Barney’s On the Beat

By Barney Brantingham

Fired: Randy Alcorn, the newspaper’s veteran
chief financial officer, was canned Monday, a major loss to a paper
already staggering under lost circulation, defecting advertisers,
and ongoing controversy.

Alcorn said he had planned to resign anyway, deeply discouraged
that the paper had degenerated into a “propaganda campaign and
petty vindictiveness” instead of dealing with the serious problems
of running a daily newspaper. But, he told me, owner Wendy McCaw
made “a pre-emptive strike,” firing him Monday afternoon because
“we didn’t see eye-to-eye and she wasn’t comfortable with me.”