Lucas Semb

[grizfan1984]

Was just laid off by Lee enterprises damn man he has been the only reporter we’ve had that has reacted with us fans and gave us the information we wanted. https://twitter.com/lucas_semb/status/1645805100261310464?s=46&t=dc8-GgsunrC6LlIKD26SmQ

 

[HookedonGriz]

Lee enterprises is obviously a shit show

 

[uofmman1122]

Just awful.

Lucas had a weird, sometimes grating style, but he was the most engaged Griz reporter we've ever had.

This is a huge loss.

 

[HookedonGriz]

@LeeEntNews is the Twitter handle. Let them have it Griz Nation.

 

[HookedonGriz]

Here you go Griz Nation. Let your voices be heard

https://lee.net/contact/

 

[PDXGrizzly]

Hopefully they get put on blast. I wonder if they have any clue as to why their subscription levels continue to drop…

 

[AZDoc]

Hopefully they get put on blast. I wonder if they have any clue as to why their subscription levels continue to drop…

But do they continue to drop? it's a serious question. I don't live in the area so have no idea of actual numbers.

 

[wbtfg]

Was just laid off by Lee enterprises damn man he has been the only reporter we’ve had that has reacted with us fans and gave us the information we wanted. https://twitter.com/lucas_semb/status/1645805100261310464?s=46&t=dc8-GgsunrC6LlIKD26SmQ

Damn....never like to see a guy get blind sided losing a dream job. I wonder if there's an opportunity to get picked up by Colter and Skyline. Regardless, best of luck to Lucas.

 

[mtgrizrule]

This sucks! He does a terrific job.
Many newspapers are in trouble.
Why is that? Unfortunately, the agenda driven narrative reporting has finally gotten to people.

If they want to save news journalism, they need to screw the narratives and agendas. Get back to neutral reporting and or reporting both sides!!!!

For those sensitive to this, I'm sorry, but that's the damn truth!

 

[grizindabox]

This sucks! He does a terrific job.
Many newspapers are in trouble.
Why is that? Unfortunately, the agenda driven narrative reporting has finally gotten to people.

If they want to save news journalism, they need to screw the narratives and agendas. Get back to neutral reporting and or reporting both sides!!!!

For those sensitive to this, I'm sorry, but that's the damn truth!

Quite honestly, print media, especially at the local level, has been on the downward trend for decades and is well past being saved.

 

[mtgrizrule]

This sucks! He does a terrific job.
Many newspapers are in trouble.
Why is that? Unfortunately, the agenda driven narrative reporting has finally gotten to people.

If they want to save news journalism, they need to screw the narratives and agendas. Get back to neutral reporting and or reporting both sides!!!!

For those sensitive to this, I'm sorry, but that's the damn truth!

Quite honestly, print media, especially at the local level, has been on the downward trend for decades and is well past being saved.

True. The witch hunt reporting of the football program, Hauck, and Jordan Johnson was the beginning of decline.

 

[grizatwork]

Quite honestly, print media, especially at the local level, has been on the downward trend for decades and is well past being saved.

True. The witch hunt reporting of the football program, Hauck, and Jordan Johnson was the beginning of decline.

The decline is more about platform delivery than the reporting. Advertising moved to online platforms. People actually getting a paper delivered to their house declined. Why would you get a paper delivered when you read the news last night via a notification to your cell phone. I still get the GF Tribune delivered to my house. It is a USA Today paper printed in Helena now. The news deadline is around 4pm. There is no Saturday paper. I have to go online to get that. Even so, Saturday night sports doesn’t get reported until Monday. Their building sold and being converted into a church. These are decisions made by finances due to the internet, not by content. In my opinion.

 

[MissoulaMarinerFan]

True. The witch hunt reporting of the football program, Hauck, and Jordan Johnson was the beginning of decline.

The decline is more about platform delivery than the reporting. Advertising moved to online platforms. People actually getting a paper delivered to their house declined. Why would you get a paper delivered when you read the news last night via a notification to your cell phone. I still get the GF Tribune delivered to my house. It is a USA Today paper printed in Helena now. The news deadline is around 4pm. There is no Saturday paper. I have to go online to get that. Even so, Saturday night sports doesn’t get reported until Monday. Their building sold and being converted into a church. These are decisions made by finances due to the internet, not by content. In my opinion.

and continuing to cut reporters who do their job to save the parent company money and then give bonuses to the mucky-mucks.

 

[reinell30]

True. The witch hunt reporting of the football program, Hauck, and Jordan Johnson was the beginning of decline.

The decline is more about platform delivery than the reporting. Advertising moved to online platforms. People actually getting a paper delivered to their house declined. Why would you get a paper delivered when you read the news last night via a notification to your cell phone. I still get the GF Tribune delivered to my house. It is a USA Today paper printed in Helena now. The news deadline is around 4pm. There is no Saturday paper. I have to go online to get that. Even so, Saturday night sports doesn’t get reported until Monday. Their building sold and being converted into a church. These are decisions made by finances due to the internet, not by content. In my opinion.

I get the Great Falls Tribune online daily. There is no coverage of Montana College sports anymore. The very little local coverage of local sports is usually two days or more old. Like Grizatwork said, most advertising has moved away from print. The newspaper people have done this to themselves.

 

[PTGrizzly]

Unfortunately Semb didn’t do himself any favors by not realizing he’s not supposed to be/act like a fan of the team he covers.

 

[Colter_Nuanez56]

True. The witch hunt reporting of the football program, Hauck, and Jordan Johnson was the beginning of decline.

The decline is more about platform delivery than the reporting. Advertising moved to online platforms. People actually getting a paper delivered to their house declined. Why would you get a paper delivered when you read the news last night via a notification to your cell phone. I still get the GF Tribune delivered to my house. It is a USA Today paper printed in Helena now. The news deadline is around 4pm. There is no Saturday paper. I have to go online to get that. Even so, Saturday night sports doesn’t get reported until Monday. Their building sold and being converted into a church. These are decisions made by finances due to the internet, not by content. In my opinion.

This is all correct. Newspapers for more than a century made money first from Classified ads (who buys or reads those anymore?), then from subscriptions. The Missoulian subscription base is a tiny fraction of what it was when I worked there as a college kid 15+ years ago.

As someone who sells advertising for a living now, newspapers are nowhere on the radar in terms of competition. Advertisers in Montana (and everywhere) are interested in digital, radio, podcasts, social media, on demand video, streaming, live television, niche print like quarterly magazines....and then somewhere at the very bottom of the totem poll is news print.

The saddest part of this is that is has literally nothing to do with almost all the content producers. Sure, some newspapers and newspaper reporters have vendettas and axes to grind. But the media entity itself is struggling to make any sort of revenue from previously lucrative streams and is dying on the vine.

It makes me so sad. I love what we've been able to create at Skyline Sports & ESPN MT and I feel so blessed to live in my home state continuing to practice crafts I have a deep passion for. But all I ever wanted when I was a kid and a teenager was to be a newspaper man. And those dreams died when I was 25 years old. At least we were able to see this coming a decade ago...I can't imagine being a young, ambitious journalist working at a newspaper these days. It would be beyond depressing.

 

[grizatwork]

The decline is more about platform delivery than the reporting. Advertising moved to online platforms. People actually getting a paper delivered to their house declined. Why would you get a paper delivered when you read the news last night via a notification to your cell phone. I still get the GF Tribune delivered to my house. It is a USA Today paper printed in Helena now. The news deadline is around 4pm. There is no Saturday paper. I have to go online to get that. Even so, Saturday night sports doesn’t get reported until Monday. Their building sold and being converted into a church. These are decisions made by finances due to the internet, not by content. In my opinion.

I get the Great Falls Tribune online daily. There is no coverage of Montana College sports anymore. The very little local coverage of local sports is usually two days or more old. Like Grizatwork said, most advertising has moved away from print. The newspaper people have done this to themselves.

I am conflicted about the “they did it to themselves argument.” In a way yes, they did by not moving to digital content sooner. But would it have made a difference? I am guilty of being old fashioned person who likes the newspaper in my hands with a cup of coffee in the morning and to do the crosswords at night. I didn’t want a digital newspaper and only do it now when because I have to. Is there really a place in the market for small market newspapers like the Missoulian or the GF Tribune digital newspaper? They now compete online with national news, statewide television news websites, Skyline sports ( which does a better job) and even fan pages like egriz. I believe the death of small market newspapers was inevitable. People like Colter with Skyline and Jenna Rowell who runs “the electric” in Great Falls are able to carve out a niche. The rest is the great consolidation of news where it is controlled by big corporations that have the money and audience to adapt.

 

[Colter_Nuanez56]

I get the Great Falls Tribune online daily. There is no coverage of Montana College sports anymore. The very little local coverage of local sports is usually two days or more old. Like Grizatwork said, most advertising has moved away from print. The newspaper people have done this to themselves.

I am conflicted about the “they did it to themselves argument.” In a way yes, they did by not moving to digital content sooner. But would it have made a difference? I am guilty of being old fashioned person who likes the newspaper in my hands with a cup of coffee in the morning and to do the crosswords at night. I didn’t want a digital newspaper and only do it now when because I have to. Is there really a place in the market for small market newspapers like the Missoulian or the GF Tribune digital newspaper? They now compete online with national news, statewide television news websites, Skyline sports ( which does a better job) and even fan pages like egriz. I believe the death of small market newspapers was inevitable. People like Colter with Skyline and Jenna Rowell who runs “the electric” in Great Falls are able to carve out a niche. The rest is the great consolidation of news where it is controlled by big corporations that have the money and audience to adapt.

Daily newspapers in rural places like Montana would absolutely be sustainable business if they were independently owned, they made an effort to controlled overhead, and had ace sales people.

ESPN is owned by Missoula Broadcasting Company. We have four radio stations. We have excellent on-air personalities, the only real, local stations left in Western Montana and a very local mission. But the reason we exist and are profitable is for one reason: we have the best sales people in media in the state of Montana. And that's not an opinion. The numbers and the awards confirm it.

If you had an ace sales team and great leadership, newspapers in all of Montana's seven "cities" could exist and thrive. There's a reason the Daily Interlake in Kalispell has not had nearly the hardship of the newspapers owned by Lee and McClatchy.

Look at the newspaper in Big Sky, Montana. It has probably 3 percent of the circulation that the Missoulian had in its heyday. But they are paying their employees incredible salaries because they are prioritizing hyper local coverage in a town growing like crazy and they are taking advantage of the influx of money to said community by having an independent paper for the community.

And the worst part is the corporations that own the rural newspapers that are dying are operating almost exclusively for stock price security with no care if local journalism dies. They have no vested interest whatsoever in local journalism in rural communities. And in some ways (my doomsday brain working in overdrive), the want it that way. They want as many ill-informed people as possible.

 

[PDXGrizzly]

The decline is more about platform delivery than the reporting. Advertising moved to online platforms. People actually getting a paper delivered to their house declined. Why would you get a paper delivered when you read the news last night via a notification to your cell phone. I still get the GF Tribune delivered to my house. It is a USA Today paper printed in Helena now. The news deadline is around 4pm. There is no Saturday paper. I have to go online to get that. Even so, Saturday night sports doesn’t get reported until Monday. Their building sold and being converted into a church. These are decisions made by finances due to the internet, not by content. In my opinion.

This is all correct. Newspapers for more than a century made money first from Classified ads (who buys or reads those anymore?), then from subscriptions. The Missoulian subscription base is a tiny fraction of what it was when I worked there as a college kid 15+ years ago.

As someone who sells advertising for a living now, newspapers are nowhere on the radar in terms of competition. Advertisers in Montana (and everywhere) are interested in digital, radio, podcasts, social media, on demand video, streaming, live television, niche print like quarterly magazines....and then somewhere at the very bottom of the totem poll is news print.

The saddest part of this is that is has literally nothing to do with almost all the content producers. Sure, some newspapers and newspaper reporters have vendettas and axes to grind. But the media entity itself is struggling to make any sort of revenue from previously lucrative streams and is dying on the vine.

It makes me so sad. I love what we've been able to create at Skyline Sports & ESPN MT and I feel so blessed to live in my home state continuing to practice crafts I have a deep passion for. But all I ever wanted when I was a kid and a teenager was to be a newspaper man. And those dreams died when I was 25 years old. At least we were able to see this coming a decade ago...I can't imagine being a young, ambitious journalist working at a newspaper these days. It would be beyond depressing.

You got a place for Lucas over at Skyline and ESPN MT?

 

[Dmontanagrizzlies]

So sad. I really loved his reporting.
Colter, thank you for taking the time to teach us what's behind the door, in the journalism world.