Fresh Loaf

Ever had to reject someone’s advances in less than 140 characters? CNN anchor Don Lemon has.

Over at Atlanta’s homegrown 24-hour news channel, it seems like everyone is on the microblogging service. Rick Sanchez, whose Facebook updates once confused the hell out of us, uses Twitter to field show suggestions. Lemon, the host of the afternoon “CNN Newroom,” uses it to interact with viewers.

And God would I love to know what provoked this update from the anchor:

(Hat tip to Christa at PecanneLog and Wonkette)

Bookmark It

Just an update: Matthew Cardinale, who broke the story about blogger Andre Walker’s payments from U.S. Rep. David Scott, responded late last night to my inquiry about Walker’s own response to his story.

Walker argued yesterday that Atlanta Progressive News, where Cardinale is news editor, was being hypocritical because APN took campaign ad money from three candidates it endorsed.

Here’s Cardinale’s response:

Dear Ken,

… These were all ad purchases. Creative Loafing sells ads too, right?

The difference is our readers can see exactly who is advertising when the ads run and if they feel ads affect content they can take that into consideration.

To insinuate ads affect endorsements, our recent slate of endorsements laid out a number of principled issue positions with which we made our decisions.

Also, Atlanta Housing Authority can advertise on our website if they want to (really, we’ll take their money), but we’re not going to all of a sudden stop investigating them. David Scott can advertise too and he’s still a corporate centrist.

(He’s referring to AHA and Scott because APN’s written critically about both of them.)

I pretty much agree with Cardinale — though you could accuse me (as one commenter to my last post basically did) of saying so because we take ads. Just as Matthew said about APN, ads don’t affect what we write in our articles — though what we report has occasionally affected advertising. Around this whole conflict of interest standpoint, ads at least have the benefit of being right out there for everyone to see, so they can judge for themselves if they feel as if a story matches a special interest; payments from political candidates might be disclosed on campaign reports, but how many people pour over them?

‘NOTHER UPDATE: Andre Walker posted a mea culpa of sorts on Georgia Politics Unfiltered this morning. I apologize that this is coming so late. As noted elsewhere, we had awful Internet problems today in the office, which kinda hampered things.

Bookmark It

SEE UPDATE here.

A leading Georgia political blogger is being accused of conflicts of interest for doing work for politicians and failing to disclose it. The issue raises a couple of broader questions about ethical standards for political bloggers.

Atlanta Progressive News released an investigative article early this morning that details work done by Georgia Politics Unfiltered’s Andre Walker for U.S. Senate candidate Vernon Jones and incumbent Congressman David Scott, as well as a long list of favorable posts on Scott.

(more…)

Bookmark It

Mike Boettcher, a Peabody Award-winning journalist who’s covered conflicts in the Middle East and Africa for NBC News and CNN, is launching a Web venture called NoIgnoring. He’s channeling the ghost of Ernie Pyle and venturing off to Iraq and Afghanistan to tell soldiers’ stories from the warzones.

“We have 200,000 U.S. men and women in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. The U.S. has seemed to have forgotten about them. We talk about the war, but we’ve forgotten the soldiers and what they are doing,” Boettcher said.

He’s not traveling solo, either — Boettcher’s 21-year-old son Carlos will join him. The two plan to embed with the Fourth Infantry Division and mimic their tours — 15 months in the field, 18 days at home — and post blogs and video reports to the site. The reports will be free for television stations to post on their websites, Boettcher says.

According to various blog posts about the venture, father and son left in late May or June. Interesting fact: Boettcher filed one of the first reports for Ted Turner’s 24-hour news network.

Full disclosure: Boettcher is a friend of mine, but I haven’t spoken with him in months. I googled his name for kicks the other day and came across this news. I wish him and Carlos all the best and look forward to their work.

Bookmark It

That Other Paper has a terrible habit of not printing our name. We’ve come to accept it here and find it almost laughable. The monolith decides what to acknowledge, we know.

So I was floored this morning while reading a Gay Talese-esque profile of John Woodham, the attorney who successfully battled the Beltline all the way to state Supreme Court.

During a recent weekday afternoon, an unshaven Woodham, dressed in an old fleece jacket and battered ballcap, returned from lunch carrying a piece of Fellini’s pizza and a Creative Loafing. He drives a Land Rover adorned with a “W” bumper sticker with a slash through it.

Emphasis added out of sheer amazement. This made me feel like an auto worker in Detroit who gets name-dropped during the State of the Union. When the editors opted to leave that reference in, did papers fly around the office? Did a portal to another dimension open, the fabric of time tear? Did Henry Grady rise from the ground and start high-kicking on Julia Wallace’s desk? The article also references comments made here.

But then again, since Woodham wouldn’t talk to the AJC, maybe saying that he was holding a copy of our paper was a clever way to describe him as a knowledgeable, astute, well-rounded man of immeasurable talent. Or a left-leaning badass.

Nice bumper sticker, too, John.

Bookmark It

You should know that I’m in a really dark place right now. Decatur Metro passes on word that Flip Spiceland, my man crush, is stepping down after seven years at 11 Alive News, NBC’s Atlanta affiliate station. My admiration and sheer wonder for this man has been well-documented, so I just would like to be brief and let Flip know … Spice … buddy … thank you.

In honor of the man, here’s a hilarious piece in the Morning News, a Brooklyn-based online magazine, about weathermen with awesome names. Flip is ranked No. 1.

(Photo courtesy of 11Alive)

Bookmark It

Quill, the official publication of the Society for Professional Journalists, has an insightful piece by Ed Avis on the changing landscape of alternative newsweeklies. Creative Loafing’s Ben Eason is heavily quoted in the piece, naturally, in part because of the recent acquisitions of the Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper. In part Eason talks about the “generational shift” in the industry.

The article thoughtfully lays out many of the challenges facing alt-weeklies, including the Internet and the subsequent impact of Craigslist on classified-ad sales, and how consolidation is one of the responses to that challenge:

At least 18 media companies in the United States own two or more alternative weeklies, including Review Publishing, which owns the Philadelphia Weekly and Atlantic City Weekly, and Village Voice Media, which owns 16 papers, including the Riverfront Times in St. Louis, Westword in Denver and New York’s Village Voice.

“Does the corporatization of those papers mean there will be less enterprising reporting? I’m not sure,” said Medill’s [Charles] Whitaker. “In the corporate model, there is an emphasis on producing a lot of stories, which can hinder enterprise. People can become concerned with filling space. But it hasn’t played out yet.”

Bookmark It

Friday was a rough day at the Loaf, perhaps even rougher at our new brethren papers in Washington and Chicago.

In Atlanta, we laid off four sales people, a marketing assistant, a sales assistant and our wonderful assistant distribution manager — seven employees total. No Edit staff member was among those cuts, but that’s partly because we have a couple of open positions right now.

The edit departments at the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper – altweeklies that Creative Loafing Inc. bought last August — were hit a bit harder. Reader Editor Alison True had to lay off John Conroy and three other highly respected, longtime staff writers on Friday. City Paper editor Erik Wemple laid off four writers and an editorial assistant. (Even though he mocked us as “unfortunately named,” NYT media columnist David Carr, who happens to be a former City Paper editor, had an interesting take on the Chicago and D.C. layoffs.)

Why is this happening? Did CL overextend when it purchased City Paper and the Reader?

Not according to CL CEO Ben Eason. Eason’s always argued that small players such as Creative Loafing Inc., which he runs out of our Tampa headquarters, will only be able to compete in today’s highly competitive media environment by becoming effective platforms for national advertisers, in addition to the local advertisers who traditionally provide the bulk of the revenue for altweeklies. In his view, he had little choice but to seek out the financing to expand. And the merger gave CL a presence in three of the country’s top 10 markets.

It’s no secret that City Paper and the Reader already were struggling before the purchase. Neither is it a mystery that our existing papers — Atlanta, Tampa, Charlotte and Sarasota — face a lot more competition than we have in the past both in print and online.

We’re not alone. CL’s going through the same sort of difficult transition that’s hitting other media companies. For the last few years, ad dollars have been moving at an accelerated pace to the Web. Classified ads, which must now compete with free online sites such as Craigslist, are in the toilet. Now the economy’s soft (to put it politely), which has particularly hit real-estate advertising.

You hear a lot more about such struggles at the dailies — because, well, they’re much, much bigger, so they make bigger news. The AJC’s print circ keeps dropping and despite pretty strong online numbers, it’s been forced to undergo some drastic restructuring. As CL’s Scott Henry reported, AJC Editor Julia Wallace cut her staff by around 80 people last spring.

The real question for me, and I suspect for most readers, is how we can do as good or better a job under such circumstances at giving Atlanta the great journalism it deserves — whether that’s in the form of investigative stories, local news coverage, great criticism or basic listings. And tied to that: Will all the effort we’re putting into blogs, podcasts, reader-submitted columns and other Web-only content help us serve our readers even better?

From an audience-building perspective, I’ve seen some encouraging numbers recently: Our October page views jumped 58.6 percent over last October’s numbers, and November’s year-over-year growth topped 90 percent. How that audience growth translates into ad dollars is the business question that Ben and the folks on the sales side of our business are going to have to grapple with for a long time — and continuously.

Bookmark It

Conventional wisdom dictates one loves or loathes Fox News because of the network’s politics.

I think what differentiates Fox from CNN or ABC, however, isn’t that it’s the place where Republicans and not-liberals go for TV news they like.

I think the secret is sensationalism.

All TV news sensationalizes. Fox sensationalizes with an intensity and shamelessness that other news outlets do not. Every moment of Fox News is calculated to get people worked up.

Example:

Yesterday afternoon in Phoenix, a toddler died after apparently being left in a hot car by his mom while she worked as a server at Hooters.

National news outlets are all over the story — because it’s tragic, and because the mother’s employment at Hooters provides an opportunity for networks to show scantily clad women, and for armchair phony moralists to make snide comments about “Hooters girls.”

ABCNews.com’s headline for the story is Forgotten Toddler Dies Inside Hot Car.

The Arizona Republic’s website headlines the sad death 17-Month Old Found Dead In Car.

FOXNews.com puts all of the story’s sensationalistic appeal right in the headline:

Toddler Dies After Hooters Mom Forgets Child in Hot Car.

The image they chose for the story is of 16 women in Hooters outfits at a convention in Las Vegas.

Fox looks at a dead child and a grieving family and sees tits and ass.

Yet it’s the preferred network of self-proclaimed family-values, traditional conservatives.

Bookmark It

Last month, the disappearance and murder of 26-year-old pregnant Ohioan Jessie Davis attracted international news coverage. Her face was on the front page of CNN.com so often that I can still picture it. The news coverage was so extensive that she’s the first hit if you Google “Ohio pregnant.”

Last week, two men were kidnapped on Glenwood Avenue in East Atlanta and held hostage for 14 hours while their kidnappers went shopping with their credit cards. The two victims were rescued by police and, two days later, flew to New York to appear on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Last Thursday night, DeKalb County police believe Monica Renee Bowie was kidnapped from her Lenox Park Apartments home. Lenox Park is just outside Atlanta city limits in DeKalb County, near Lenox Square mall. Neighbors say they heard a woman screaming for help at around 11 that night.

Local TV news stations reported the abduction fairly quickly, but compared to Jessie Davis and the East Atlanta kidnappings, relatively little attention has been paid to Bowie’s disappearance.

No national news outlets have mentioned her.

The AJC didn’t report her disappearance until Sunday.

Her face doesn’t even appear on the DeKalb County Police Department’s missing persons web page.

Why do think that is?

Bookmark It