A month after the corporation that owns the Press-Telegram fired its publisher and managing editor and put Long Beach’s once-grand daily newspaper under the control of the publisher and managing editor of the Torrance Daily Breeze, longtime P-T columnist Tom Hennessy finally checked in Sunday with his take on the traumatic events.

And? Amazingly, the man who has been he face and voice of the Press-Telegram since 1980 — “Mr. Long Beach,” some people call him — admits he essentially doesn’t have one.

“In short, I am no longer ‘in the know,’” wrote Hennessy, who writes only a Sunday column since taking a semi-retirement (emphasis on the latter, he advised us in this dispatch) in December. “Nor have I discussed the paper’s difficulties with former co-workers. Most of what I do know stems from snippets in weekly publications, some as unkind as they are inaccurate, plus a quite credible recent overview by the Long Beach Business Journal.”

Hennessy admits that its kind of surprising that “I am so far out of the loop.” But he doesn’t apologize for it.

To the contrary, not only has Hennessy not cared — or even been journalistically curious — enough investigate or even converse about the state of his profession in the city where he practices it, he’s offended that others have.

Writes Hennessy: “It also hurts to see a cadre delight in the P-T’s plight: people with axes to grind against the paper and a couple of politicians angling to make capital from the situation.”

Hennessy mistakes aggressive questioning of the caretakers of local journalism with grinding an ax, and that’s understandable from a guy who let his own tools go dull and rust so long ago.

After the Press-Telegram’s latest round of cuts on Feb. 29 actually chopped off the paper’s head, Hennessy’s first column was about how sad executive editor Rich Archbold was about the chance that Wrigley Field — in Chicago — might change its name.

Hennessy’s first public appearance – with Archbold, naturally — was at a Belmont Shore bookstore, where he read aloud to a crowd from ”Grayson,” a book about a whale.

It was reminiscent of the way George W. Bush continuing to read “The Pet Goat” to schoolchildren on September 11, 2001, when he was informed that airliners had just crashed into the World Trade Center.

Meanwhile, those two politicians Hennessy references disparagingly — City Councilwomen Tonia Reyes Uranga and Bonnie Lowenthal, who are running against one another for the 54th District seat in the state assembly — were actually uniting to cast their support for Hennessy’s overworked and underpaid colleagues. They actually sacrificed their lunch hour last week to carry picket signs and protest the corporate castration of Long Beach’s 110-year-old daily paper.

Hennessy, on the other hand, was a no-show … as he has been so often during rank-and-file fights for journalistic excellence during his career at the Press-Telegram. He’s been out of the loop for a long time. The fact that he finally realizes it probably represents some kind of progress.

Tags: Daily Breeze, Long Beach, out of the loop, press telegram, Rich Archbold, tom hennessy, Torrance