After 70 Years, Harry Themal Caps His Pen as News Journal Shrinkage Continues
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.
He could have retired some 20+ years ago at full Social Security age and saved a younger persons job.
sorry, Boris. In America, all the young people work for blogs. Print is dead.
“He could have retired some 20+ years ago”
If you had read the link you’d know he did. Since 1991 he wrote a weekly until the last year or two when the budget first took a hit an it dropped to bi-weekly.
Thank you, though, for demonstrating that once an asshat, always an asshat.
Al,
Harry was the second public editor. Cy Liberman, who may have predated you, was the first.
Thanks for the correction.
Both fellow Ardenites.