Journalism experience of over 100 years is leaving the building


News Sentinel Editor Jack McElroy notes the departures late next week of three long-time newsroom folks, Gerry Segroves, Lynn Lewis and Fred Brown.

Both Fred and Lynn had worked at the Memphis Press-Scimitar before it closed in 1983.

Fred’s an example of a vet who has adapted over the years. He blogs, he’s done audio for online, he’s shot video. I’m sure he’d say it’s been an learning experience. There was a recent training session in which he said he had once shot a video with the front of the camera pointing at himself instead of the subject, but, hey, he did it. Fred is not one of those veterans that blogger and consultant Paul Conley says to forget training.

Lynn is the master of detail and organization. He has helped the online staff immensely in figuring out what was coming from the features and entertainment sections, repairing the translation errors that too often occur in throwing stories across the abyss between the print computer system and the online system, and in finding online homes for stories that just couldn’t quite be squeezed into the paper.

Gerry or the night online producer is the last person out of the newsroom in the early morning hours. I’ve turned the lights out on him more than once (he’s at the extreme other end of the newsroom). He often brought to the online producer’s attention late stories that he couldn’t get more than a couple graphs in somewhere deep in the paper that deserved better. And he let us know of fixes made that we might have missed.

Good folks all and to be missed.