The Night They Drove the News-Press Down

There's basically bumbling, there's malicious, and then there's head so far up your ass you might as well be a hemmorhoid, or the News-Press. Or so the case must be, as breaking news says the paper has fired its behind-the-scenes-soul, Life Editor Andrea Huebner. It's hard to imagine the paper actually coming out with her gone, she's done so much work for Life, Arts, Scene, the copy desk, special tabs, you name it. Through all the turmoil over the past few months, people would turn to Andrea and say, "Well there's hope-you're still here." Now she's the first person to actually be fired in this whole mess, which is kind of like someone--oh, let's call her Wendy--managing to get off the Titanic, (poor Nipper left behind, alas, but at least Travis is used to ending up in the drink), surveying her lifeboat and saying, "I think you're the problem," and then scuttling the boat. I picked that marine metaphor since Mad, Mad, Millionaire McCaw seems to like yachting, if you can call a ship with its own helicopter (plus passengers Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones) a yacht and not an aircraft carrier. (Oh, unlike, say, the News-Press's current regime, I will point out my conflict of interest here, as Andrea is a dear friend, having gone to college with Amy and actually, with her equally cool husband Barry, was one of the people I talked to the most at a party of Amy's before we began dating 12 years ago that made me say, "This woman must be great--she has such interesting, intelligent, fun friends!")

My guess is Andrea got it because she let Healthspan columnist Michael Seabaugh get in a polite and accurate--and therefore punishable by death--shot in on Dr. (of Physiology) Laura. The paper ran an apology to Dr. (of Physiology) Laura, without even notifying Seabaugh, and no doubt Andrea got the brunt of not catching his indiscretion, or worse, seeing it and not playing suck up to the powers that be. This terrible faux pas, of course, comes after her letting Starshine Roshell run a column in support of those who had left the paper, too. They took Starshine's column away to get even there, but Andrea had just been piling up the strikes (I mean baseball, not union strikes, but who knows, maybe the News-Press spies, uh, internal security, saw her in the crowd at rallies supporting the workers who actually respect the fading corpse of the paper.)

It's more than fitting that Wendy McCaw's "yachting" partner in Europe while the mess went down was Michael Douglas. She might want to rent, or sue Blockbuster to get a copy for free, Douglas's film War of the Roses. Because the ending of that film will give her a hint as to what's going happen to her and the paper. Soon.