Merry Christmas, Love Your Corporate Publisher

The Little Ole Grey Lady in Winston-Salem, the Winston-Salem Journal, announced Tuesday that the copy editors have left the building. All 17 of them have been laid off and ain't coming back, thanks to the "efficiencies of modern technology."

The Journal will now be designed and proofed by the knowledgeable folks in Tampa and Richmond. We're betting these telecommuting copy editors in Tampa will have to pull up Googlemaps to figure out the difference between Ashe County, Asheboro and Asheville.

New Journal publisher Jeffrey Green allows that, "If we perform as expected in 2011, I anticipate being able to add news resources to improve our coverage."

Yeah, right. If Green believes that, we have some ocean front land available in Glendale Springs we can sell him.

The Journal's owner, Media General (which owns 42 newspapers in the Southeast at latest count), will continue sucking out all the ink, and the cash, until the Journal is nothing more than a crumpled old piece of newsprint lying in a dusty corner. The once proud aggregator of news from Northwest North Carolina has been declining rapidly in the last five years, routinely eliminating sections, reducing page sizes and cutting copy space all in the effort to preserve those big 20+ percent profit margins that newspaper publishers have historically enjoyed. Media General and her equally greedy sister conglomerates long ago shed any pretense of serving the local communities in which they do business. Investigative journalism and carrying out the duties of a watchdog Fourth Estate just don't pad the pockets. Media General CEO Marshall Norton still pulled down a hefty $1.4 million in 2009 while his empire lost more than $35 million.

UNC J-School professor Phillip Myer predicted some years ago that the last newspaper reader would retire sometime before 2043. Sadly, the Journal won't be one of the last ones standing.