Opening Day
The featured photo from the hard copy of the Chron today is an editorial cartoon from Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Nick Anderson. It is about the U.S. Secretary of Defense. You should know the story by now. Commentary thinks he should be fired. The USA is involved in a couple of major wars right now and this fella doesn’t tell the President and others in the chain of command that he has a major illness and is in the hospital. He needs to be a goner for sure.
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This entity is on the verge of being a joke. Commentary is talking about the Houston Landing who fired a couple of highly respected journalists earlier this week. Here is a part of a Texas Monthly piece on the firings:
The Landing’s success made it all the more shocking when, on Monday morning, Rahman and Stuckey were summarily fired by CEO Peter Bhatia, a fifty-year newspaper veteran and former Detroit Free Press editor in chief who had been in the job for less than a year. Bhatia is longtime friends with Landing board member Jeff Cohen, a senior advisor at Houston philanthropy organization Arnold Ventures—a major funder of the Landing—and a former Chronicle editor in chief. The six-member board of directors appears to have brought Bhatia in to shake things up at the website. (None of the Landing’s six board members agreed to interview requests for this story; the author of this story worked briefly under Cohen at the Chronicle in 2017 and did sporadic freelance copy writing for the Arnold Ventures website from 2019 to 2020.)
And this:
Bhatia acknowledged that the newsroom was in open revolt against his leadership. “I have no illusion that some people are going to leave over this, and I respect that,” he told Texas Monthly. The Landing’s managing editor, John Tedesco, will temporarily take over for Rahman while Bhatia leads a search for a new editor in chief. Tedesco told me that he disagrees with the decision to fire Rahman and Stuckey and fears that “this turmoil will cause our best and brightest journalists to look for the nearest exit ramp.”
Here is the entire Texas Monthly article: What’s Going on at Houston Landing, the Billionaire-Funded Nonprofit News Site? (texasmonthly.com).
How can you have a newsroom in “open revolt?” It is a bad look for sure.
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Folks have been guessing what Selena Gomez was telling Taylor Swift at the Golden Globes the other night. Selena says she was just passing on some gossip. Maybe it was the following from the Daily Beast:
Selena Gomez has been tapped to play the singer Linda Ronstadt in a biopic, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The feature doesn’t have a director attached yet but is being produced by Ronstadt’s manager, John Boylan, and James Keach, who produced a 2019 documentary about Ronstadt. Gomez, 31, has already met Ronstadt, 77, to discuss the project, according to Boylan.
Cool. I am rooting for Selena.
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Some MLB fans always ask why it is called Opening Day when some games start in the evening. Why not say it is Opening Night? Not this year. Opening Day at The Yard will start at 3 pm, Thursday, March 28, 2024, versus the Yankees. I plan to be there.
