The production god is dead. Long live the Internet

As you know, it's been a hard but transformative week for the Freeman, having moved print production to Troy. Yes, our mailroom and press employees were let go as a result. I've know many of them for many years and it has been difficult to see them go.

But along with that difficult move comes a ray of inspiration. Our future is looking bright and I'm glad I get to be a part of it.

If you need a refresher, here's Publisher's Ira Fusfeld addressing our future and an illuminating interview by the Watershed Post with Managing Editor Tony Adamis, which addresses "how to make the transition from being a newspaper – which is a good thing to be -- to being a multimedia journalism company."

I'll let Journal Register Company CEO John Patton explain why we are doing what we are doing.

That Hinchey episode, explained

Daily Freeman Managing Editor Tony Adamis spoke to Julia Reischel of Watershed Post on Tuesday about the whole Hinchey-reporter incident:

Watershed Post: It's good to see the Freeman weigh in on this, now that this video has gone national.

Tony Adamis: We took a lot of flack for the length of time that it took us to respond, but we were just trying to be responsible about it. We took a kind of third-party approach to it. Even though I trust my correspondent, he and I both agreed that if any story was going to be run, it would be done by some other reporter approaching it as any reporter would. Plus, I took the time to do my own investigation.

It's a great and serious piece (unlike, say, the musings of this horrible person), and explains a lot of things. If you would like to take an inside peek at our newsroom, I recommend you give it a read.

Among the findings:

* Correspondent William Kemble was not taken off the Partition Street story, as many had thought:

Ariel (Zangla) had been working on that story for months. And William was working, for a shorter period of time, on the story on the earmarks issue. And after the earmarks story, the Hinchey camp complained about the characterization in that story having to do with the Partition Street Project, which led us to delay Ariel's story about Partition Street while we tried to do our best due diligence of looking at the complaint. The result was the second Kemble story. That wasn't even a planned story. It was really just a result of the complaint from the Hinchey camp. It's not true that [Kemble] had been taken off the story.

* Veteran Freeman reporter Paul Kirby once had the mayor of Kingston throw his own tape recorder at him. (That would be the late T.R. Gallo, not James Sottile - he throws drinks).
* The Freeman has been described as a right-wing paper.
* The Freeman has endorsed U.S. Rep. Hinchey over and over and over and over.

In conclusion, the Freeman is bipolar.

And everyone, it seems, remembers the incident differently. Hugh Reynolds of the Kingston Times even described that after the incident, Hinchey, "looked directly at the reporter, about 20 feet away, put his right hand around his throat and pointed at him with his left index finger."

Ouch.

Also, I wasn't there, but I remember it like this:




I know. I'm a horrible person.

UPDATE: Maurice Hinchey fans are hyperventilating because his lead is slipping, according to the Wall Street Journal. He's only up by a whooping 19 percentage points, according to internal polling, the Journal reports.

In other words, if true, he's set to crush George Phillips.

PANIC!

UPDATE 2: A korrecshun, Hinchey is up by 17 points in that Dem poll. 

Hinchey Poll Memo

UPDATE 3: It should be mentioned that Republican polling has them tied. 
The New York Times' FiveThirtyEight summarizes it neatly.