The Arizona Republic's weird "autism is cured" story
Big splashy story on the front page of the Valley & State section the other day.
Autism therapy group says it cured 6 kids
Results from a Phoenix study of a behavior therapy designed to cure autism give hope to thousands of Arizona families and could revamp special education in the state’s public schools.
But the costly price tag could keep the treatment out of reach for many families. And the state’s budget crisis could mean implementation is years away at the school level.
The Center for Autism and Related Disorders says it has cured six of 14 autistic children who participated in a $5.4 million, state-funded study in the Phoenix area.
Emphasis added. We know nothing about autism, but this story doesn’t have anything close to the amount of information in it to allow someone to figure out what’s going on.
The story says that the treatment included “intensive behavior therapy” but never explains what that is. A few graphs later it’s defined again—as “a type of therapy called applied behavior analysis, known as ABA”—but it’s never explained what that entails, either.
Even further on we hear it can be “web-based.” Then we hear again that it’s “highly intense”—and can cost $200,000.
There’s very little in the story that would help a disinterested reader figure out the value of this program.
There’s mention of one child who was helped by the program, but the reporter didn’t talk to the girl involved. Instead, her parents merely say that she’s “recovered.”
The story also doesn’t explain CARD’s position in the sometimes contentious world of autism treatment, and doesn’t put this program into the context of other CARD programs or the spectrum of autism treatment generally.
And finally, the story ends on an amazing note. First, a director of the center gets to make an unchallenged paean to, unsurprisingly, the center’s work…:
Daniel Openden, the center’s vice president and clinical services director, said the CARD results are the latest to prove ABA-based therapy is the gold standard for autism treatment.
… and then, in the last lines of the story, undercuts the story’s entire premise and headline:
He sees autistic children make amazing progress, but he doesn’t say they are cured or recovered.
“Recovery can mean different things to different people, so the key is to understand how recovery is defined,” he said. “We see a range of outcomes in response to effective treatment, up to and including children who appear indistinguishable from their peers. But we’re not comfortable saying that these children no longer have autism.”
6:11 AM
The Great Fountain Hills Garbage Crisis of 2010
The Republic has a big story this a.m. about how Tea Party folks, feeling their oats, are all upset about changes in the way garbage is collected in Fountain Hills.
The city is going with only one trash hauler for the town, and requiring residents to recycle.
The story goes on and on, letting the Tea Party folks have their say, but never details what the basis for the city action was.
I mean, I assume that Fountain Hills isn’t the first city to deal with this issue? What are the pros and cons of the debate?
Seems to me that one trash hauler rather than the current five would save the city money and might reduce the number of noisy trucks in a neighborhood by 80 percent, among other things.
And it would be nice to know if there were any federal or state requirements for cities in terms of recycling or if there were economic benefits to the city with it. (For example, by reducing the material in its landfill.)
The story tells us none of this.
The one thing we do know is that, with the Tea Party people involved, the debate got pretty dumb pretty quick.
Said one council person:
“"When ideology prevents rational discussion of a really pretty mundane topic, trash, there is no perspective Everything is suspect, which paralyzes us.”
What’s the Republic’s excuse?
5:54 AM
Arizona Republic: No news here! Please move along
As PHXated has mentioned before, the Arizona Republic has a curious approach to news.
If you have a wet-behind-the-ears would-be representative with a famous name who worked for a porny web site, or a governor who goes into the Twilight Zone for ten seconds during a debate, for heaven’s sake don’t treat it as big news or cover it as an ongoing story.
It just gets folks riled up.
Newspapers for decades survived on not riling folks up. (They might cancel their subscription!)
The world’s changed, today, but newspapers haven’t.
The latest: The paper heard, recently, that Gov. Brewer had been in a car crash in 1988 during which, it certainly seems, she’d been driving drunk.
The paper had a scoop!
Stop the presses?
Nope.
Instead, the paper buried it in a fact-checking column in section two. And made the story a he-said she-said sort of thing.
… When in fact the officers at the scene said she’d been drunk, and Brewer failed four sobriety tests! (The comical details are here.
The original Republic article apparently had an interview with Brewer, but didn’t ask her the obvious questions:
How do you explain the failed drunk tests? Should she have been arrested? Would failing four sobriety tests in typical stops lead to drivers being arrested—and shouldn’t they be?
Anyway, since then, Brewer has been trying to do damage control.
Here’s Brewer on CNN, for example:
As PHXated has mentioned before, the Arizona Republic has a curious approach to news.
If you have a wet-behind-the-ears would-be representative with a famous name who worked for a porny web site, or a governor who goes into the Twilight Zone for ten seconds during a debate, for heaven’s sake don’t treat it as big news or cover it as an ongoing story.
It just gets folks riled up.
Newspapers for decades survived on not riling folks up. (They might cancel their subscription!)
The world’s changed, today, but newspapers haven’t.
The latest: The paper heard, recently, that Gov. Brewer had been in a car crash in 1988 during which, it certainly seems, she’d been driving drunk.
The paper had a scoop!
Stop the presses?
Nope.
Instead, the paper buried it in a fact-checking column in section two. And made the story a he-said she-said sort of thing.
… When in fact the officers at the scene said she’d been drunk, and Brewer failed four sobriety tests! (The comical details are here.
The original Republic article apparently had an interview with Brewer, but didn’t ask her the obvious questions:
How do you explain the failed drunk tests? Should she have been arrested? Would failing four sobriety tests in typical stops lead to drivers being arrested—and shouldn’t they be?
Anyway, since then, Brewer has been trying to do damage control.
Here’s Brewer on CNN, for example:
Note that CNN, a national organization, is following up on the story.
Here again, the Arizona Republic had another story of national interest to run with, and it both a) mishandles it at the beginning and b) doesn’t follow up on it.
8:08 AM
More dog news from the Arizona Republic!
The paper’s editorial Moriarity, Scruffy McPoochie, continues to wield awesome power from his perch in the paper’s Living section.
Lesser editors vie for his favors by running as many dog stories as they can.
Today, in the Valley & State section, there’s a story about a crazy dog who was running around and attacking people and then threatened a cop, who shot the thing.
That’s a pretty simple story, but the Republic, splaying it all over the front page of the local news section, plays it thusly:
Gilbert police officer’s killing of dog divides neighborhood
It’s a gunshot that has divided a Gilbert neighborhood.
On one side, a family is mourning the loss of its 2-year-old “goofy” bloodhound and is angry that a Gilbert police officer would fire a handgun near their house in the 500 block of West Laredo Avenue.
On the other side are two women who claim they were attacked by a confused, aggressive dog roaming the street. At least one, Janet McLellan, says the officer’s use of deadly force was appropriate.
The neighborhood isn’t “divided.” There aren’t neighbors running around who are “pro-rabid dogs.”
The owners, who had a violent dog on the loose, are mad because their dog got killed.
The hed should have been “Reckless dog owners mad their rabid dog got shot.”
And the bloodhound wasn’t “goofy.” It was running around attacking people.
But it’s clear at the Republic that no one wants to offend the canine-centric sensibility of Scruffy McPoochie!
The Arizona Republic runs more dogs news than Dog Fancy. Our complete archive of the momentous rise of Scruffy McPoochie is here.
7:47 AM
The Arizona Republic takes a pass on Ben Quayle's disastrous poll numbers
We’ve noticed before how the Arizona Republic didn’t take much interest in Little Benny Quayle’s involvement with a porny web site, Dirty Scottsdale.
Skanky sex, a famous political name…those aren’t the sorts of things the media should be interested in.
Now we can see the paper’s not interested in any bad news about Quayle.
Yesterday, a reputable polling company released numbers on the District 3 race. (The company is Public Policy Polling.)
It said Quayle was trailing opponent Jon Hulburd, 46 to 44.
Worse, it gave Quayle a 52 percent unfavorable rating.
Is this news?
Politico this a.m. has a lede story booming “99 Dem House Seats in Danger—that is to say, it’s not a good time to be a Democrat running for Congress.
District 3 went for McCain by a 57 to 42 margin—that is to say, it’s a solidly GOP district.
But nothing about it in the Republic this a.m. Columnist Laurie Roberts, however, did do a blog post:
The poll of 655 likely voters included more Republicans than Democrats and respondents favored Sen. John McCain by a wide margin over Rodney Glassman. Those aspects would seem in line with the district’s partisan makeup and its presumed political loyalties in another race.
But home readers of the paper—the ones who are clustered in the upscale developments in northeast Phoenix, where this battle is being fought—aren’t let in on the news.
7:45 AM
The Espresso Pundit nails the Republic again
Local right-wing pol Greg Patterson, who blogs under the name Espresso Pundit, is a nut on several levels, but he reads the Republic closely and occasionally catches it out.
Today he notes that the paper, in its endorsement of Felicia Rotellini for AG, praises her temperament.
This point Patterson ridicules (“My puppy has a nice temperament”) unfairly and dumbly.
(For one, a better temperament is something many Arizona politicians need. Two, it’s not clear he understands what the word means. I don’t think his puppy does have a “nice” temperament for example. I’d bet that, like most puppies, it has an overexcitable, easily distractible, immature one. And finally, in any case the paper didn’t say Rotellini had a nice temperament; in this context it was obviously talking about probity and fairness and the like.)
Anyway, he goes on to note that a few months ago the paper went out to praise Rotellini’s “significant” courtroom experience.
It’s since come out she doesn’t have much of that: Patterson quotes a more recent Republic story that says Rotellini’s never tried a criminal case.
Says Patterson:
Neither the Republic nor Rotellini ever bothered to tell voters that the Republic’s Primary endorsement was based on an incorrect statement. It’s obvious why Rotellini didn’t go back to the Republic editorial board and set the record straight. She would have had to concede that she had exaggerated her record so much that she caused the Republic to get it wrong. Then the public would know that while she was touting her record as a “career” prosecutor, she had actually never tried a criminal case.
Full post here.
8:44 AM
Jan Brewer, her criminally insane son, the Arizona Republic, and prior restraint
The lede story in the Republic today is a look at how Jan Brewer’s approach to mental health funding has been shaped by her son, who is in a state hospital after being charged with sexual assault and kidnapping.
He was found not guilty by reason on insanity and has apparently been in the hospital for most of that time, though the paper is vague on this point. (Earlier, it said that the son had attended Brewer’s inauguration.)
Nowhere in either of the two stories about the case does it say what it was her son actually did.
New Times reported this a few weeks ago:
According to a Phoenix Police Department report dated July 29, 1989, Brewer, then an unemployed 25-year-old, forced his way into a woman’s apartment on West Indian School Road and threatened to hurt her “real bad” if she didn’t engage in sexual acts, including performing fellatio.
The Republic story says Brewer lost her other son three years ago:
Other personal family tragedies, such as the death of son John Brewer in January 2007 from cancer and AIDS are spoken of [by Brewer] only briefly.
A related story in the paper today is about a backstage battle to keep Brewer’s son’s criminal record out of the public eye. A judge yesterday stated the obvious, that the matter was part of the public record.
New Times broke the story a few weeks back; the Republic, in keeping with its idiosyncratic approach to journalistic niceties, kept the issue under wraps:
“I believe The Republic has been sensitive to the issues involved in this case and responsible in its reporting while, at the same time, working diligently to protect the public’s essential access to criminal-case files,” said Randy Lovely, Republic editor and vice president for news. “Obviously, we’re appreciative of the court’s ruling.”
The Republic decided not to publicize the story until the ruling was finalized on Monday.
Emphasis added. The story is confusing. Apparently, the son, who is apparently sane enough to worry about his mother’s political career, requested and got his files sealed.
The Republic got a copy of them this year, apparently through a mistake in the clerk’s office. Then the governor learned, in an interview with a republic reporter, than the file was open.
Then things get opaque:
… [Brewer’s] son’s attorney, Reginald Cooke, asked a judge to force Phoenix Newspapers, the newspaper’s parent company, to return the case file and prevent the paper from printing anything contained in it. PNI asked the judge to unseal the file.
On one level, this doesn’t make any sense, because this would seem to be a case of prior restraint. A judge can’t stop a paper from printing something in the public record.
It’s possible that the the paper’s lawyer’s decided that the matter turned on a slightly different issue; that since, whether rightly or not, the case was sealed, the paper could have been liable for publishing it, and that the smarter tack was to just make the case that the file was wrongly suppressed.
That’s a defensible argument, I suppose.
Suppressing the story about the actual battle while it was going on, during an election campaign?
That’s not defensible at all.
7:54 AM
The Republic follows up on its searing story on unprosecuted rapes on Indian reservations
Dennis Wagner’s story today details the bureaucratic confusion and lack of federal oversight that allows so many crimes, rape prominent among them, to go without punishment.
Ronet Bachman, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware who analyzed Indian rape data for the DOJ two years ago, said confusion and enforcement shortcomings allow repeat offenders.
Asked if the failure is due to poor training, jurisdictional issues, a lack of resources, mismanagement, complacency or incompetence, Bachman said, “It is botched because of all those things.”
Yesterday it was a case study—done after two years of legal wrangling to get access to police files—argued with some evidence that a man who assaulted more than a dozen White Mountain Apache women was never caught.
The story today has one weird note:
Native American women suffer from violent crime at a rate 2 ½ times the national average. More than one-third are raped during their lifetimes, according to the Department of Justice, compared with a national figure of one in five.
Emphasis added. That seems an extreme statistic.
A cursory check of such numbers on the internet seems to indicate that the story is conflating sexual assaults in toto with rape specifically.
On the other hand, most rape cases go unreported, and it could be that Wagner is actually using valid justice department figures. But the numbers are so high they deserves to have been explained better.
7:21 AM
The Sunday Republic steps up
As we’ve noted before, the Arizona Republic doesn’t always suck.
Today, it’s a good Sunday paper:
- There’s a major investigative piece that shows with some conclusiveness that a rapist who preyed on young White Mountain Apache women near Whiteriver, west of Phoenix, was never caught.
The story paints a grim picture of wholesale police incompetence on the reservation.
The Republic waged a two-year legal battle to get the records of the investigations, which of course should have been public from the beginning.
And there’s also reams of copy about the “birthright citizenship” debate, with a pair of stories by Alia Beard Rau and Dan Nowicki.
(As usual, AZCentral doesn’t make it easy on readers. Nowicki’s piece is not linked to from Rau’s article … and doesn’t come up when you search for “Nowicki”!)
4:11 PM
Laurie Roberts lays out the Ben Quayle/Brock Landers story in all its porny glory
Yesterday, the Arizona Republic finally vouchsafed to its print clientele an overview of Ben Quayle’s sordid past associations with the ultraskanky web site Dirty Scottsdale.
This came after the election he was running in, but whatever.
Today Laurie Roberts, on whom we have a journalistic crush, finally limns the story the way the paper should have from the start:
So, to recap:.
He denied writing for the website, then he admitted writing for the website, saying he posted a handful of “fictional satirical comments.”
He denied that he is Brock Landers but he hasn’t denied writing under the name Brock Landers.
And he couldn’t recall whether he introduced Karamian to a lawyer for purposes of incorporating the website, but then later admitted that he hooked them up.
Now he says he’s “been consistent from the very beginning on this issue.”
7:47 AM
Newsflash: Arizona Republic readers learn about Ben Quayle's porny alter ego
In its campaign wrap-up story today, the Arizona Republic tells its readers that Ben Quayle might not be the ideal GOP candidate to replace John Shadegg.
Why?
Well, turns out the sanctimonious family-values candidate used to write for, and palled around with the founder of, a sleazy web site in Scottsdale.
His nom de skank was Brock Landers, the name of a porn actor in Boogie Nights.
As PHXated has noted here and here, while the story has been a national news staple for the past two week, the Arizona Republic has apparently never mentioned it in its news pages.
(We have yet to find an actual printed story in which this was mentioned; the paper has run a couple of wire stories on the web site. It certainly has not done what you’d expect, which is routinely make reference to an ongoing scandal in a major local political campaign.)
Until today, that is… two days after the election he was running in.
11:14 PM
Scruffy McPoochie, rampant
Scruffy McPoochie, the editor of the Arizona Republic’s daily Living section, ignores the criticism that the paper’s feature section should include stories about people.
Dogs are ‘living’ too, McPoochie growls, and resumes pawing through wire stories, searching out the best dog news from across the nation.
Today’s entry is about dog cancer.
It continues to add to the paper’s luster as the Nation’s Leading Purveyor of Dog Journalism™.
The lede is about a dog who lost its leg to cancer.
This poignant anecdote is made all the more affecting when we learn that the dog in question was a greyhound, which are “bred for the racetrack.”
It’s hard to run with only three legs. That’s the poignant part.
You’re not going to believe this. The owner of the greyhound, Tex, who lost his leg?
[Lisa Stone], the founder of a Scottsdale law firm treats Tex and her two Ridgebacks, Layla and Larry, like her children.
“I’m the crazy dog parent,” she said, offering proof: When Tex was in the hospital after his amputation, she stayed at his bedside for eight to nine hours a day.
And when her first greyhound had his hindquarters amputated due to osteosarcoma, she slept on the living-room floor with him for more than a year because he couldn’t climb the stairs to her bedroom.
In other words, she’s had two greyhounds who’ve had their legs amputated.
What are the odds?
The story also contains this paragraph:
“To collect the DNA, we just need a little slobber, and trust me, with my Labrador, you can get plenty of it,” Trent said.
The dog cancer story joins McPoochie’s other dog journalism triumphs.
Another (!) story about a swanky kennel for dogs.
It’s hard to believe the Republic’s circulation is dropping ten percent a year.
10:59 PM
The Arizona Republic: The Nation's Leading Purveyor of Dog Journalism™
The Arizona Republic, which writes about local dogs more than humans, has a story today about a dog who died in the heat.
We’re sorry about the dog, but we already knew that it was hot out.
The story was in our zoned section, but we’re betting Scruffy McPoochie, the paper’s canny, canine Living section editor, will grab the thing and reuse it in his section sometime next week.
McPoochie, pictured above, is just one of the folks from whatever species who’ve help make the Arizona Republic the nation’s leading purveyor of dog journalism.
Just a couple of weeks ago, McPoochie ran a story about dog insurance.
It was a wire story, and mostly about people in Chicago, but McPoochie knew that dog journalism isn’t about states. It’s a state of mind.
It was such a great subject that a jealous business-section editor, in an act of journalistic oneupdogship, reassigned it to a Republic staffer, and the paper ran another story on the same lame subject.
The result, as we saw, wasn’t as good as the Chicago one, but whatever.
The paper doesn’t mind doubling down on dog journalism.
McPoochie ran a story about swanky dog hotels a while back …
… and a few weeks later, ran another story about the same damn thing.
Then there was the story about dogs on Twitter.
Which was almost as interesting as the story about dogs on Facebook.
And this is in addition to the paper’s day-to-day coverage of the beat: The church that allows dogs … another story about a dog who died … earthshaking changes at a dog park ….
Sure the paper’s circulation is declining ten percent or more a year.
That’s just among humans.
The local dog population may yet turn out to give the paper a whole new …
… leash on life!
8:08 PM
How AZCentral.com sucks, no. 38 in a series
The Republic has a bunch of stories about Rick Romley’s massive document release today.
It’s almost impossible to find them on AZCentral.com. Robert Robb’s column on Thomas should have been linked from the main story, but it isn’t.
There’s also an editorial. That wasn’t linked either.
In looking for the editorial, I noticed a prominent link to something called the Arizona Repubilc Editorial Board blog.
The subhed for the blog is “Editorials from the Arizona Republic.”
The blog stopped being updated in October 2009.
8:18 AM
Republic Watch: The revenge of Scruffy McPoochie, Living section editor
Scruffy McPoochie, the Arizona Republic’s Living section editor, loves stories about dogs.
He’ll print stories about anything if there’s a dog in it.
Dogs on Twitter: “Dogs can tweet, too (sort of).”
Dogs on Facebook: “Busy social network for the furry set.”
There was a story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
And, of course, the hard-bitten McPoochie’s finest moment, just five weeks later:
Another story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Ritzy pet resorts replace kennels of yesterday.”
(Some more examples of the section’s indefatigable appetite for such stuff here. McPoochie also has a thing for Starbucks.)
Even a grizzled vet like McPoochie can still get excited about his job.
Last week his ancient heart must have begun to race when he saw a new dog-related story come over the wires.
The subject? Dog insurance!
Wire stories like that—they come to him free, with no need for making his staff do any work—are kibbles from heaven.
McPoochie’s tail wagged excitedly as he read the expository prose:
Typically, pet owners pay a monthly premium. As their pet needs veterinary services, they pay the bills upfront, then submit them for reimbursement.
Some plans cover what in human terms are considered “well visits,” including vaccinations and checkups. But many cover only costs associated with a pet’s illness.
Not just a dog story—a story that explains how insurance works!
He’s a key part of the Arizona Republic’s secret plan to bore people to death.
Anyway, it was the work of a few minutes to whip up a hedline—“Pet health insurance can ease vet-bill shock”—and toss it into the paper.
McPoochie must have stopped reading there, because the rest of the story doesn’t really fulfill the promise of that hedline.
Consider:
Even with pet insurance, hassle-free coverage is no guarantee. Nicole Abbott found this out the hard way.
When the Chicago attorney learned that her company offered pet insurance as part of its benefits package, she immediately signed up her beloved pugs Bella and Chooch.
At the end of last year, Chooch developed an unusual type of stones in his bladder, requiring $500 worth of testing and a $1,200 surgery.
But the insurance company denied the claim, saying Chooch – who previously had problems with routine bladder stones – had a pre-existing condition.
“I tried everything, and they wound up saying I’d have to appeal to the state agency that oversees insurance,” Abbott said.
“I’d spend hours at that point, so I just said, ‘Forget it. It’s not worth it.’ ”
Shortly after Abbott got Bella, the dog had a seizure and required hundreds of dollars worth of treatment. The pet-insurance company claimed Bella’s seizure came one day shy of her policy going into effect, so the treatment wasn’t covered. Abbott disputed that claim, but again hit a brick wall.
But yesterday could not have been a good day for McPoochie.
He has a new threat to face.
Another editor is, you might say, pissing on his territory.
Consider this story, “Popularity rises for pet health insurance”, published yesterday in the Republic’s business section.
It was the second story in as many days the Arizona Republic has published about dog insurance.
McPoochie could see, however, that his competition was not in his league.
It’s hard to believe, but the paper’s business section published a story not just on the same subject, but demonstrably worse than the wire story McPoochie came up with.
The wire story, from the Chicago Tribune, led with a pretty good anecdote about an adorable Lab who swallowed a teacup.
The Republic’s stirring lede, on its version of the story?
The humanization of pets and the increased costs of veterinary care have sparked a burgeoning industry: pet health care.
Sizzling prose!
And the Republic didn’t bother to do what the Tribune did as a matter of course—find someone who can illustrate the down side of the story.
I mean, the Tribune article was a shitty idea for an article, but it was reported out with integrity.
The Republic story doesn’t give readers the downside, and instead spends a lot of time letting people who sell pet insurance talk about the industry’s rosy future …
Within the next few years, it’s likely the rising cost of veterinary care will increasingly convert pet owners without health-care plans into clients, said Doris Amdur, founder of United Pet Care, a health-care company that offers discount plans.
… and relating stories that don’t make sense, like this one:
Teri Morris secured pet insurance for her dog Bella, 9, about 5 years ago.
Although Bella hasn’t had any major health problems, Morris knows vet bills can get expensive quickly.
Morris' dog Scooby died a year ago, after she spent about $8,000 in vet bills to treat his diabetes, thyroid dysfunction and bladder cancer, she said.
“At least some of that would have been covered if he had been insured,” she said.
Ok, so she had insurance for one dog for five years, but he hasn’t gotten sick. And she had another dog, who died a year ago, but he wasn’t insured? Why didn’t she insure both dogs?
Somewhere, Scruffy McPoochie is laughing.
6:32 AM
A local legislator and publisher has his wages garnished
From the Republic:
State Rep. Cloves Campbell Jr.’s paycheck from his $24,000 annual legislative salary is a lot smaller these days because a judge has ordered automatic payroll deductions to pay for a reception a non-profit group claims it had arranged for him three years ago.
Campbell for two years ignored a lawsuit from an organization called the Leadership Consortium, which said it had spent $15,000 on a D.C. reception for him. The paper says the group gives out minority scholarships.
Campbell denied to the Republic the event had been held for him. As for missing all those court appearances?
“Actually, every time (the court) sent something, I was out of town,” said Campbell, adding that he “can’t recall exactly” the details of those trips.
Campbell is the son of Cloves Campbell Sr., one of the founders of the Arizona Informant, a local black newspaper. Its web site is here.
I couldn’t find his title on the site proper, but local news reports have identified him as “co-publisher” of the paper.
6:38 AM
The mysterious disappearing All-Star Game boycott of Arizona
Yesterday, you’ll remember, the Republic front page was all abuzz with talk at this year’s All-Star Game in Anaheim about boycotting next year’s game, which is currently scheduled for Chase Field in Phoenix.
Funny, today the paper fronts another big story about the All-Star Game coming to Phoenix…
… with nary a word about boycotts or SB 1070.
The same writer, too—Nick Piecoro.
This is what I hate about the Republic. How dishonest it is.
From the outside, it sure does seem like there were some high-level discussions at the paper about the splashiness of the possible boycott story Tuesday.
One might even speculate that some behind-the-scenes power brokers with some financial interest in the game’s being held here gave the paper hell.
And then, obviously, someone ordered up a “redo”—essentially the same story, scrubbed of anything that might offend the town’s sports swells.
It’s almost like rewriting history.
10:27 AM
The Espresso Pundit catches the Republic in a big error
We don’t really get Greg Patterson, who blogs as the Espresso Pundit.
He’s one of those guys who is always mad.
But why?
Let’s see… he was born white and male in a country fabulously accommodating to his type.
There were eight years of national Republican rule, complete with tax cuts, which surely benefitted him more than most…and his buddies have been in control of the AZ legislature since who knows when, delivering him lots more tax cuts.
The courts are turning the country over to the gun nets and corporations, his party got us into two wars that keep the Halliburtons of the world in the chips, and the country’s most popular news channel is an arm of the GOP.
But he’s always upset!
It’s weird.
Anyway, Patterson got the Republic dead to rights on a mistake in a recent editorial, which claimed that the state’s gun laws made restaurants and bars provide storage for gun owners if they don’t allow weapons.
He’s right about the correction, too… what should a paper do when an incorrect fact makes an entire article or editorial invalid?
8:40 AM
Arizona Republic editor Jeffrey Dozbaba dies
From the paper:
Most of his newspaper career was spent at The Republic. He began in 1978 as a copy editor, became sports editor in 1991, assistant manager editor in 1993, and then senior editor, senior director of the newsroom’s Information Center and finally was named a manager editor in March 2008. He retired in June 2009.
“He helped lead The Republic’s local news coverage and his efforts have left a lasting legacy for the Phoenix community,” said Randy Lovely, Republic editor and vice president for news. “He was a hard worker, but he played with equal energy and could also be counted on to lighten the mood and add laughter to the room.”
I don’t know if this is a Republic tradition or not, but the obit is oddly un-nihil nisi bonum:
[I]t was hard to escape some of the ribbing Dozbaba liked to dish out.
“He could insult you like nobody’s business,” Leonard said, “but he always did it with a smile.”
[…]
Former Republic reporter Bob Golfen, who knew him since college, said some of Dozbaba’s ideas, however, could be a bit hard to follow.
“He was a smart guy with great instincts, but he wasn’t always tremendously articulate,” he said.
When reading over a story, Dozbaba might say it was good but that something was missing.
“He seemed to have a deeper understanding of what we needed to do, even if he couldn’t always say it,” Golfen said.
7:43 AM
The Arizona Republic prints another press release from Starbucks!
You hate to keep beating up on the Arizona Republic, but it’s just so … infuriating sometimes.
We’ve noted a while back how the paper devoted two whole pages in one of its zoned sections to a story about a resort opening up a Starbucks store inside.
More recently, the paper’s business section ran a huge front-page feature about how Starbucks was introducing a new cup size.
Last week, not to be outdone, the paper’s pathetic Living section gets into the act, with a big illustrated front-page story about …
… a plastic cup the chain is selling:
The Starbucks Cold Reusable To-Go Cups are back in stores this summer.
Well, sometimes, because double-walled plastic cups, which mimic the clear-plastic cups the company uses for its iced coffees and the like, are highly sought by many Starbucks devotees and get snapped up quickly.
The piece goes on for about 15 more paragraphs.
3:52 PM
More important dog news from the Arizona Republic!
In recent posts we have noted that the Living section of the Arizona Republic has published a lot of stories about dogs—more than you’d expect from a paper that doesn’t print enough news about people.
We finally came to conclusion that the section was being edited by a dog, and even found a picture of the editor in question, which you can see here.
Reading the Living section and keeping in mind that that’s the fellow in charge helps in understanding some of the editorial choices the paper makes on a given day.
The pieces were in most cases crappy little wire-service stories about pet-related products or ephemera.
There was the one about dogs on Facebook:
“Busy social network for the furry set.”
And one about dogs on Twitter:
“Dogs can tweet, too (sort of).”
There was a story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
And then, mind-blowingly, another story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Ritzy pet resorts replace kennels of yesterday.”
While examining some old files here at PHXated world headquarters we came across a torn-out front page of the Living section from February.
We realized that we’d missed some of the paper’s hard-hitting dog coverage.
We mention it now because it’s quite a story.
It’s about a church (in LA, not Phoenix, because this is just another space-filling wire story), that allows dogs.
This is how it begins, emphasis added:
As the Presbyterian service was about to start, one of the congregants was being disruptive, making a spectacle of himself once again on a Sunday. But that’s what other members of the Los Angeles church have come to expect from Mr. Booby.
At Covenant Presbyterian Church in the city’s Westchester neighborhood, dogs like Mr. Booby are welcome congregants at the Sunday night services, where howling and sudden bouts of scratching may interrupt prayers, and the collection plate holds treats for poodles and golden retrievers alike.
The hedline?
“Howl-lelujah: Church includes dogs”
12:33 PM
PHXations—Saturday, June 26, 2010
Hey Republic… If you’re doing a story about “Silent Sunday” at South Mountain Park—that’s the no cars day on the fourth Sunday of the month—would it kill you to note that when the next fourth Sunday is, so readers don’t have to go check their calendars?
For the record, fourth Sunday is tomorrow, so you can hike in the park without cars roaring by.
12:23 PM
Duke Tully R.I.P.: The comments!
From the post earlier today noting the passing of Duke Tully, the publisher of the Arizona Republic who resigned in disgrace after admitting he’d faked a lifetime of war exploits:
Francine Hardaway:
I was one of Duke Tully’s charmees in the 80s when I had my PR company. He would take me to lunch at Avanti, where he would have two martinis and tell me war stories. I knew nothing about the Air Force, so I had no way to judge truth. I was on a ski vacation with my daughters when the fraud story broke, and we still laugh about it.
Anon:
Perhaps, Francine, you would like to consider that one mistake does not define a person. That one fabrication that was difficult to let go of made him any less honourable, kind, or loving. In between your bouts of laughter, maybe you should reflect on just what gives you the right to judge someone so harshly. I’m sure you’ve never made a regrettable decision in your entire, small-minded life. I hope there are none who hold you in such low regard for a transgression of your own.
APC:
Duke was more than this one event. He was a good man, and came clean before the pressure from political enemies. He’d been dropping hints for some time, since he was wracked with guilt. Even though he was advised to quietly stop telling war stories and distance himself from it, he refused to stay quiet. THAT is the mark of an honorable man. Admitting his mistake and acknowledging fault.
And did he get any help from John McCain, after helping McCain so much? Not so much as a word of sympathy. McCain had gotten what he wanted, and washed his hands with no compassion.
Duke will be missed.
PHXated observes:
We have known Ms. Hardaway for only a short time, but are sure that her transgressions are equally entertaining but less hypocritical.
What the Republic obit didn’t mention was that Tully presided over the Republic when it was fat and self-satisfied—and a far-right defender of the status quo. (Pulliam newspapers were famously rigid and atavistic.)
The lives of all minority groups were attenuated at that time—gays and women, blacks and Hispanics. In the meantime, the small-mindedness of the city fathers (they were all of course men) laid the groundwork for the state today: A backward minor republic with a crappy, undeveloped economy; small-minded citizens; a ruefully mediocre educational system; and a bunch of social metrics identical to those of the Deep South.
We delighteded in his downfall because it was a small but enjoyable payback for those decades of intolerance and neglect.
And it’s also a reminder that our poltroons of the moment—that’s you, Russell Pearce, and you, Joe Arpaio!—may yet have their comeuppance!
1:30 PM
Duke Tully dies
The former publisher of the Arizona Republic died yesterday in Florida.
No worries that the paper would soft-pedal the scandal that drove him out of town; the obit goes into delightful detail:
Darrow “Duke” Tully, the former Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette publisher who faked an elaborate military career and resigned in disgrace, has died of complications from a stroke in Tampa. He was 78.
Tully was publisher of The Republic and Gazette until December 1985, when he resigned after learning that his political enemies were investigating his war record.
Tom Collins, Maricopa County attorney at the time, planned to have a news conference to expose Tully, who claimed to have been an Air Force combat pilot in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
[…]
Longtime friend and employee Bill Shover said Tully’s dual existence was driven by his need to win his father’s approval.
“He was rejected by the Air Force because he had bad vision and flat feet,” said Shover, former director of public affairs for Phoenix Newspapers Inc., which owned The Republic and The Gazette during Tully’s tenure.
Tully’s brother was killed in World War II during a training mission and his father criticized him for not becoming a war hero, Shover recalled.
That’s when Tully turned his sights on newspapers and was told he could curry favor with a small Indiana paper if he pretended to be a veteran.
From there, Tully’s stories about his military exploits escalated.
6:44 AM
4The Arizona Republic continues to be so weird. (An ongoing series)
Yesterday, in its Your Home section, the paper introduced a new gardening columnist, Cathy Babcock.
Babcock is a former director at the Desert Botanical Garden and seems like a nice addition to the section, and all is well and good.
Except … instead of just letting Babcock write something, the editor decided the section needed to herald the hire with an actual interview of Babcock.
The resulting piece is unbylined, even though its written in a chirpy, personal style:
She understands the heat. She understands our soil. And she understands that many of us want to plant an herb garden like the one we saw in Martha Stewart Living, and she can help us pull it off.
The unbylined story is a Republic tic we’ve discussed here and here.
Anyway, that’s all bad enough. The interview that follows is done Q&A style, with bold-faced questions, followed by what you’d think would be Babcock’s replies in normal type beneath then.
Instead, the answers to the questions are just normal article prose.
It’s weird! It reads like Babcock is talking about herself in the third person.
For example:
Are you a life-long gardener?
Babcock got interested in plants during a trip to California with her sister in the late 1980s. Babcock actually went back to school to study horticulture. She worked in accounting and “didn’t want to work in an office anymore.” She studied urban horticulture at Arizona State University, graduating in 1989, and has worked at the garden since.
And you also get just random dumbness like this:
Do you work in an office now?
Sadly, Babcock acknowledges, much of her day now is in an office…
Have you ever seen a newspaper interview done in that format before?
7:49 AM
The Arizona Republic takes a stand!
The Arizona Republic is so randomly put together and edited, despite the good work of a lot of its good writers, that it’s hard to get a bead on it.
Just to surprise us, the paper runs an unassailably documented, incredibly long, and cogently argued editorial about the much bruited-about political issue of “securing the border.”
The bad news is that it ran on the front page as a news story under a tag of “analysis.”
It was written by Dennis Wagner; it’s a great piece that lays waste to the creeps and poltroons stirring up the cheap seats with fear tactics, and it’s the kind of thing the paper should run more of.
Since it is basically an opinion piece, it’s going to attract a lot of flak, but it’s hard to argue with anything Wagner writes:
Anyone with a minimal knowledge or understanding about the nearly 2,000-mile swath of land between Mexico and the United States realizes that requiring a secure border establishes an impossible standard.
…There is no way to conclude success because authorities have no idea how many undocumented immigrants are getting through. Authorities can count only the number of unauthorized intruders captured. Such unavoidable uncertainty prevents any absolute assurances that no one is sneaking over, making declarations of victory impossible.
The story includes this mischievous passage:
Here is another way to consider the problem: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a leader in the anti-immigration movement and acclaimed as America’s toughest sheriff, cannot secure his own jails. Every year, despite armed guards, electronic locks and video monitors, inmates smuggle drugs in from the outside and sometimes even escape.
No one would blame Arpaio. All penal institutions, regardless of security measures, have breaches. Yet imagine if America adopted a position that no new laws could be passed regarding prison reform “until the nation’s jails are secure.”
Lots and lots of facts and figures in the (very long) story, which is here.
7:24 AM
Meet the new editor of the Arizona Republic's Living section!
Back in February, readers of the Arizona Republic’s feature section were given a wire-service story about dogs on Facebook:
“Busy social network for the furry set.”
Then there was the story about … dogs on Twitter:
“Dogs can tweet, too (sort of).”
Then came a hard-hitting story about pet boarding:
“Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
Then a story about a “therapy dog” who, sniff sniff, died:
Most of these stories were wire copy, which means that instead of figuring out a way to get vibrant and essential local news into the section with folks on staff, the editor is just picking shmaltzy fluff out of the free copy the paper has available to it from the various news services it subscribes to.
You might think, after all that, that the Living section had scraped the bottom of the barrel when it came to bland and inoffensive dog news …
… and you’d be right.
Today the section has a front-page story on … Posh pads for pampered pooches!
It’s the second wire service story the section has run on this topic in the past two months.
The hedline and the story are different, but the idea is the same.
This one is called “It’s a dog’s life: Ritzy pet resorts replace kennels of yesterday.”
It’s about an upscale “pet resort.”
In Charlotte, North Carolina.
Why a paper in a industry fighting for its life would just give up in this way is a puzzlement.
… until we discovered who is currently editing the section:
8:31 AM
More on the EVT's mysterious reference to "race" problems at a (night)club in Chandler
Earlier today we noted an odd story in the East Valley Tribune, which detailed a legal dispute between a new nightclub and some other local businesses, a group of restaurants at the same strip mall.
The dispute has something to do whether the place is a club, a nightclub or a concert venue.
Way down in the story there were unexplained references to remarks about the clientele’s “race.”
But the story never said what “race” was being singled out. It could have been Hispanic or Asian, Ewok or Eloi, black or … [gulp!] white!
Friends in Chandler have subsequently informed us that clientele is black—and that African Americans were the object of the alleged racial comments alluded to in the story.
I dug through the EVT’s archive on the dispute, but didn’t find an example of the paper’s having vouchsafed this information to its readers.
Besides one sidelong reference to a “civil rights” aspect—“civil rights” being a well-known euphemism for “black-related”—there was nothing to let a disinterested reader know what in the hell was going on.
Isn’t this overdelicate? On the one hand we have the crazy Arizona Republic, which insists on capitalizing the words “black” and “white.” The Republic’s treatment gives you the sense that someone there was indignant that the word “black” was getting capitalized, and insisted on capitalizing “white,” too.
It is a practice that to my knowledge is followed by no other daily paper in the country. The Republic is the journalistic equivalent of a kid wondering why moms and dads get Mother’s Days and Father’s Days, but there’s no Kid’s Day.
(The answer, of course is that every day is Kid’s Day.)
And now we have the EVT, trying in effect whisper the news.
“It’s about race.”
Huh?
“It’s about race.”
Huh?
Previously in PHXated:
Why does the Arizona Republic capitalize the words “white” and “black”?.
4:06 PM
Got tongue?
From the Arizona Republic’s “Things to do this weekend” page:
World Series of Beer Pong qualifier at Sandbar
If playing beer pong is a pastime for you, consider signing up for the World Series of Beer Pong qualifying competition at Sandbar Mexican Grill in Scottsdale. Sign up with a friend and play to your heart’s content against other beer pong enthusiasts. The winning team gets to travel to Las Vegas for the championships. There will be $2 draft beers and shots on special, and ladies who play get to pay half price for entry.
Only the Republic could run a photo even the organizers of a “Beer Pong World Series” might find tasteless.
We just have one question: Is the impressively outstretched tongue part of the Scottsdale gang sign the large-breasted woman is flashing?
Or was it just a sort of personal fillip of her own design?
(h/t Tyler Hurst)
6:23 PM
The Arizona Republic: All the fluff that's fit to recycle
Over at EaterAZ, an item that catches the Arizona Republic writing the same article twice, and even recycling the same phrases and sentences.
Here’s a sample EaterAZ found, from two pieces the paper did on the local food blog Foodies Like Us, with similar phrases in bold:
“Foodies Like Us is a 6,000-strong social-networking group founded in July by friends and former bankers Jay Pizarro and Susie Timm. It celebrates cooking, eating, dining and drinks, uniting Valley residents from all walks of life who love to socialize around the table. The website features restaurant reviews, recipe swaps, food chatter, cooking blogs, market finds and tips. The group also sponsors cooking classes, progressive dinners by trolley, wine tastings and happy hours.“
[EaterAZ commented:] After scratching our head as to why they’re a “dining newcomer,” we began to think that all this sounded too familiar. The picture looked familiar, too. Hey, wait a second. That IS the same picture… And many of the same press-release copied words (in bold) are there as well. Check it out, here’s something AZCentral.com published two months ago on Foodies:
“Leave it up to food lovers to create a virtual table for like-minded fans. Former banking colleagues and friends Susie Timm and Jay Pizarro (above) parlayed their mutual interest in food to create a 6,000-member-and-growing social-networking group that celebrates cooking, eating, dining and drinks. Their mantra: We are a 365-days-a-year food festival. Their Web site is filled with all things food, including restaurant reviews, recipe swaps, food chatter, cooking blogs, market finds and advice for the home mixologist. The Scottsdale-based company also sponsors cooking classes, progressive dinners by trolley, wine tastings and happy hours at top Valley eateries.”
5:26 PM
The online East Valley Tribune has a new look
It’s the first major online move since the paper was formally taken over by Randy Miller.
PHXated thinks it looks better, but still suffers from a lot of the flaws of online newspaper sites.
Two quick examples: Note how much of the page is devoted to self-promotional crap and how many lines of navigation the site prioritizes before it starts giving its readers the news they’ve come to the site for.
And second, newspapers can’t get away from that terrestrial feeling of just not having enough room on the printed page.
That doesn’t exist online, so it’s always quizzical to me when I see a list of heds like this, in the new site’s main feature well: * Suns' outside shooting cements Game 1 loss * Mesa to crack down on crime-ridden convenience stores * Executive Board unanimously approves AIA state tournament realignment plan * Minorities are the majority at school, but not at graduation * Brewer: If Prop. 100 fails, I failed * Proposition 100 supporters have cash advantage * Night club sued by neighboring restaurants * More adults coming to EVIT for new-career training * Mesa hopes light rail brings life to downtown
A third to a half of these telegrammatic lines are utterly unparsable to readers--which means they aren't going to get read.
Why not give each of these “Top Stories” a hed and a deck that makes them understandable and inviting to a curious but disinterested reader?
11:32 AM
What really happened at Freedom Communications
Freedom was the newspaper chain that, until recently, owned the East Valley Tribune. It was based in Orange County, and its flagship paper was the Orange County Register.
Freedom is now in bankruptcy.
In the narrative we hear about the trouble newspapers are in, new technology has vaporized their business model, readers want their news for free, and a watchdog vital to our democracy is at risk.
In reality, as this very long inquiry into the collapse of the company in, of all places, the Orange County Register shows, the papers brought most of their problems on themselves:
The loss of the family business could be attributed to many factors: too much debt, poor business decisions, an economic downturn of epic proportions and an inability to adapt to the changing tides of the newspaper industry.
But the center of the problem was the Hoiles family itself, the seeds planted by the pugnacious founder but exacerbated after his death by power struggles, petty jealousies, personal vendettas –- and money.
The reporter, Mary Ann Milbourn, does a good job delving into the family nuttiness that destroyed the company. Among other things, they rejected an offer in 1985 to sell the company for more than $1 billion.
A billion dollars was an enormous amount of money in 1985; it’s a trenchant indication of just how much money the industry was making at the time.
The EVT isn’t named, but it and its sister Freedom Communication papers in the Valley get this wan aside:
•In 2000, Freedom bought a group of papers in Arizona from The Thomson Corp. for a reported $180 million. Most were sold in March for $2 million.
6:43 AM
The state's biggest companies and highest paid CEOs
The former is listed by the Arizona Republic this a.m.
The trouble is that the top fifty companies are dispensed by the paper in no fewer than 25 groups of two, requiring some 24 additional clicks to see them all.
And since this is the miserable web site of the Arizona Republic, you can be assured that each click takes from between six and ten seconds to give you a new page, and that, during that time, the page will, annoyingly, re-situate itself a few times.
It’s an imensely pleasureable reading experience!
You’d think that by hitting print you might get a coherent list to read. Look how this page resolves itself:
Note how that instead of the full list, it just gives you the two entries on that page, and that it doesn’t even do that right. You can also see that the intro paragraph from the beginning of the story is repeated on each printed page.
If, laboriously, you print the whole thing out, you’d have those literary pearls of wisdom 25 times.
Finally, if you look closely on the bottom right-hand corner of the print page, you can see this legend: “Print powered by FormatDynamics”!
In other words, the Republic, like so many other media outfits, is actually paying some other company do to a crummy job formatting its print pages.
Exactly the sort of thing a media company should outsource.
Anyway, if you’re interested in how the state’s execs are doing, The PBJ is on the case tracking executive pay. It’s list of recent dispatches from company reports is here.
7:40 AM
An editor in Flagstaff is missing
Timothy Lawrence Hendricks, also known as Larry Hendricks, was last seen leaving his home Monday morning in east Flagstaff and headed for work. Police say he never arrived, and he hasn’t been seen or heard from since.
Police spokesman Lt. Ken Koch (coke) says there’s no indication of foul play.
Hendricks is the assistant city editor at the Arizona Daily Sun in Flagstaff and covers crime and courts.
7:01 PM
Is this the first sign of the "new" East Valley tribune?
PHXated has been under the weather and is just now catching up on a few things. An op-ed piece from a couple of days ago in the East Valley Tribune may be a portentous sign of the way the paper’s new management will be taking it:
A recent analysis by Roger Simon of PJTV Media maintains that Obama is showing signs of mental illness. A wide variety of commentators have observed that Obama displays severe narcissism. Obama is conceited, and he is demonstrating a serious disassociation from reality.
A recent case in point was Obama’s bizarre and meandering 17-minute, 2,500-word answer to the simple question about how he could justify raising taxes for ObamaCare during a recession when citizens are already overtaxed.
Emphases added. The authors, Roy and Mary Beth Brown, went on from there vigorously arguing their thesis, such as it was.
There are two types of people in the world; those who find the Browns’ political insights compelling, and those who find it odd to describe the spastic drooling of Pajamas Media’s Roger Simon as “analysis.”
Those in the second group will find it odd the EVT, which is not a Cro-Magnon operation, published the Browns’ essay.
Two theories:
It’s possible that the paper, which is operating with a staff size of about 20 percent of what it was three years ago, is in such chaos inside that it’s understandable that some Tea Party drivel that comes in over the transom could accidentally get published.
On the other hand, maybe it was deliberate.
In that case, it could be either a new gambit by the paper to make it the go-to publication for the state’s Tea Party fringe …
…or—more ominously, given that that might not be a strong business move—just a taste of the new owner’s political sensibility.
Anyone have an alternative explanation?
8:27 PM
1Does the average city employee really cost $100,000 a year?
Boy does the Arizona Republic suck at editing. I mean, it’s hard to believe there is something other than a big ol’ desk of chimpanzees reading copy before it’s printed.
Consider a story today about what the average per-employee cost of city government is.
The story begins like this:
Phoenix Councilman Sal DiCiccio says that the average city employee costs taxpayers about $100,000 in salary and benefits. Councilman Michael Nowakowski says the average worker earns much less. Who’s right?
Both are.
Boy, it sure sounds like we’re going to get two accounts of the issues involved, with the reporter noting that it all comes down to how you massage the figures.
But it turns out … DiCiccio’s basically right. No, not even basically right. The average annual cost per employee is just shy of $98,000, period.
The story goes on for seven more paragraphs, discussing a few ancillary issues, but never challenges the figure.
Nowakowski never returns to make a different case!
Secondly, in the lede, we see a reference to “salary and benefits.” But then we see Nowakowski saying they “earn” much less.
The editor of the story could have asked the reporter to clarify this distinction. The paper could have explained that the “benefits” part of the equation is a lot—forty or fifty percent more than the base salary the employees “earn.”
So the average salary of city employees might be just $65K.
Next, the only real comparison at issue in this debate is what the costs of Phoenix are relative to other major cities. The story discusses utterly irrelevant matters like the average cost of private sector employees ($54K a year)
… with, of course, no attempt to make the case that the two labor forces are in any way comparable.
(You’d assume, in fact, that they would be much different. A big city would be most comparable to a single large corporation doing specialized highly professional and bureaucratic work.
(You gotta figure that the percentage of the work force doing low-paying basic service-industry jobs would be much, much higher in the private sector.)
We all know we have a government that pays people.
It’s an entirely fair question to ask whether Phoenix pays its employees more than other large cities.
But why does a newspaper waste the time of everyone involved by reporting on everything but the one metric that would answer the question at hand?
Doesn’t the Arizona Republic have editors?
8:45 AM
Half the EVT newsroom laid off
A bankruptcy judge on Tuesday approved the sale of the East Valley Tribune to Randy Miller’s Thirteenth Street Media. Yesterday, in anticipation of the takeover, the paper nearly flatlined the staff that remained.
From Nick Martin at Heat City:
When they arrived at work today, employees were told they would be summoned via email to one of two meetings.
At the first meeting at 10 a.m., the sources said, dozens of employees were brought into a room on the ground floor where outgoing publisher Julie Moreno told them they were being let go. One source said the mood was exactly what you’d expect: grim. There was nervous laughter, a few tears and a lot of sad faces.
A half hour later, another group of staffers met with Miller in a room on the second floor, where he handed them letters with job offers under the new regime. There, the sources said, Miller also outlined his plan for the reorganized Tribune.
According to Martin, who used to work there and has good sources, the EVT’s newsroom staff, already downsized to about three dozen people, will now have as few as fourteen.
The number is apparently about a quarter the newsroom personnel the paper had a year or two ago. The paper is publishing only three days a week, so the impact of such cuts isn’t as bad as it might be. At the same time, the effect on the paper’s web site has been palpable and embarrassing, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere.
3:04 PM
Just when you thought the Arizona Republic couldn't get any worser!
Today it publishes a feature—complete with massive photo—on the cover of its business section about …
… Starbucks using a new cup size.
A. New. Cup. Size.
That’s what warrants a cover feature at the Arizona Republic.
As usual, the story itself is correspondingly insipid. Here’s the lede:
Phoenix-area coffee junkies who have grown immune to Starbucks’ maximum 24-ounce jolt now can boost their caffeine intake by 30 percent without loading up on extra shots.
The Seattle-based coffeehouse chain is test-marketing a new 31-ounce cup for iced coffees and teas in Phoenix and Tampa to determine whether customers are ready to supersize their caffeine.
For what is essentially ad copy for a corporation, it’s mighty fine prose. A graf later, looking for a little color to brighten up the story, reporter Max Jarman intrepidly finds a customer drinking from one of the new cups.
Turns out he was drinking decaffeinated ice tea.
Jarman doesn’t say what the drinks will cost, nor does he mention the nutritional issues. Extrapolating from info on Starbucks’ own nutrition pages, you can see that a 31-ounce Frappuccino will contain about 600 calories, and more than 100 grams of carbs.
As for the illustration, it’s a big picture of a coffee cup with a big ol’ Starbucks logo on the side. Some drawings to the right of the photo are a great example of the expository journalism a newspaper can provide its audience with, given some planning and just a tiny bit of creativity.
I think anyone looking at the result will immediately apprehend that a 31-ounce cup is bigger than a 24-ounce cup.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday over in the Living section, the paper has continued its fascination with psychics.
The hedline of the story is this:
Psychics see their popularity rising
Medium’s popularity a sign of public’s growing fascination with the other side
I suppose its relevant to mention that the story is about no such thing. It quotes one alleged psychic saying she was busy, but she never says she has more business than normal, and no one else does, either. (Indeed, she’s the only purported psychic quoted.)
The story does more than you’d expect by quoting a psychic debunker, but then, in an almost parodic descent into a rabit hole of journalistic over-objectivity, finds someone to quarrel with the debunker!
But Richard Mann, a professor emeritus of psychology and religion at the University of Michigan, says people have always expressed a connection with the dead….
Worst of all, the story is a wire piece from Detroit. It’s just amazing to think that an editor at the paper decided that of all the wire stories available that day, the crappy one about the psychics was the one to run.
Previously in PHXated:
5:49 PM
Kicking the EVT while it's down, continued
Granted it’s a holiday, and granted there’s an enormous amount of pressure on the folks inside the East Valley Tribune—they don’t know, week to week, if they’re gong to have jobs.
But here again is the main feature well of the paper this a.m.:
I’m assuming the web site has something programmed into it to generate the feature well by taking the top stories from two different departments. But as we saw last week and again today, it’s maybe not smart to let the front page of a web site be created without human intervention.
7:00 AM
A new black newspaper in Tucson
The Vanguard is being put out by the local Black Chamber of Commerce with a 1000 print run, the AZ Daily Star says. The chamber’s president, Clarence Boykins, is the publisher.
Boykins, who said he put up the initial investment to start up the Vanguard, is publisher. He tapped Tucson freelance writer and editor Theda K. Rogers to be executive editor.
Boykins picked up the first 16-page edition, printed at Territorial Publishers, Friday and called it “a great beginning.”
He said the paper aims to improve communication for blacks who are dispersed around Southern Arizona, while increasing the understanding of black culture in the larger community.
6:00 AM