In addition to the firing of Stan Zimmerman which I reported on last week, the Observer Group has ousted nearly every writer associated with the Pelican Press. Looks like Paul Roat is gone; Diana Colson who did the Social Notes column — gone. Anne Johnson, who’d been a mainstay at the newspaper — as editor — for many, many years … gone, without even a note of farewell. Film critic Frank Tucciarone, gone. Kathie Moon,, gone. Thrza Jacobs, Robert Frederickson, Jay Davis — think they’re all gone. Don’t know what happened to Rebecca Wild Baxter or Ric Miracle or John Riley the cartoonist. Am assuming they’re gone as well. Am probably missing some names here, but all told, it looks as if about 18 names that were listed in the old Pelican Press masthead as contributors or staff, are gone this week.
It looks like Rachel Brown Hackney is still on board as a managing editor and the Observer seems to have held on to the old Pelican advertising staff for the most part.
In today’s Pelican Press, the sidebar to editor Matt Walsh’s letter from the editor, says, “The opinion page is shifting its politico-economic philosophy to that of The Observer Group’s newspapers, embracing the principals of individual freedom and capitalism and Austrian economics; and the founding principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.”