Joe “Cannonball” Cannon is living up to his last name, it seems, with a recent pair of demotions of news staff members at the Mormon Republican Cougar Times.
Glen Warchol of the Trib’s Salt Lake Crawler (The fifth-most influential blog in Utah last week, according to BlogNetNews), reports that Chuck Gates, the assistant managing editor for news, and Julianne Basinger, the business editor, were demoted to “special writer” and copy desk respectively, because, as one reporter said, they weren’t going “Mo’ enough, fast enough.”
You can get the gritty details of the story over on Warchol’s blog, but the long and short of it is this is just another salvo in Cannon’s reign as editor of the MRCTimes.
Their claim earlier to be more Mormon and more local was not a joke, and although it’s one thing (and potentially a smart business decision) to cater to your majority LDS audience, at some point you’ll need to stop calling yourself a legitimate newspaper and eventually just say what you are: A glorified ward newsletter.
They aren’t even a “glorified” ward newsletter. They are a ward newsletter, which is fine. I mean, who else would want to read it?