It’s funny to me how many people I ask who don’t know that. New Times story about it here. Part of the reason is the way the Arizona Republic, in an awesome example of journalistic poutiness, buried the news about the award last May.

Arizona seems to live in a dream world sometimes. The most popular politician in the state runs an organization so compromised a local paper wins a public service Pulitzer for examining just a small part of it—and it does not become part of the public debate.

I mention this only to note that the East Valley Tribune may be being sold, after a year that, despite the Pulitzer, has already seen a wrenching downsizing: 140 staffers let go, publication trimmed first to four days, and now three days, a week.

Freedom Communications, the national chain based in Orange County, is in bankruptcy, and the news at the end of last week is that it is asking the court to let it sell off some assets, among them possibly the EVT and a few smaller local papers—the Sun City Daily News-Sun and Ahwatukee Foothills News.

The EVT’s story about it here.

The more I read the EVT, the more I like it. Hard to argue with this account of the company’s financial problems:

In its bankruptcy filing earlier this month, Freedom listed debts of nearly $1 billion. Much of that was incurred in 2004, when the company bought out some members of the Hoiles family, which has controlled the company since its founding more than 70 years ago. Two outside investor groups financed the buyout.

In recent years, the company has seen a steep decline in advertising revenue and increasing competition from the Internet, as have most newspaper companies across the nation. The situation was made worse by the onset of the latest national recession. As a result, Freedom defaulted on its debt obligations.

Emphasis added. The lesson here is the insane amount of debt Freedom and so many media companies took on in the earlier years of this decade. People get sentimental about daily newspapers, rightly or wrongly, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that most of the daily journalism companies in true financial straits right now got there through bad business decisions unrelated to the current financial downturn or, truth be told, the decline of the industry overall.

More on that little hobby-horse of mine here.

Reporter Nick Martin, one of the staffers laid off earlier this year, writes in more detail about the issue here on his blog Heat City.

p.s. I realize the EVT has a lot of problems to deal with right now, but I feel I have to note it’s another one of the local papers whose web site is mighty glitchy. Here’s what I got when I used the site’s seach engine to find its story on the latest news about its parent company:

bad_web_evt_page

Here’s a closeup of the results:

Screen_shot_2009-09-20_at_11.23.55_AM

And the links all resolve to weird Google Reader pages.

Search for the same thing through Google News, however, and it comes right up.

Similarly,when I searched for the word “arpaio” to get the link for the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series, I got this:

Screen_shot_2009-09-20_at_11.13.21_AM

The search engine should be key-worded so that any search for Arpaio should produce a master page with the series and recent articles nicely laid out.

Now, anyone at the paper would doubtless sigh when asked about this, making the valid point that with 140 recent layoffs, resources were stretched thin.

To which one would still have to reply: So why weren’t these basic web issues done before the operation borrowed a billion dollars to buy out its owners?