The CutlineBlogger buys newspaper
Do not adjust your monitors, tablets and/or smartphone screens: A blogger is buying a newspaper.
Tom Knighton, an Albany, Ga.-based blogger who claims to have developed reputation for talking trash about the community, has agreed to buy The Albany Journal, a small, weekly newspaper serving Southwest Georgia.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed and Knighton did not immediately return a Facebook message from The Cutline seeking comment.
But Knighton, a chairman of the Libertarian party of Southwest Georgia, told WALB-TV that buying a newspaper was an opportunity he couldn't pass up. "Being a journalist is just something I have always wanted to do," Knighton, who has been a regular columnist for the Journal, said. "When an opportunity like that drops in your lap, you do not turn it down."
Knighton explained his decision further in a post on his political blog, Laws-n-Sausages.com:
Why, you may ask, would the new media purchase a news medium that's on its last legs? Well, The Albany Journal isn't on its last legs. [Current owner] Kevin Hogencamp has his own reasons for selling it, but I looked at things and the paper itself is doing well. Community newspapers, as a whole, are doing fine despite more and more people getting their news on the internet. Why? Because a lot of the local stuff isn't floating around out there for anyone to read.
Other than adding a book review section, Knighton--who takes over on Nov. 1--does not plan to make too many changes to the paper. "Nothing traumatic," he assured readers. ("I will operate under the assumption of, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it,'" Knighton told WALB.)
In his most recent Journal column, Knighton wrote that he has "developed a bit of a reputation for talking about the worst of Albany," adding: "It's not really undeserved either, but I argue that I haven't had a lot of really great stuff to talk about."
The title of the column? "Hope for Albany's Future."
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