Cindi Ross Scoppe shared her good news with me last week, but told me to embargo it while she and the folks at the Post and Courier decided how to announce it. So I did. And then, she went ahead and scooped me herself on social media!
It’s those kind of killer instincts that have made her the finest political journalist working in South Carolina today.
And yes, she is indeed back working. As she wrote:
I’m starting my new job on Thursday, as an editorial writer for The Post and Courier. I’ll be working with a great team, writing editorials and columns primarily about state government and the Legislature. And yes, I’m staying in Columbia, where I can keep a close eye on everything. I’ll have a column in a few days introducing myself to readers, and I’ll share that here.
This is tremendous news — the Charleston paper creating this new position, in Columbia, and hiring Cindi for it is the kind of fairy-tale ending that just doesn’t happen for experienced journalists these days. It’s wonderful for Cindi, and even better for South Carolina.
Y’all might not know this, but the Post and Courier is the last daily newspaper in South Carolina that actually employs an editorial department (with an editorial page editor and everything), offering opinions on the issues that affect our state. The State, as you know, doesn’t do it — they didn’t even bother to have an “opinion page” today, which is just as well, since when they do run it it’s just canned stuff from elsewhere and a few letters. And I learned during the campaign, when I was checking around to set up endorsement interviews, that the Greenville and Spartanburg papers don’t do editorials any more, either.
Cindi told me that the Charleston folks asked why, toward the end of her career at The State, she wrote only columns and no editorials. The answer was as obvious to me as it was to her — there was something vaguely false about offering editorials when you’re the last member of the editorial board. Might as well sign them. (For those still confused about the difference, I’ll explain further on request.)
I’m just so happy for Cindi. But I’m thrilled for South Carolina. We all needed her back on the job.
Related Posts
Thanks Brad. We decided to go ahead and start out on social media, and then follow up with a proper column after I’m officially on board. (And I hope you are sufficiently impressed by the image that I – yes, I – put together.)
Oh, yes. It gives me great satisfaction, tinged with Schadenfreude, to see you developing those peripheral skills. It’s good for you!
But seriously and sincerely, I’m happy that you’ll be — or so I assume — able to spend most of your time writing again…
This is great nrws!
Very glad to hear this. She can still be active in a state that she knows well.
So sad what’s happening to newspapers. I remember when The State stopped their Saturday editorial page. Looks like that was just the beginning of a downhill slide.
I stopped the Saturday (print) page, and replaced it with a lot of extra online content.
I did it because my staff was shrinking, and I didn’t want to see the quality of what we were doing suffer. Fridays had always been brutal, putting out the Saturday, Sunday and Monday pages all at once. After I’d lost a couple of positions, I thought it wise to ditch some pages. I preferred doing less to doing just as much with a smaller number of people, and seeing the quality suffer.
In retrospect, it’s laughable that I thought we were hard up. Sure, I’d lost my production person and one of my associate editors (Nina Brook, who wrote mainly about education), never to be replaced. But I still had Cindi and Warren and Mike Fitts as associates, plus Robert, an office manager and a part-timer with production skills. A far, far cry from when Cindi was doing it by herself — and then there were none. She of course had to cut back greatly on what the editorial page did, but still her work output was superhuman. I’m glad she’ll be back to pure writing. That will be wonderful for her, and for us.
We were still all super-busy after ditching Saturday — in fact, my workload on Fridays became greater (a really intense 11 or 12 hours) because I took on the added work of that online content myself.
But we were blessed by great resources, compared to what was to come…
Who remembers the Columbia Record? An afternoon paper now seems like something from a mideval period.
Love cindi & have missed her so much! Will i be able to read her colums here or must i read on line only? Love the news & courrier also but it is no longer delivered to florence.