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In his first column since the newspaper he has headlined for 30 years was decimated, "Mr. Press-Telegram" Tom Hennessey took a deep breath and railed at the horrible injustice of...Sam Zell's plan to hawk the naming rights to Wrigley Field. In Chicago. Maybe. Sample:
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.
Oh good God. Dave Wielenga at the District Weekly lets him have it:
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....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?
Wielenga's earlier coverage.