Kirk Wessler fired by Peoria Journal Star?

Details are few but here's what's known...

Kirk Wessler has been working for the PJ Star since the Dick Lien era...

He was the current Sports Editor.

Within the past 24 hours, Kirk Wessler announced on his own personal Facebook page that Friday September 7 is his last day at the Peoria Journal Star (owned by Gatehouse Media).

Wessler admits it is sudden, surprising and not what he wanted - so draw your own conclusions.  One of his colleagues, Aaron Ferguson appears to have only found out about his colleague's leaving yesterday.
One of Kirk's colleagues who worked in Missouri tweeted that Gatehouse is an "awful newspaper chain" - https://twitter.com/ghank/status/1037070821909581825

Here's a couple clips from Kirk Wessler's statement:
""Friday will be my last day at the Journal Star.
I may have more to say in a few days, but right now, I’m a jumble of mixed emotions.
... the end is not quite what I imagined either.
...My last day as a full-time newspaper journalist will be the Friday after Labor Day 2018. This wasn’t by design. It’s just the way things worked out.
I wonder what comes next."
Kirk Wessler once explained in a post on the Journal Star forum, that he turned sour on Bradley Head Coach Jim Les within the first year that Les was hired.  He then began beating the drum to get Les run out as head coach...

One other comment was:
"I dropped a critical hammer on Les and his program"

..and then Wessler spent the next 7-8 years "hammering" on Jim Les, unfairly attacking at any point and failing to even recognize the quality of the program, the team and the successes.
Wessler called for Les' firing and became an advocate for the horrible moves by Joanne Glasser then the subsequent disastrous hirings that sunk Bradley to near-DIII levels for the better part of 8 years.
Wessler hasn't let up yet, as he still occasionally drags out erroneous arguments to try to attack Les or Ken Kavanagh.  It is his MO - to try to justify the horrid moves made under the Glasser regime, and shift blame for all the disasters - away from where it belongs - Glasser & Cross.

It is many fans' opinion that Kirk Wessler bears a large amount of the reponsibility for the destruction of the BU athletics programs in that era and the disaster that is only now beginning to show recovery and is still a long way from being fully recovered.  Wessler also attacked GOOD Bradley fans - the very ones who finally turned on him, turned on Glasser and forced the changes that are now bringing Bradley back.  Wessler belittled Bradley fans who did not want to play in the small girls' gym, who did not want to play opponents like Eureka College, and who did not want the kind of hires that caused the worse performances in almost every sport that Bradley Athletics has ever known.

Kirk will get his share of accolades.  When journalists give themselves awards, it really doesn't register much with me or anyone else.  Just patting themselves on the back...
99% of all news on Bradley basketball gets reported first and gets reported more accurately and better on BradleyFans.com than in the Journal Star.
Is it any wonder the Journal Star circulation and readership has plummeted!  Is it any wonder the paper has been sold off repeatedly and downsized again & again with layoffs frequently?

I personally cancelled my subscription to the PJ Star a year ago after subscribing for 40 years...and I am not alone, as I know many others who have cancelled after multiple huge rate hikes while the paper shrinks and fails to offer any decent coverage of Bradley basketball.  It's hard to figure what all those people do over there at the PJ Star when they don't cover Bradley, there's absolutely NO coverage of local high school sports - and then Kirk writes a dozen columns every time there's an obscure track meet!

Oh well - some newspapers are thriving but the old haggard ones who demand you have to keep reading but don't bother to give decent, fair coverage because they believe they are a monopoly and you have no choice....those papers are the ones on the way out.  Bye...