you ruined everything! you ... ruiner!

(note: this is taken from the comments over at honest wagner, so please forgive the proper capitalization.)

God bless John Perrotto for his column on the Nutting family.

I decided to flee their "empire" in Wheeling almost 10 years ago. Our office had threadbare carpet; our computer systems were held together with spit and duct tape; our management was worn down, beaten and completely subservient.

There was little resembling good journalism that came out of that place -- and this is not to denigrate the people I worked with, who on the whole were good people. We were paid shit wages, and Ogden was more than content to put shit in his papers, as long as advertisers kept buying space.

And they did, because he owned all the papers in the Upper Ohio Valley. If they wanted to advertise, they had to go through the Nutting family.

I knew this family would ruin my beloved Pirates. I should know, as I watched him ruin two perfectly good newspapers. What fans see now is what we saw every day.

And no, I don't think the good people of the Upper Ohio Valley could or would ignore his papers. If you want to read news, check the comics, see the local sports coverage or do the crossword puzzle over breakfast, you have no choice, as he owns them all -- The Intelligencer, the News-Register, the (Martins Ferry) Times-Leader, the Steubenville Herald-Star, the New Martinsville/Wetzel county papers, etc.

But I haven't lived there for nine years, so I could be wrong. I doubt it, though.