Last week’s latest round of Gannett layoffs sounded almost benign — only three people lost their jobs at the News Journal — until you realize that number represented almost 10% of the newsroom staff. And the full-timers aren’t the only things readers won’t find in its ever-diminishing pages anymore.
Harry Themal, whose career in local news gathering and dissemination lasted longer than most of us have been alive, brought it to a close yesterday with his final column. He doesn’t give a reason for his departure, but another free-lancer I know who worked for the paper said the last trickle of funding for free-lance articles ran dry last month.
Harry was the newspaper’s managing editor when I was hired to answer phones and write obituaries in 1981, when he already had 30 years doing news in Wilmington. He was also a film critic, the paper’s firstsecond public editor and the newspaper’s last link to Wilmington newspaper legend Bill Frank, a name only about three people in Creekwood would even recognize. The loss of his institutional knowledge is immeasurable.