Scripps decides to produce 3 West Coast newspapers from Corpus Christi, Texas

The newspaper business is continuing its dismal descent, in case you were wondering.

E.W. Scripps is laying off droves of people on the West Coast and giving their jobs to workers at its Corpus Christi, Texas, newspaper.

"Scripps is changing the game, making proofreading, layout and some news decisions for California and Washington take place a thousand-something miles (and a couple of time zones) away in Texas. Other companies are likely to follow, if they haven’t already done this," observes Steve Greenberg.

"What does this mean to the newspapers? It means there won’t be local people to catch local place names, history or other regional idiosyncrasies that good local copy editors can catch, nor any real “institutional memory” of local people and institutions."

The sports editor at the Ventura County Daily Star was among the casualties. "This decision will wipe out 15 jobs at our paper, three in sports," writes David Lassen.

Santa Barbara Independent columnist Barney Brantingham said outsourcing jobs at the Ventura daily to Corpus "has led to cracks like, `It’s now the Ventura Lone Star,' and questions about whether Texas editors will know the difference between El Rio (a Ventura County community) and the Rio Grande. "

While we're on the subject, we heard 3 or 4 weeks ago that the local Brazosport daily laid off a reporter, which our source said gives The Facts a grand total of three full-time reporters, plus another person who reports the news part of the time and handles copy editing duties part of the time. (A few other non-editorial employees also were allegedly were laid off, we were told.)

We were gonna do a full-scale blog post on the apparent deteriorating fortunes of the B'port daily til we forgot about it.