More ghost news from the Arizona Republic
Two weeks ago, it was a haunted library.
Today it’s a haunted hotel in Douglas:
It doesn’t have to be Halloween for ghost stories at the Gadsden. Employees and guests have reported eerie tales all times of the year. There are so many stories that the issue is met with a shrug. Employees don’t seem upset that their workplace is haunted. The ghosts apparently are frisky, not nasty.
“They’re nice,” said Brenda Maley, the assistant manager who’s worked at the hotel for 32 years. “I think they’re happy here.”
These stories join the Republic’s hard-hitting psychics coverage.
In the haunted library story, the reporter mentioned a group called “Sonoran Paranormal Investigations Inc.” This group’s web site says that its work is based on “true scientific inquiry and stringent analysis.”
This story has a whole other paranormal investigation group to call on, called the “Phoenix Arizona Paranormal Society.” This group boasts of its use of “modern techniques and documented evidence aquired during investigations”—and of its “years of paranormal experience both personal and investigative.”
Both sound like reliable sources for newspaper articles.
A representative of the Phoenix Arizona Paranormal Society is called in to attest to the hauntedness of the hotel:
Count in Rod Franklin, a computer technician and founder of the Phoenix Arizona Paranormal Society, as a believer. His group tries to help people get rid of unwanted spirits.
“There are a lot of people who don’t take it seriously, but they’ve never had an encounter,” he said.
It’s hard to argue with that logic!
11:14 AM
And just when you thought the Arizona Republic couldn't get any weirder...
… it runs a story about a haunted library.
This is the paper’s evidence:
“I’ve had books fly at me, so I’ve seen it. I mean, you’re just standing there. You just say, ‘OK, it’s because I walked by.’ You always justify what it is,” librarian Colleen Gorman said.
Does any of that make sense? If the librarian saw a book flying around, shouldn’t the reporter ask when it happened and if anyone else saw it?
Or if, besides being incoherent, she’s just nuts or a big liar, shouldn’t she be kept away from kids?
The rest of the story descends into the parodic; there’s a lot of scenes of some alleged paranormal investigator looking at lights flashing on an “electromagnetic-field meter” like some bumpkin version of Dan Ackroyd in Ghostbusters—except Dan Ackroyd didn’t have a newspaper reporter following him around and hanging on his every word.
Or a daily newspaper editor willing to print it.
The Republic, as we’ve seen, likes paranormal stories almost as much as it likes dog stories.
In March the paper ran a story about how psychics were getting more popular. That’s what the hedline said, anyway: The actual story offered no evidence of it.
And last year the paper ran a similar story.
News not so much.
7:46 AM
Freedom Communications says it's coming out of bankruptcy
The company is still the owner of the beleaguered East Valley Tribune, the Orange County (Calif.) Register, and about thirty other newspapers and eight TV stations. The Register reports:
Freedom Communications’ reorganization calls for the company to more than double pretax earnings to $98 million within four years. [Interim Chief Executive Burl] Osborne said that improvement will be achieved by:
Continued efficiencies in management and operations. One example already implemented is joint newspaper delivery with the Los Angeles Times
Revenue growth, especially from online activity, such as an existing partnership with Yahoo
Improved coordination among divisions within the company
Joint efforts with other media companiesOne example of that last point might be shared printing agreements among Southern California publications, but Osborne does not expect Southern California to wind up with one regional newspaper.
The company brought its problems on itself, by lading up with too much debt. One good side of the story is that the remaining members of the Holles family are now out of the picture.
A confirmation hearing is scheduled for March 9, at which a write down of just under a half-billion dollars will be finalized.
As Nick Martin reported on Heat City some time ago, the company’s was gifting a lot of its execs with bonuses, even as it was capsizing. Details here.
11:49 PM
EVT sale finally going through
A complete disaster seems to have been avoided in the East Valley. The Tribune, which might have closed entirely at the end of the last year, has been rescued, sort of, by a company called Thirteenth Street Media, which is based in Boulder, Colorado.
The owner of Thirteenth Street, Randy Miller, also owns a weekly paper it distributes to the tonier areas of North Tucson and a weekly called the Telluride Daily Planet in Colorado. Stories from Tucson make it seem like the former is a slight outfit and getting slighter.
On the other hand, the latter, the Telluride paper, doesn’t seem to be a silly operation. It’s not an easy feature to get going or to use, but it does boast an “e-Edition” that lets you see what the actual printed paper looks like, and it seems to carry actual news, despite its small circulation.
On the other hand, there are still a few hitches in the giddyup web-wise, as this this About Us page demonstrates.
Nick Martin has a lot of details on the sale in Heat City:
Under the just-announced deal, Miller would get the three newspapers, their printing presses and the building in Sun City occupied by Daily News-Sun, as well as all the trimmings that go along with owning a newspaper, such as its fleet of vehicles and use of trademarks.
Noticeably missing from the deal, however, is the Tribune’s headquarters in downtown Mesa, which the county government says is worth almost $7 million.
In exchange, Miller would pay $2.05 million. But he would also take over an operation which Freedom said is losing about $60,000 a week.
Any deal is still subject to approval from the federal bankruptcy judge in Delaware who is overseeing the case. The same judge will also be choosing from among the bids if others decide to compete against Miller.
Other bidders have until March 8 to submit their offer. A hearing will be held the following day to discuss the sale, and the judge could decide as soon as then whether to allow the deal to take place.
A superficial PBJ story on the sale here. It says that the Telluride Daily Planet is a weekly. All I could find in the Republic is this four-graf story.
How embarrassing is it that an unpaid blogger like Nick Martin completely out-reports the newsrooms staffs of two established news organizations on a business story involving an institution—a newspaper—that’s obviously part of a lot of people’s daily lives?
Despite its impressive win of a Pulitzer last year, for a series on Joe Arpaio, the Tribune has lost many employees in the last year and now publishes just three days a week.
It may or may not be true that the EVT is losing $60,000 a week. (A company like Freedom can make any sort of financial case it wants.) And it’s possible that the ancillary publications will help out. Still, it’s hard to believe a company the size of Thirteenth Street is prepared to carry any losses very long, and that’s not including the issue of how much debt it’s taken on to finance the deal. (Even in newspaper fire sales, debt is killing a lot of recent deals.)
All that said, $60,000 is the equivalent of some 60 employees. Even if the new owners can somehow find some internal savings that had eluded Freedom, it’s hard to see how it’s repositioning the paper for the future isn’t going to include some significant new layoffs.
2:54 PM
What's up at the EVT?
Here’s the feature well of the East Valley Tribune’s site right now:
The top story—the cop tragedy in Gilbert—is two days old. The bottom one is about … a book reading at a library? From the outside it looks like the paper isn’t staffing its website over the weekend.
8:43 PM
A few notes about the Arizona Republic
Q: Who’s writing the paper’s Arizona Living section?
A: Not Republic reporters. Two days into the week, a total of nine feature stories. One was written by a Republic staffer. The rest were all wire stories, and lame ones at that. (“Facebook buds make workouts a bit easier.”)
On Sunday, there was a big page of things to do this week. Top item: John Mayer doing a VH1 Storytellers show. (I can’t link to it because it doesn’t sem to appear on the web.) It’s hard to be optimistic about the future of the paper when it seems like virtually no one working at the place cares about the substance of what they are publishing. A city the size of Phoenix and the best thing they can suggest doing over the course of the week is sitting on your butt and watching a routine basic cable show?
Our favorite story this week, however, was a strong Richard Ruelas feature Saturday about the frontier-day newspaper wars between the Republic and the Phoenix Gazette.
In a history of the Republic Ruelas noticed a funny story, dating from 1912, about how the Gazette was caught stealing news from the Republic, then called the Republican, which planted a fake story that the Gazette duly lifted. Wrote the Republic:
Lacking the enterprise which it boastfully claims and being utterly devoid of the commonest ethics belonging to the newspaper business, [the Gazette] has been brazenly and methodically stealing the news which The Republican has paid to have gathered and to publish.
Ruelas is one of the few people at the paper who does actual reported features. A week or so ago he did a long and fairly interesting reconstruction of an ineresting bit of rock ‘n’ roll arcana: Was Bono targeted for a shooting at a Tempe show back in 1987?
The year Arizona was consumed with controversy over Gov. Evan Mecham’s decision to cancel a state holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. was also the year that the Irish band U2 played four concerts here.
And dealt with death threats, according to the band. According to the oft-told tale, lead singer Bono would be shot while performing the group’s ode to King, “Pride (In the Name of Love).”
The band’s memory of this 1987 incident has appeared in various books, in magazines and in Bono’s induction speech when the band entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Ruelas skeptically pieces together various recollections to figure out how much of the story was true.
2:55 PM
Le Templar's goodbye column
The opinion pages editor is leaving the EVT to join the Goldwater Institute.
Loyal Tribune readers know of the newspaper’s challenges over the past year — the switch in January 2009 from a metro daily to a community paper with a smaller staff, company bankruptcy in September, the Nov. 2 announcement of a pending closure followed a couple of weeks later by a proposed sale that has yet to be completed.
Today, I have a great deal of hope for the Tribune’s future. But I won’t be there in the Mesa newsroom to see what happens next. I am taking advantage of a rare opportunity to join the staff of the Goldwater Institute, a public policy institution (what reporters used to call a political think tank) that shares the vision and values that the Tribune’s editorial pages have pursued with vigor for so long.
7:06 PM
Potential East Valley Tribune sale is expanded
The East Valley Tribune is reporting that its long-discussed sale to Thirteenth Floor Street Media has been delayed because the company is negotiating to get the EVT’s sister papers in the Valley as well:
The new letter of intent also includes assets of the Sun City Daily News-Sun, Ahwatukee Foothills News and Arizona Interactive in Chandler, which publishes the Clipper advertising shopper and does commercial printing. The Daily-News Sun also publishes the Glendale/Peoria Today and Surprise Today newspapers.
The deal expanded because the operations are so closely intertwined, Freedom said in a statement.
Thirteenth Street owner Randy Miller was expected to be in the Valley this week visiting the staff at Freedom locations.
More details on the new developments at Heat City.
7:00 AM
You hate to kick the EVT while it's down ...
.. and granted, it’s New Year’s weekend. Still, here’s the front-and-center well of its front page this a.m.:
p.s.: Heat City is reporting that the paper’s editor, Chris Coppola, is leaving—for an editing job at the Arizona Republic.
1:59 AM
Are readers getting the information they need from local news?
One of the things I’m interested in journalismwise is the quality of local news. We all have the internets available to us now, so few of us are dependent on our local news sources for anything but local news, right?
At the same time, many of those local news sources, particularly the print ones, are quite vulnerable right now, given the state of the industry.
Part of the reason I pick on local papers so much is that, in this context—and please excuse my French—to keep printing the same shitty stuff you always did is to sign your own death warrant.
Here’s some examples.
One’s minor. You might have noticed how the Republic is reviewing the big stories of the decade, year by year, this week. There’s a list of national stories on the front page, local stories on the Valley & State page, biz stories on the business page.
It seem crazy to me the paper wouldn’t put the local stories on its front page. That’s the insight it has no other publication can compete with.
In what context is the idea “Boy, we think the tsunami was one of the biggest stories of 2004!” front-page news in a local paper?
All local newspapers are going to turn their interests sharply homeward in the coming years; the Republic is still acting as if it’s a prime source of national and world news for its readers. It’s not.
Put it in a fucking sidebar.
Here’s another example. The Phoenix Business Journal has a story plugged on its front-page today about retail sales in the month between Christmas and New Year’s:
Retail sales climb 2.3 percent
Retailers got some good news at the end of the holiday shopping season with sales up 2.3 percent from last year, according to figures released Tuesday from the International Council of Shopping Centers.
A few grafs down, the story cited similar figures from MasterCard. The trouble is that the story didn’t say what most national news stories on the topic did, namely that there was an extra shopping day in the period this year, which means that the actual increase in sales was only about 1 percent.
It’s a small thing, but in an information age, information matters. Why should I subscribe to the PBJ—which is supposed to be displaying some expertise in business issues—when even a casual reader of business news like me immediately spots deficiencies in its reporting?
The PBJ story gets worse. The second sentence of the story makes no sense:
The [council] described the increase as significant and said procrastination by holiday shoppers, coupled with a crippling Northeastern blizzard, proved strong for retailers.
Note that the council is telling us the increase was significant when in fact it wasn’t. And how was the blizzard “strong for retailers”? Am I missing something?
Another: In my Northeast-Phoenix-zoned local-news tab this a.m., there’s a story about … some crappy bar on Camelback. Here’s the hed and first graf:
Sip Tiny Tinis on big night out at updated HB Hanratty’s
HB Hanratty’s Pub in central Phoenix has started serving Tiny Tinis, 4-ounce pours for $4.
As usual, for some unknown reason the story doesn’t come up on AZCentral.com, though I noticed another story, here, that plugs the same drink.
The question, again, is why a newspaper wastes staff time assigning, writing, editing and publishing press releases.
(Not to mention the question of how this particular press release—about a bar on Camelback—came to be included in a zoned section devoted to northeast Phoenix news.)
7:00 AM
High-wire act at the EVT
The publisher of the East Valley Tribune has posted a letter on the status of the paper’s pending sale. The news in the letter is … there is no news:
To Our Readers,
This week we have received a number of inquiries regarding the future of your newspaper. Because we value your trust in us and the relationship with all our readers, we wanted to provide a brief update.
While we have not yet reached a final agreement with Thirteenth Street Media for the sale of the Tribune, we remain in active discussions with them working to conclude the final details of a sale.
Please know that we will continue to publish and distribute the Tribune and provide our customers and readers with excellent service just as we always have while these discussions continue. Our Phoenix-area Web sites will also continue operating normally during this period.
Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Julie Moreno
Publisher, East Valley Tribune
Two months ago, the paper’s bankrupt owner, Freedom Communications, said it would close at the end of the year. Three weeks later, Thirteenth Floor came into the picture. Background on what’s happened since here.
7:00 AM
The buyer of the East Valley Tribune is asking staffers to re-apply for their jobs
Things don’t look good. Nick Martin writes in Heat City:
First, [Thirteenth Street Media owner Randy] Miller asked employees which position they are applying for – a problem because Miller has not said which positions might be available.
Later, Miller asks applicants to include three references, but he adds one instruction: “Please do not include relatives or former employers.”
No former employers, you say? So who does he want listed? Friends? Community leaders? A journalist’s sources? It’s unclear.
We should prepare for some grim holiday news from the East Valley Tribune. The smart business move is to radically downsize the serious staff and let the malleable souls remaining keep the thing filled with business-, advertiser- and government-friendly newsblurbs.
That, coincidentally, is what the company did when it took over a paper in Tucson called the Explorer. Here’s a former staffer quoted in the Tucson Weekly talking about where things were headed:
[The new editors] asked me and Oro Valley reporter Patrick McNamara if Marana and Oro Valley had [public information officers], and we said, “Yeah.” Do they send press releases? Do you put them in the paper? “No, not always. It depends on what it is. We never run a press release from a PIO.” They seemed a little taken aback by that. I quipped that most of the press releases for Marana were, “Come take a picture of this cactus we just planted.” Everyone else seemed to chuckle, but when they didn’t chuckle, I sort of knew I wasn’t going to be a part of these guys’ plan."
I can’t imagine the EVT was losing a lot of money. Its current owner, Freedom Communications, has claimed only that it had been “unprofitable” for the last two years. You can view that as a careful choice of words; on the other hand, the company is in bankruptcy, so maybe the word doesn’t have a special meaning. On the third hand, the company was loaded down with debt and might have been trying to unload a paper that wasn’t losing money just to raise cash.
The big question is how much debt Thirteenth Street is taking on to accomplish its own acquisition. The poster child for this scenario is Tribune Company, which took on oceans of new debt solely for the purpose of the privilege of being owned by Sam Zell. It, too, is in bankruptcy.
The EVT is a serious newspaper right now; if Thirteenth Street is rigorous in the cost-cutting, it can coast on that reputation (and the reflexive ad buys) for a while before folks really start noticing the decline in quality. In the meantime, again, its hard to see how a lot of local journalists won’t be facing a tough holiday.
7:00 AM
Joe Arpaio at the Cronkite School: The zoo approacheth
The Arizona Republic and KPHO have both posted stories about Monday’s live “Meet the Press”-style interview of Joe Arpaio at ASU’s Cronkite School of journalism.
Arpaio’s going to be questioned by three profs from the school at 7 p.m.
Both stories are pretty incompetent. The Republic story says that interest in the event will surely swamp the smallish school atrium where the interview will be held, so the school’s going to show it on a large video screen and stream it over the internet.
The paper doesn’t bother to tell readers where the screen will be, or what the web address for the stream is.
For the record, the video will be shown in the public mall just south of the Cronkite building, which is on the east side of Central Avenue between Polk and Fillmore.
The video stream will be here, according to the school.
The KPHO story is equally unhelpful; worse, it lets the sheriff natter on about how good he is with the press:
“There have been blips about some weekly newspaper — we didn’t give an answer to a request — but that’s been straightened out. But I think it’s great. If there’s anyone who has an open door policy, I think it’s the sheriff,” said Arpaio.
As anyone who reads the New Times knows, there are three inaccuracies in merely the first sentence alone. The KPHO reporter doesn’t bother to ask him about them.
The Republic story doesn’t mention that some students plan to protest the event; the KPHO story does, but neither note that local Tea Party activists are showing up as well.
PHXated’s background on the event is here and here.
12:00 AM
A buyer for the EVT?
A buyer for the East Valley Tribune, slated to close at the end of the year, has been found, publisher Julie Moreno told employees today.
The paper’s owner, Freedom Communications, is in bankruptcy and said two weeks ago that it would shut the paper down at the end of the year after a suitable buyer could not be found.
EVT story here.
The only discomfiting thing about the news is that … we don’t know who the new owner might be:
The buyer was not identified.
Moreno said the buyer has indicated they plan to keep a “substantial” number of Tribune employees.
In a conference call with Tribune employees Friday from Freedom headquarters in Irvine, Calif., Moreno said she has not had any conversations with the buyer about how the business will operate in the future, “but it’s my understanding the intention is to continue to operate the newspaper and Web site.”
More on the sale at Heat City.
If the buyer ever officially materializes and the deal actually goes through, this is great news for the paper’s employees, who were facing a grim new year.
Whether the paper can financially support itself after the deal is the hard part. Freedom’s in the trouble it’s in because it over-leveraged itself buying up new properties, and found itself with its financial pants down after the economic downturn.
Let me underline this point, because it’s not often mentioned in stories about the state of the newspaper industry: Up until very recently, most newspapers made a lot of money. Even in an economic collapse the papers should have been able to get by. (I guess we have to take the word of Freedom that the EVT has been unprofitable for the last two years, but I’d also like to see the sort of money it was throwing off up until 2007.)
But variations of expansion and acquisitions have burdened them with excessive debt, and that’s what’s killing a lot of them.
Now, Freedom is a special case. Some of the family ownership was smart and unloaded about half their interest about five years ago, in a deal that saw a couple of private-equity groups take a 40 percent share.
A WSJ story on the issue said this deal entailed a “relatively small” amount of debt. But here’s an example of how the numbers are working: That same story said the company’s revenues were down fully 75 percent—but it still was earning $50 million. (Note that it was making some $200 million a year until recently.)
Now, that’s not an enormous figure for such a large company (which owns dozens of small papers and eight TV stations).
But when their corporate ownership is leveraged up to its keister, two things happen. One, the papers’ profits are devoted to paying off the companies’ debt. (Which is to say, the profits are going to pay the bill for the privilege of being owned by the financial manipulators who put the deal together.)
That mean the profits aren’t going into making the property better; when the owners themselves aren’t getting their money first, they have even less impetus to sink money into the papers—and that gives subscribers less reason to stay with them.
And two, the leverage gives the papers no breathing room. The advantage of being held by a private company is that in theory you can weather troubled times and think long term without pressure from stockholders to maximize short-term profits. That’s not happening any more.
Here, it seems Freedom’s owners will be wiped out; they’ve supposedly already written off close to $500 million.
The big question about the new owner is: How much debt will it be carrying?
The answer to that question will tell us whether we’ll be reading the same stories a year from now.
12:00 AM
EVT to stop publishing at the end of the year
The East Valley Tribune had tried slashing staff and even cutting publication to three days a week, but was finally forced to give up, the paper’s publisher told staffers today, according to Heat City.
The paper is owned by the Freedom chain, based in Orange County, California, which is in bankruptcy. Reports Nick Martin:
The closing makes the Tribune the second Arizona newspaper to shutter this year. In May, the state’s oldest newspaper, the Tucson Citizen, was shut down by its owner, Gannett. The Citizen has since become a local blogging website for the media chain.
“This is probably the most difficult decision a company can make,” Freedom CEO Burl Osborne said in a news release. “But ultimately, after considering all available options, this is the best alternative for our company.”
The paper won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its lacerating series on Joe Arpaio, “Reasonable Doubt.”
Martin has more details on the closing here.
12:00 AM
The city of Anthem has its own magazine
Who knew? As is annoyingly frequent, I can’t find the AZCentral.com version of the story, printed in the Republic today, that details how the city of Anthem has decided to keep publishing the monthly magazine “Freedom Way.”
There was apparently some controversy in the town from residents worried that the magazine costs the community money.
No one, apparently, questioned whether it was appropriate for the town council to be publishing a magazine in the first place.
One councilman, according to the story, tried to get the council to pass a measure banning the magazine from endorsing candidates or taking campaign ads. According to the Republic, “The idea failed to gain support.”
As is also typical at the Republic, the story raised more questions than it answered. Is the magazine endorsing candidates now? How did the thing get started?
12:00 AM
Arizona Republic circulation down 12 percent
New figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation—the outfit that monitors newspaper subscription rates in the U.S.—shows that newspaper circulation plunged again this year.
How much? By more than 10 percent over the same period a year ago, on average.
The Arizona Republic’s circulation is now down to 316,000 and change. That’s a decline of 12.3 percent this year.
Some papers suffered even steeper losses, but in many cases this was due to the elimination of free copies, service to local hotels and other voluntary circ. pullbacks. I don’t know if the Republic has made any strategic moves like that that might have affected its circulation so severely.
What’s causing the paper’s circulation decline? Would love to hear from readers or any Republic employees what their theories are.
12:00 AM
Do psychics have PR agents?
It sure seems like it. Hard to believe a big-city newspaper would be receptive to a pitch from the tarot-card industry to drum up some business—but it’s even harder to contemplate a paper coming up with this story on its own:
When the going gets tough, Valley residents apparently go in search of the metaphysical.
Local psychics and astrologers say that while they’re seeing some decline in business as longtime clients cut back on discretionary spending, the recession is bringing them many new customers.
I missed this gem in the paper; it was brought to my attention by the blog Mediactive, overseen by ASU j school prof Dan Gillmor. Says he:
No newspaper, as far as I know, gives its pages over to self-described psychics. Yet the Republic’s story quotes several, along with the astrologers, with a straight face.
It even provides a helpful sidebar explaining the difference between psychics, astrologers, fortune-tellers and mediums (in each case with the same level of “here’s what they say, never mind what science says” logic). For example, we learn that a psychic is “sensitive to non-physical or supernatural forces and influences, able to see into the future and into the events in a person’s life. Often uses tools such as tarot cards, crystals or tea leaves.” Gosh, thanks the the deeper insight.
12:00 AM
Mayor Phil and his GF get into trouble
Turns out Mayor Phil Gordon has been dating one of his political consultants. The trouble comes because he’s been paying her for political work and has in the past nominated her to city boards.
Sarah Fenske in New Times has an in-depth story here.
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon hasn’t needed to raise money since he waltzed to reelection in the fall of 2007, leaving a war chest stocked with $370,000.
Yet in the last two years, Gordon has paid his chief fundraiser big bucks all the same. Records show that Gordon paid fundraiser Elissa Mullany and her business partner, Cate Wunder, a total of $39,000 since January 2008. That’s a period in which the campaign hasn’t shown a dime of revenue.
Gordon says he’s been daing Mullany since his breakup with his wife; their divorce is not yet final. (Mullany’s married but separated too, Fenske says.)
It looks like the mayor had to put out a press release about the relationship after Fenske started nosing around. Here’s how the Arizona Republic plays it:
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon on Tuesday asked the city attorney and a former Arizona Supreme Court chief justice to review his political ties to consultant Elissa Mullany, the woman he is now dating.
The request came after The Arizona Republic and another media outlet inquired about the relationship and whether Mullany was benefitting from any taxpayer dollars.
Note the lack of grace with which the Republic acknowledges its competition. My issue with this isn’t so much not naming the New Times as with the clumsiness. Good journalism should handle various issues consistently, and it shouldn’t leave obvious questions in readers’ minds.
A lot of stories are pursued by different news outlets at the same time. It’s appropriate to say, in those cases, “The mayor released the information after news organizations started querying the office about it.” But if they are going to note that one other outlet in paticular is doing the asking, the paper should name it.
Why did it not name New Times? Maybe it’s because Fenske had a lot more information.
The Republic trumpets its “review” of the matter … and shares it with readers in three paragraphs.
Fenske’s piece is 1500 words long, and more than forty paragraphs. And it has a lot of evidence of the positively continental attitudes of some of the major players in the story:
Mullany, who was then known as Elissa Peters, was divorced from her first husband, Aldon Terpstra, in December 1998. She married James Mullany five years later, in October 2003. She has two young sons.
A former City Council staffer, James Mullany now works for former Phoenix Mayor Paul Johnson at his development company, Old World Communities/ Berkana Townhomes. Thanks to an appointment from Gordon, he’s also on the city’s Deferred Compensation Board.
3:18 PM
Did you know the East Valley Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize?
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:
Here’s a closeup of the results:
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:
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?
6:00 AM
Bill Goodykoontz on the disappearing critic's screening
The Republic’s film critic notes that the movie studios are showing fewer and fewer movies to critics for review:
I’m starting to feel like Charlie Brown. I never get invited to anything.
OK, that’s an exaggeration.
But this much is true: Of the three major releases that open Friday, Sept. 11, today none was available for review. I watched a fourth film, “Lorna’s Silence,” on DVD.
The three films are Sorority Row, a slasher pic; Whiteout, a thriller with Kate Beckinsale set in Antarctica; and I Can Do Bad All By Myself, the latest bit of sentimentality from Tyler Perry.
Slasher films make money whether they are good or bad, and Perry presumably doesn’t care or doesn’t need to care what white critics say about his black films.
Whiteout is more of a puzzle; locally, it was screened on a Wednesday night, which is too late to make the Republic’s deadlines. That strategically leaves local word-of-mouth to the screening audience and to less-serious local critics. Beckinsale, as Goodykoontz notes, is a fairly respectable actress, but in the end even respectable actresses end up in bad films, and the studio was trying to give the thing whatever protection from critics it could.
Manohla Dargis in the NYT, for example, reviewed it today. Her verdict? “[A] perfunctory, by-the-numbers approach to the story and its characters.” And she ended with this kiss-off:
And shouldn’t there be penguins? I thought every movie about Antarctica had to have penguins. Has someone done market research proving otherwise? Is the whole penguin thing over? Or maybe the penguins read the script and told their agents to pass. Smart birds.
Goodykoontz’s is a good reminder, though, that the movie studios, like the record companies, while busily marketing themselves in public as friends of consumers and fans, often work behind the scenes in ways to screw over their customers—and in this case their news sources.
6:00 AM
Who's writing what at the Arizona Republic?
Yesterday, the paper had a big spread on long-gone Phoenix landmarks—everything from Legend City to the Cine Capri to Caf’ Casino.
The byline? There was none. Just “By The Arizona Republic.”
In the Calendar section was a big full-page review of the new movie 9. The byline? There was none.
I assume it was Bill Goodykoontz, but what’s up with that?
p.s.: And why, after the paper has just printed a story about something called “Caf’ Casino,” does a search for the phrase “Caf’ Casino” not produce the story in the AZCentral.com search engine?
Ditto for “Legend City.”
And ditto for the “Cine Capri.”
And why, oh why, is the damn thing immediately accessible in Google News?
6:00 AM
Dramatic journalistic one-upsmanship at the Arizona Republic
A few days, ago, you will recall, we examined the news briefs of the Arizona Republic’s Valley and State section and found that no bit of press-release banality was too low for the paper to assiduously chronicle and waste newsprint on. (“Republic Watch: Another example of why newspapers are dying.”)
One item in the Phoenix news briefs column, you will recall, was the breathless accounting of the opening of a community-college cafeteria.
(“The Phoenix College Culinary Cafe officially reopens today for the fall semester. Lunch is served every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.,” the story began—and went on for another four paragraphs.)
After perusing the paper this morning, we are sensing a little office rivalry. Not to be outdone, the West Valley news briefs section sees the Phoenix one’s Culinary Cafe—and raises a student-run eatery!
Student-run eatery opensAVONDALE – Estrella Mountain Community College’s student-operated restaurant opened last week on campus, 3000 N. Dysart Road.
The cost for a three-course meal at Regions Restaurant is $8.95, plus tax.
The restaurant opens to the public from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays.
The brief goes on from there, but you get the idea. The important news is that Republic’s not-to-be-outdone coverage of community-college dining-room offers continues.
6:00 AM
Even an Arizona Republic basher would have to admit ....
… that the front page today doesn’t suck.
It’s symptomatic of the design changes so many papers have adopted that only four actual stories begin, or purport to begin, on that page. But they include:
- A long recap of the the legislative shenanigans that created this year’s budget crisis
- A look back at the economic meltdown, one year ago (This was technically a long blurb to an AP story, but it should count.)
- The lede, the first in a series by by reporter Pat Kossan at how some local charter schools are abusing the tuition tax-credit program
- And a splashy intro to the first of another series, this one on the underlying issues of the health-care debate.
3:49 AM
Why people don't subscribe to newspapers any more
Exhibit no. 371 in a series, from the Arizona Republic:
5 pallets of water are donated
SCOTTSDALE – The Greater Southwest Chapter of the Club Managers Association of America has donated five pallets of water to Arizona Helping Hands Inc.Terra Waldron – vice president and general manager of Desert Highlands, a private golf and residential community in Scottsdale – and her staff joined forces to collect two pallets of water for Helping Hands.
This was the lead item in the paper’s Scottsdale news column this a.m. It continued for five more paragraphs.
It’s bad enough that newspapers reprint press releases and sell them as news; do they have to reprint boring press releases? How did the writer stay awake while typing out those sentences? Who at the Republic thinks that people want to read stuff like that instead of actual news? Why, after the paper has gone through one recent round of layoffs, does the staff that remains have to spend its time doing things like this?
And finally, I used AZCentral.com’s search engine to try to find this story after seeing it in the paper. No matter how I searched for it, it didn’t come up.
Here’s the search for “Waldron,” for example.
I went to Google News and … it came right up, giving me the story I linked to above.
In other words, the paper’s web site doesn’t even know what’s on the paper’s web site.
6:00 AM
Why newspapers are dying: A case study from the Arizona Republic
Your host here at PHXated has an interest in the media, and recently wrote a long article on the state of the daily press. The essay, “Five Key Reasons Newspapers Are Dying, and Why They Don’t Get Talked About Much,” was printed over two days in Splice Today.
After a day of radio silence, during which I thought no one cared about the subject (and even if they did I’d bloviated too long) a few folks noticed the article and started tweeting about it.
I was happy about the interest that resulted, because it demonstrated to me that serious subjects could still be treated substantively these days, and that people would take the time to read the result. For a few days, life was fun. I was interviewed by the Times and got some nice words from some people who are spending a lot of time figuring out the future of the industry.
Anyway, I just saw that I even got noticed by the Seeing Red AZ blog.
But neither they nor anyone else wondered about the identity of one major character in the piece, an unnamed paper in “one of the very largest cities in the U.S., … in classic flyover territory, a sociological light year away from a major media center.”’
Here’s part of it:
You can see the evidence of it [i.e., what I argue is the press’s thoroughgoing timidity and blandness] in the pages of virtually every daily in the U.S. I live now in one of the very largest cities in the U.S., but it’s in classic flyover territory, a sociological light year away from a major media center. Here’s a list of the headlines that appeared on a recent day on the front cover of the paper’s feature section, including both stories and news squibs:
“Wooden Memories”
“Test your hearing”
“Free burrito for teachers”
“Post office food drive”
“Fight Crohn’s and colitis”
“Mom and Estában”
“Healthful salsa non-guilty pleasure”
“Great gifts for teachers”The first of those—“Wooden Memories”—was the compelling headline of a big feature about folks who keep old wood-shop projects around the house because … they just can’t bring themselves to get rid of them.
“Wooden Memories”! “Healthful salsa”! It’s obvious from reading down that list of headlines that there was nothing there of remote interest of just about any sentient being. But that’s not what the paper’s editors were aiming for. The point is that there was nothing there that could possibly offend anyone.
Any editor who presided over such a sorry collection of non stories and journalistic Malt-o-Meal at a time when papers should have been fighting to make themselves relevant to readers should of course have been fired.
But, inside newspapers, that’s what is, paradoxically, regarded.
Indeed, the top editor of that paper just got a new job: He was stolen away by another well-known American newspaper, one of the ones currently facing bankruptcy and closure. You’d think a paper in that position would be fighting back. Instead, they turned to a guy who’d overseen the publication of sections like that.
6:00 AM