The lead paragraph in the Erie Times-News story today announcing the retirement of its CEO and publisher Jim Dible read like this: "In his 11 years at the Times Publishing Company, Jim Dible helped expand a multimedia enterprise that focuses on local news."
Ironic, then, that the newspaper has been taking a lot of heat recently for doing just the opposite with its notorious "Made in Mexico" series about the status of the Steris Corp. which moved its manufacturing operation from Erie to Mexico last year. Sending a staff reporter and photographer several thousand miles away for a series of stories in a foreign country hardly qualifies as "local." Was it Tip O'Neil who said "All politics are local"?
There's little doubt in my mind that when they decided to undertake what one of them called a "concept" series putatively underscoring the causes and effects of Steris's move to Mexico which threw 450 local folks out of work, the Times-News editors had their eyes fixed hopefully on a prize in the 2007 journalism awards sweepstakes, notwithstanding all the high-falutin' talk about learning lessons relative to competing in a global economy.
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