Validation for our Arkansas move

When Philip T. Smith made the decision to switch publishers between his Crawfordsville (Ind.) Journal Review and Pampas (Tex.) News, he created a scenario that almost certainly dooms the person in the Journal Review managing editor's office.

That's because Pampas publisher Sean Smith is married to Kerri Smith, the Pampas managing editor. So who do you suppose he will want to be his ME in Crawfordsville?

If Maria hadn't seized the opportunity for career growth in Arkansas last summer, it would be her instead of JR ME Jay Heater staring into the abyss of joblessness. (Heater aspires to work at The Indianapolis Star. As a career journalist who took early retirement in October, 2000, rather than work another day for the management at The Star, all I can say to Heater is to be careful what you wish for.)

Whether new management can resurrect the Journal Review remains to be seen.

The core of the advertising sales staff has defected to the startup daily, The Paper of Montgomery County.

Fired General Manager and Ad Director Mark Deacon is now living a more lucrative and stress-free life in Chippewa Falls, Wisc.

Fired Circulation Manager John Marshall has opened channels with The Paper and is working on a book chronicling the tragic mismanagement that took the Journal Review from a solid moneymaker to its present desperate straits in just three short years.

Talented former Assistant ME Sam King has returned to his first love - sportswriting - at the Lafayette Journal & Courier, where he works with former JR page designer Karen Taylor, arguably the best newspaper page designer in Indiana.

Shaylan Owen, who was named the top ad designer in Indiana in last year's Hoosier State Press Association competition, is also gone - living the good life at the Bloomington Herald where he is better paid and has more perks. He offered to stay at the JR for a trifling $1/hour raise, but the publisher refused.

I feel compelled to add that these are my opinions and observations alone and do not reflect the views of my wife, who has a considerably more compassionate take on the events of the past three years. I, after all, am the grumpy old man of the family and this is how grumpy old men see things.