he valued providing credible journalism about them. He seemed so enamored with longtime Mayor Beverly O'Neill that it made you wonder if he regretted not meeting her 40 years earlier so he could have married her. I'm only half-kidding when I say that.

    To paraphrase Clint Eastwood, Rich Archbold seemed to be a man who knew his limitations. Once a reporter of note in the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, he was unable to rise to the capabilities demanded of a big city newspaper editor, so he didn't even try.

    Instead, he convinced himself that Long Beach was a small town with a big population and therefore pursued small-town journalism. He was aided in his quest for mediocrity by a knack of surrounding himself with people who, for a variety of reasons, tended not to challenge his approach.

    Thus emboldened, it often made him -- and some members of his posse -- a bit supercilious, with the results often just silly.

    It's possible that the Press-Telegram was a victim of market conditions more than anything else, but it would have been nice to find out how things would have gone with more dynamic leadership than Archbold and a list of Knight-Ridder farmhands

    Someone once said to me during the P-T that the paper was run like they were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but there are two differences:

    1-The Titanic sank quickly after plowing into an iceberg at full-steam. The Press-Telegram sank slowly, a droll, rudderless vessel flowing half-speed, neither her nor there, bereft of direction.

    2-The captain of the Titanic went down with the ship. Capt. Archbold, who would have made a million clams on the "Survivor" TV series, is still treading water.

    We used to joke at the P-T that Archbold was able to stay at the helm because he had some compromising photos of one (or more) of the Ridder family.

    But considering he still is around after a decade with the Singleton company, one must conclude that he has compromising photos of Dean Singleton and the Ridders together. There can be no other explanation.
  • dave
    Guess I really have always been a crank.
  • w3
    It's already been posted on the main page, but anyone unhappy about the death of Long Beach's daily newspaper (make no mistake, that's exactly what this is) should attend the city council meeting on Wednesday.
  • w3
    Sorry, I meant Tuesday.
  • jdubb
    One addendum in defense of Tom Hennessy.

    As lame as it was to write about Wrigley Field when the paper is essentially folding (and boy, was it lame), isn't it being a little naive to think most newspaper columnists would risk their job to mount an assault on how bad the paper has become?

    Perhaps Hennessy was journalistically fiddling while Rome burned, but how many people do we know that are so ideologically pure that they would write about the decline in the quality of their paper when they knew it would be the end of their job? And yes, I think he would have lost his job if he did that.

    Could it be that he just decided to continue writing the types of columns that had made him popular in the first place? Maybe he didn't think he was big enough of a deal to turn the tide, anyway.

    It may seem improbable to people like you and me that he couldn't see it, but maybe he didn't think the paper had fallen that much. Even if he did, I ask again, isn't it at least understandable that someone would decide not to tell there employer how much the product sucks?

    I think, therefore, that this quote from you about Hennessy is a tad unfair:

    "I alleged that this cowardice was a conscious decision made so that, like Archbold, he could stay in the good graces of his ruthless corporate bosses."

    I think classifying Hennessy as a coward is overstating the case, a projection onto Hennessy, if you will, of someone else's view of what should be done.

    Bottom line, Hennessy is/was a worker bee at the Press-Telegram. The person more responsible for any drivel coming out of it, past, present and, it seems, future, would be Rich Archbold. He's the guy who helped set the tone over the years way more than Hennessy.

    If they wanted hard-hitting columns and an ombudsman approach about the quality of the P-T from Hennessy, Archbold could have set that tone as well. Hennessy probably would have done it, too, especially if Hennessy is/was the toady that you suggest.

    I suggest the odds are at least even that Archbold told/asked Hennessy to write that Wrigley column. Sycophantic or not, it might have come down to the fact Hennessy likes a paycheck.

    I ask you this: would you let one of your columnists write bad things about the quality of your own publication? Maybe you would, but most publishers or editors wouldn't, double-standard or not.

    I completely agree with most of your assessment of the P-T's demise, but using Hennessy as a poster boy is decrying the symptom and not the disease.
  • Green Line Rules
    I think the bashing of Tom is pretty spot on, but it isn't just him who is a PT joke...
    No one has been a bigger blight on the face of the paper than Doug "I will drop your name, if you buy me a drink" Kirkorian....
    His rambling manifestos of crap that at times take up more column inches than he is tall has been all but forced upon people because he is Rich's friend... Not because it's a good thing to write, or timely, or anything a columnist should be...
    He recycles columns, every few months we get the Lasorda column, the Misty May Column, the Anti-gambling one, the bananas Bob Foster one.... The I don't care about football/basketball/baseball any sport columns while vacationing for months at a time in Europe while all his co-workers scramble to keep their jobs....
    Don't just spit the venom at Rich and Tom, Doug deserves it just as much...
  • JuanPardell
    Dave is probably one of the few journalists, if not the only one, left in Long Beach who will challenge the establishment. Jdubb's comments are hilarious. You may want to include Joe Prevratil in that trio of "enamoradas". Archibold's backing of the former Queen Mary chief, has been nothing short of journalistic oral sex.
  • Beachcombover
    Let's not forget how well Archbold and his enablers treated veteran scribes. I recall reporter Harry Tessel being demoted to nightside GA and suffering serious injuries while driving through the dark to cover some half-ass story. Columnist George Robeson who, as far as a recall, covered Long Beach like a blanket, but knew nothing about Wrigley Field, was shunted off to edit letters to the editor. They were replaced by such stalwarts as Angelo Figueroa, who reached out to our growing Mexican-American readership with personal tales of Detroit and Puerto Rico. A back data search that turned up some of his original submissions, before they were totally rewritten by a kindly city editor, presented strong evidence of near illiteracy. And who can forget how scared to death Archbold & were of a real news when the PT's crack sportswriters umasked the Artesia High basketball scandal.
  • angelo figueroa
    I was at the Press Telegram for two years, before being hired by The San Jose Mercury News as a columnist. On my first day on the job at the P-T the union posted a letter in the newsroom stating that my hiring was against the interests of "white reporters." What a place. I can only guess at the identity of Beachcombover, but whoever it is, I'm fortunate that they weren't on the committees for the Greater Los Angeles Press Club and the California Newspaper Publishers Association, both of whom honored me with first place awards for columns and commentary during my short stint at the P-T. Not bad for an illiterate.
  • Dave Wielenga
    Hey Angelo! Long time! I was following your career for awhile, at least until you were at People. Would love to catch up. Regarding your stint at the P-T, I remember the not-exactly-subliminal racial tension on the staff that accompanied editor Sandra Keyes' long-overdue diversification project, for which I believe she received special funding from Knight-Ridder (can you even imagine corporations actually investing in the newsroom now). I don't have a clear memory of everything that happened during that time, but I am not sure if everything that was posted on the union's bulletin board was actually "from" the union. I do remember the union having a few meetings at its offices across the street in which some of these issues were aired in highly charged sessions. I can only imagine how difficult they were for you. But I also remember you as a very active and strong member---hell, leader---of that union as we struggled with that issue and others related to our contract and union-busting methods by the Knight-Ridder. Having a leading columnist---especially a new member of the staff--willing to take such public stands was brave on your part and beneficial to your colleagues. It was quite a contrast with Hennessy.
  • Dave Wielenga
    Hey everybody! If any of you would like your comments published in the paper (remember those days?) edition of The District, please submit them to this e-mail address: letters@TheDistrictWeekly.com. Oh, and if you want, you can even use your real names (remember THOSE days?).
  • Dave Wielenga
    Hey everybody! If any of you would like to have your comments published in the paper (remember that?) edition of The District, please send them to this e-mail address: Letters@TheDistrictWeekly.com. And if you want, you can even sign them with your real name (remember that?).
  • LBRez
    Thank you Green Line for mentioning Krikorian, they guy may have been "it" in his past but now could be writing for the papers at Poly or Wilson. Glorify his buddies drinking while giving hallpasses to ballplayers who juice and santimoniously condemning those who condemn the juicers as being sanctimonious. Like, Oh My God, did you see 2 Bellies and 4 Chins doings belly shots of Bananas?!? I still read the P-T every morning, or I should say scan it, I hope someone with deep pockets vested in our community (hello Molina family?) takes a risk and can purchase the paper so we can have a true daily newspaper worthy of the 35th biggest city in the country.
  • w3
    LBRez

    I've been making that prayer for a while now. The thing people don't hear about is that the PT is more than profitable. If you knew how much cash Singleton has wrung out of that purchase, only to destroy the paper later, you would have to conclude that journalism was never his goal in the first place. Newspapers just happen to be a troubled industry where assets are undervalued, so investors can pick up properties on the cheap and gut them for piecemeal sale later. He's a corporate raider, pure and simple, and the fact that AP decided to honor him as a journalist underscores just how crazy this industry has gotten.
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