One time in the early 2000s, I approached the ticket takers at a high school football game in Dillon for my normal routine.

“Hi, I’m here to cover the game for The Montana Standard,” I told the nice women, who noticed my clipboard and nodded for me to enter without a ticket.

As I walked away, I heard one woman say to me, “I hope you can find a better place for us than Page 5.”

Apparently, she believed the Dillon Beavers should always be on the front page.

In the 14 or so years I worked under Bruce Sayler on the Standard sports desk, we traveled to cover nearly every home football game for Dillon and Anaconda.

Trying to get a story in by deadline in those days was no easy task — especially when you were an hour away from the newsroom. Doing the postgame interviews and typing up the boxscore usually only left 15 or 20 minutes to get the story written.

But we busted our hump every night and got it done, knowing that people would just take our hard work for granted. We worked hard whether the story was going on Page 1 or Page 5 of the sports section.

It wasn’t that the folks in Dillon were unhappy with our stories and coverage. Most of them were. Some people, though, are just never satisfied. Those are the people you hear from the most.

I have friends who would always accuse me and my coworkers of favoring Butte High over Butte Central. I have friends who would always accuse me and my coworkers of favoring Butte Central over Butte High.

Usually, that was based on the placement of the story in the paper and the size of the photo.

“Butte Central won, and the Maroons only got a short story on the bottom of the page,” one friend told me once. “Butte High lost, and the Bulldogs got a big photo and a huge story.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Butte High played in Butte, and Central played in Browning.”

We didn’t have the manpower to send a reporter and a photographer to Browning to cover the game, so we had to rely on the coach to call in the boxscore.

We had a great staff and the best sports editor of all time. However, every day was filled with criticism from readers who thought we should have done more or done something differently.

That was fine by us. It was part of the business, and we loved it.

If you’ve spent a minute in newspaper journalism, you know exactly what I mean. You get 10,000 complaints for every one attaboy.

So, I am calling Bravo Sierra on last week’s column by Jeff Welsch, the statewide sports editor for the Montana Lee Newspapers. The column appeared on 406mtsports.com, and it was subtly announcing that the once-free website will now charge $4.99 each month.

“Our reporters are routinely greeted with ‘thank you’ at events, at the grocery store and at local watering holes,” the column reads.

That is some serious selective listening, if that is what they are hearing. I’m at the games, too, and I hear something completely different.

I hear people ask why there is so little coverage anymore from the newspaper.

That’s because Lee Enterprises has cut its newsrooms to the bone. The Montana Standard used to have four full-time sports writers and a handful of part-time scribes covering all the sports in the area.

Now, they have one writer. That’s right. One.

He is really good, but he is just one man trying to do the job we used to have six or seven people to do.

The paper has had some very good writers in the 11 plus years since I gratefully joined the “Life After Lee” group. Lee Enterprises still has some very good writers covering sports for the papers and 406mtsports.com.

But they have all been handcuffed by management constantly asking for more from its writers while giving them less resources.

Most of those writers have also been asked to take two-week, unpaid furloughs. That is the real “thanks” they get from the company for all their hard work.

“Great job on all the work that prep season. Now take two weeks off. Hopefully you can still make your mortgage or rent payment.”

In the last dozen years, Lee has axed great journalists like Sayler, Bob Meseroll, Chuck Johnson, Carmen Winslow and Walter Hinick, just to name a few. The paper chain also prematurely closed the careers of some quality editors and the best collection of pressmen you will ever see.

It wasn’t Welsch who decided to make such cuts that destroyed a once-great product. But he has been steering the ship for sports coverage that isn’t even a shell of what it used to be.

He is the one who stopped the papers from running real boxscores, and then he brags about the little information that he calls boxscores. Those are not boxscores.

The coverage isn’t anywhere near what it was 12 years ago. Today, it is embarrassingly lacking.

So, Welsch writes a column to brag about the coverage while asking for money?

That is kind of like the captain of the Titanic bragging about his steering to all those people scrambling for the lifeboats.

“You see that? I almost missed that iceberg.”

What I also found insulting was his line about “free websites.”

“A free website makes sense for a fledgling niche site trying to gain footing; now that 406 Sports is a household name across the Montana sporting landscape we will be joining Lee’s successful HuskersExtra in Nebraska, BadgersExtra in Wisconsin and STL Pinch Hits in St. Louis as a cornerstone product earning its keep.”

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I assume he was referring to ButteSports.com as one of those fledgling niche sites. I was in charge of that site for 10 years, and during that time, Bruce Sayler, Pat Ryan, Derek Hendrickson, Ron and Shelly Davis and I routinely destroyed Lee Enterprises when it came to stories.

Lee also completely copied its sports website from us. They might say they didn’t model 406mtsports.com after ButteSports.com when they debuted their site four years after ours, but we know the truth.

We also know that it isn’t true that readers today like what they are getting more than they did in the past. They charge a whole lot more for the paper now, and they give you a whole lot less content.

What people in their right mind would want that?

Now, some of Lee’s papers have moved to three days a week publication, and they are delivered by the mail. And subscription prices are still going up.

The paper chain has self-destructed thanks to years of mismanagement and really bad decisions. 

Feel free to pay the $4.99 for the website that was once free. Maybe it is worth it to you. Maybe they will write a feature story about your athlete while they neglect to give the full story of the action of so many other players and teams.

Maybe that will make you thank one of the writers at an event, grocery store or watering hole.

But don’t for one second believe that they are charging you now because the product is suddenly worth more.

Don’t for a second believe that they are taking that money to pay their writers more.

Remember, they are still forcing their employees to take unpaid furloughs. The employees that they haven’t laid off, that is.

This smells like nothing more than a money grab by a company that has already squeezed all the blood from all of its papers. It reeks of a last-ditch attempt to refill the coffers so those untalented executives can comfortably parachute out to safety.

And those poor readers in Dillon will be lucky if they ever find their game stories on Page 5.

— Bill Foley, who will not be subscribing to 406mtsports.com or applying for a job with Lee Enterprises any time soon, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 before that billionaire weirdo ruins it. Listen to the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.