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Vasché: He just doesn’t get it.

Margaret Randazzo, President of The Modesto Bee (aka McClatchy Modesto), wrote a piece last Sunday about how The Bee cares about the local community and despite McClatchy missing the mark on keeping pace with the news industry, The Bee still has a strong death grip on local information reporting. Oh and that people still read The Bee (No really, they swear! Just forget the fact that statistics everywhere say newspaper readership is declining more and more every year).

A lot of people left comments on her posting noting some pretty good points.  Everything from The Bee losing focus of it’s advertisers to The Bee pandering to city politics and even The Bee moving all of their printing business to Sacramento. It might not be far fetched to say that The Modesto Bee might end up being just a bureau of The Sacramento Bee.  One good commentor pointed out the fact that The Bee has dropped their workforce considerably, losing many members of their editorial staff and has started reprinting wire stories. Thats leads to another question: Why read ModBee.com if they are just reprinting Associated Press wire stories that are available on more credible, professional and easier to use websites like CNN.com or FOXNews.com? 

Well on ModBee.com yesterday, Mark Vasché, Editor and Vice President of McClatchy Modesto, decided to spat back at the commentors.  In a posting titled “Golden Age of Newspapers II - still exciting but more challenging,” he reminisces of the good ol’ days when readers could only turn to The Bee for news and was no doubt missing the days when advertisers dropped serious coin to be in his “paper of the past”. He then proceeded to mention a good friend of his who mistakenly thought he was being relocated to Sacramento, just like his printing press. Funny, huh?

Then Mark started in on the commenters of Margaret’s posting.  Saying that they were wrong and that The Modesto Bee does have the communities best interests at heart, despite overwhelming appeal by readers and advertisers for better reporting and better advertising opportunities.

It’s OK Mark, I know you don’t get it. However, I imagine as an editor it would be fun to be a spin man.  You should write about that.  That would be more interesting. Oh and it must be nice to be a monopoly in the area.  You should write about that too.