The Associated Press as well as our friends at the Riverfront Times and STLMedia are all reporting that St. Louis’ newest media entrant, the Globe Democrat, is losing their sports staff.

“Why?” You ask, tilting your head slightly to the right like a little puppy.

Well dear reader, when you don’t pay your employees, they tend to hate your guts and then usually choose to stop working for you.

Sports editor Rob Rains announced Tuesday the entire sports staff of Globe-Democrat.com had resigned effective Wednesday to pursue other opportunities, leaving the future of the website in doubt. Staffers have not been paid since May 15.

Rob’s son, BJ Rains also worked at the struggling website but managed to jump ship earlier this summer going to work for Fox Sports Midwest and InsideSTL. Leaving towards the end of May, at the time BJ was glowing about his time with the Globe Democrat…granted he had only not been paid for about 2 weeks at that point, so maybe he was still in that “Oh my check will be a little late. I believe them.” phase.

Say it with me: You can’t do the newspaper business the old way anymore. You have to be lean and the Globe started out emulating the “old way” right from the beginning. If the big guys can barely hold water working that way, why did Daniel Rositano, owner of the Globe, think he could with an effectively brand new operation?!  We just don’t get it.

In other news bidding for globe-democrat.com should start up any time now. It has a lame dash in the middle of it, but we’d imagine you could still do something special with it. Those girls pooping in that cup where popular, you could do something like that maybe.

More: “Globe Democrat: We’re Doing Fine, but Laying Off People Anyway“

We got an anonymous tip last night that succinctly read:

Globe Democrat laid off all employees because it ran out of money.

Hmm. Well the site is still up, and according to the St. Louis Beacon, the Globe Democrat has laid off three reporters and is “refocusing” on only certain sections of news. Namely sports and local politics.

The Beacon reported:

Dan Rositano, who resurrected the Globe-Democrat name and began publishing the news website on Dec. 8, said news reporters Brian Flinchpaugh, Steve Birmingham and Lisa Watson lost their jobs on Monday.

“These are extremely talented, wonderful people,” Rositano said. “I feel personally very blessed to know them. This is just a philosophical change in the way we run our media.

But we had to fire them because it turns out starting a “newspaper” when traditional media is at its lower point ever, turned out to not be a great idea. Lets be clear, just because the Globe-Democrat is a website doesn’t make it new media because from all accounts it is still run like an “old media” newspaper. I think they might actually even hand out those dusty old fedoras with a “press” card tucked in the band and we’re fairly certain someone that works there is named Bugsy.

“What we’re doing is taking a look at some of the strengths we have, some of the weaknesses and we’re reorganizing to move toward what the strengths will be.”

In addition to focusing on sports and political news, Rositano said the Globe-Democrat.com would be looking at its design and possibly changing the syndicated material it carries as well.

Look this is all fine but we think its pretty clear the actual truth falls in between the story the Globe Democrat fed the Beacon and our tipster. The ancient adage “When there’s smoke, there’s fire.” seems to apply here. You don’t “refocus” if everything is going great. You just don’t. When we’re out being awesome and banging 14 super-models, we don’t stop in the middle of the orgy and kick out 10 of them so we can “refocus” on the other 4. “Refocusing” is what someone would do if they were in a big fat girl orgy…something isn’t working…you 7 leave. Take your nachos with you.

According to Compete, globe-democrat.com got around 60k+ unique visitors in March, which isn’t horrible but quite a bit lower than other non-Post Dispatch news sources in the area, like the Riverfront Times. Below we have a graph over six months, from October to March of this year (Note that the Globe Democrat didn’t go live until December).

Look at the Globe Democrat site, you don’t see what you would think is any high-yeild ads on there and their comment to the Beacon about “possibly changing the syndicated material it carries” is telling. The STATS partnership is probably eating a small site like alive with either extremely high costs for their AP news articles or taking up valuable ad space with their own self-purchased ads.

To us this doesn’t seem at all like a “re-focusing” but more like a strip-down cost cutting measure to stay afloat, which only makes it harder to keep the lights on.

Good luck Globe Democrat. You let us know if you want to talk about you rebranding to become Punching Kitty’s Sports Section.

Oh one last thing. Maybe update that “staff” page when you get a chance.

A dead guy in a cemetery?! Oh no!

Frankly the police tape seems a bitch much in this situation.  Zombies would just walk right through that crap.

via Globe Democrat

For the second time in the last few weeks the Globe Democrat, St. Louis’ newest (but also totally old) news source, has made themselves look a little silly.

First there was their public tiff with Post Dispatch sports columnist Bernie Miklasz that columnated in an “Why is everyone always picking on me?” post from their sports editor…you know because guys that did nothing wrong always have to explain themselves…

Then today, the very Globe Democrat reporter that came in second place to Miklasz in the “Who is buying the Rams” sweepstakes stepped in it again.  Way to go annoying radio voice, and overly inflated talking head Howard Balzer!

Like most things these days, all the action happened over Twitter.

Step One: Say something that everyone is going to go crazy about but still really vague:

Woah!  Huge scoop there Balzer!  Everyone wants to see Bulger lose his horns, and this is huge.  There is one little detail though… (thanks to Bernie)

Well either the Rams let go of a whole lot of players today, or Balzer jumped the gun.  Lets see how he covers his bearded ass on this one…

Um, ok.  So why did the other 59 guys pack up?  Because they did expect to get back?  Nice try.

In other news, Steven Jackson blew his nose and Coach Spags took a dump.  Interpet those as you wish.

We have a little game for you today!

Below is a screenshot we took last night of a St. Louis media website.  Assuming you’ve never heard of either of the names on the picture below, what would you guess the name of this site was?

Here are you choices:

a) “The Toshiba website sponsored by St. Louis Globe-Democrat”

b) “Toshiba website sponsored by nothing…all I see is Toshiba.”

c) “I have no idea what that dead hooker is doing in my trunk officer, but I do know she looks like that girl from high school that dumped me and totally would deserve the beating from someone that’s not me and put her in my trunk probably because our cars look alike or something.”

The answer was either A or B.  C was a confession that I’m leaving up because the delete key doesn’t work on my keyboard.  Its all out there now.  That’s my New Year’s Resolution: No delete!

The sexiest actor of all time is Bronson Pinchot.

Whoops!. Oh well…no delete!

That “other” St. Louis newspaper that closed its doors in 1986, before newspapers closing their doors was all the rage, is back…as a website.

Things looks good so far, and I really hope they do well since we need another strong news source in this town, but I do have a few questions:

1. They do know that their website doesn’t have to just look like a boring old newspaper right?  Don’t get me wrong, the newspaper look can be awesome, but this isn’t it.  If you want to do the newspaper thing look at this: www.instablog.org That’s how you do a newspaper website!

2. If GlobeDemocrat.com is a blog about the old Globe-Democrat newspaper and then the Globe-Democrat relaunches itself as a website, couldn’t they get that domain instead of using globe-democrat.com?  I mean, whats the point of the blog now anyway?

3. I’m sure their staff is pretty small, but I really hope they get more unique content than a few articles surrounded by news feed articles from STATS.  They will need some voices to make this thing go anywhere.

4. This page could use some work.

5. Their privacy policy has a few holes in it…normally this isn’t something I would really feel the need to check in to but…well…you know.

First we have this (emphasis mine):

Personally Identifiable Information collected by Globe-Democrat.com may also be used for other purposes including but not limited to site administration and troubleshooting. Certain third parties who provide technical support for the operation of our site (our Web hosting service and our newsletter provider, for example) may access such information.

…and then this…

As we continue to develop our business, we may sell, buy, merge or partner with other companies or businesses. In such transactions, user information may be among the transferred assets. We may also disclose your information in response to a court order, at other times when we believe we are reasonably required to do so by law, in connection with the collection of amounts you may owe to us, and/or whenever we deem it appropriate or necessary to give such information to law enforcement authorities. Please note we may not provide you with notice prior to disclosure in such cases.

I’m sure they mean well, and I’m not here to try and accuse them of things they haven’t yet done, but this thing is like swiss cheese.

6. Howard Balzer on sports?!  Ugh!  Really?  There wasn’t anyone else?!  If you wanted a jersey chaser to write for you there are lots of girls out there that are way more attractive with only a slight loss in writing acumen. …nice work picking up BJ Rains though.