We've got our very own monument to excess right here in SLO county. David Weyrich is a pompous, bigoted, 400-pound, Philistine blowhard who parlayed a business inheritance into $650-million cash and then blew it all -- blew it all -- in less than 15 years.
Among his many failed enterprises were the infamous North County Gazette newspapers, which were initially sold for .25 or .50-cents an issue (can't quite remember) but fell into disgrace amid a preposterously slanted right-wing bias.
Around the time of California's Proposition 22, the staunchly Catholic Weyrich issued an edict mandating that the papers (plural because there were several editions, one for each NC town) not publish any -- read any -- "positive" news items about homosexuality, and by that I mean to say it was a black-and-white policy decision the paper made no bones about.
The backlash was so severe that sales of the Gazette plummeted, leading first to a change that made the paper a free weekly and then, when even that failed to increase readership, Weyrich tried delivering the Gazette, for free, to every household in the County. People raised holy hell about finding his garbage on their driveway every Thursday, embarrassed journalists on the staff bailed out like so many rats off a sinking ship, and the paper folded within a matter of weeks.
There are at least a half dozen other examples of Weyrich's colossal miscalculations -- a $300-a-night hotel in downtown Atascadero, a million-dollar-per-lot residential subdivision in Paso Robles, a high-end luxury jet charter business at tiny Paso Robles airport -- all of which went belly-up faster than he could shovel the money into getting them started.
David Weyrich the living embodiment of the old saying: "A fool and his money are soon parted." He literally burned through $650-million, and now he's going to find out how the other half lives. Been nice knowing you Weyrich.
Among his many failed enterprises were the infamous North County Gazette newspapers, which were initially sold for .25 or .50-cents an issue (can't quite remember) but fell into disgrace amid a preposterously slanted right-wing bias.
Around the time of California's Proposition 22, the staunchly Catholic Weyrich issued an edict mandating that the papers (plural because there were several editions, one for each NC town) not publish any -- read any -- "positive" news items about homosexuality, and by that I mean to say it was a black-and-white policy decision the paper made no bones about.
The backlash was so severe that sales of the Gazette plummeted, leading first to a change that made the paper a free weekly and then, when even that failed to increase readership, Weyrich tried delivering the Gazette, for free, to every household in the County. People raised holy hell about finding his garbage on their driveway every Thursday, embarrassed journalists on the staff bailed out like so many rats off a sinking ship, and the paper folded within a matter of weeks.
There are at least a half dozen other examples of Weyrich's colossal miscalculations -- a $300-a-night hotel in downtown Atascadero, a million-dollar-per-lot residential subdivision in Paso Robles, a high-end luxury jet charter business at tiny Paso Robles airport -- all of which went belly-up faster than he could shovel the money into getting them started.
David Weyrich the living embodiment of the old saying: "A fool and his money are soon parted." He literally burned through $650-million, and now he's going to find out how the other half lives. Been nice knowing you Weyrich.
No comments:
Post a Comment