With The Oklahoman still fading into irrelevance, the paper's newish out-of-state owners, Gannet, recently brought in Ray Rivera – a dreamy, ambitious and just-naive-enough-for-the-job newsman from Seattle – to try to turn things around, and transform the paper from a right-wing propaganda pamphlet for the state's ruling elite into a community-backed source of allegedly objective local news and journalism.
This new direction, which I assume will keep the paper afloat just long enough to be bought back by the Gaylord family and turned into a non-profit so they can maintain their influence in this town, has ruffled the feathers of the paper's old guard who long for the days when The Oklahoman was still an influential, albeit draconian, publication that targeted conservative Oklahoma readers who enjoyed a right-wing, racist spin on local news and information.
One of those people in the old guard is J.E. McReynolds. He worked for the paper for nearly 30 years, with the last five spent overseeing the production of some of the hottest, most-out-of-touch conservative views on the paper's editorial page.