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I will be out of the office on special assignment next week, so my blogging will be light. Hang in there. Joe B will continue to file the Short List every day, and I will pop in as often as I can from my remote locations to add my 2 cents.
Tampa Tribune Editor Janet Coats will meet with her restless troops next week to discuss what they have all been awaiting/dreading: the future of the newsroom. She sent this e-mail to her staff today:
From: Coats, Janet E.
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2008
Subject: Newsroom staff meetingsWe’ll have staff meetings on Tuesday to talk about plans for the second half of the year. We’ll talk about the subject that is foremost in your minds – job reductions. But we’ll also talk about the new structure for the newsroom and the ways we see the newspaper and TBO.com changing in the coming months.
We’ll also try to draw a road map for the next few months. We live in uncertain times, and there’s not much I can do to change that. But I will try to give you a little better sense of the decisions we face in the next few months, and how we’re going to work through them to create the best opportunities to do good journalism.
Bonus cuts: 54 take buyout at Media General Fla operations; Closing the South Tampa office
I’m proud and happy to be the featured speaker at the Suncoast Tiger Bay Club meeting Thursday night on the USF-St. Petersburg campus.
USF St. Petersburg
140 7th Avenue S., St. Petersburg
Click here for campus map
5:00 - 6:00 p.m. - Hors D’oeuvres Reception*
*$20 for STBC members, students, faculty & staff / $25 for all others
6:15 - 7:15 p.m. - Program (open to all at no cost)
Details here. (I know the RSVP deadline has passed but contact Tiger Bay Club anyway; I’m sure they can make an accommodation.)
I will be talking about the impact of the youth vote in 2008, and I hope there are plenty of people there ready to take me on on the subject.
(I had meant to post this last week as the Russert frenzy was in full bloom but had trouble with the embedding code; with that fixed, and with The Today Show this morning yet again finding a reason to mention Russert’s passing, I figured, what the hell …)
Here’s Fox News waxing godly about how a rainbow suddenly appeared after Tim Russert’s funeral. Don’t these anchors know that Rupert will fire them for saying nice stuff about liberal journalists?
Station Director Vicki Santa has abruptly stepped down from her position of eight years at the community radio station, which revealed the news on its website on Friday:
Vicki Santa regretfully announced her resignation as Station Manager at the WMNF Community Radio Board of Directors meeting on June 16th, 2008.
Vicki has been our Station Manager for 8 years and was instrumental in realizing many of our goals, including construction of our beautiful new facility on Martin Luther King Blvd. and shepherding our move into it.
Vicki will be transitioning to a new role at WMNF where she can continue to share her vast experience and love for community radio with us and we are grateful that Vicki will still be a valued and contributing member of our family.
Mercedes Skelton has been appointed Acting Station Manager effective immediately.
Ed Ruark President, Nathan B. Stubblefield Foundation
Santa had weathered a downturn in fundraising in 2007 and a controversy over the cancellation of activist Connie Burton’s show in 2005. Any MNF’ers out there know what’s going on with this move?
One-time CL staff member and current freelance contributor Dawn Morgan is sharing her journalistic talents with other news organizations around town. Just today, Dawn interviewed journalist/political organizer David Sirota about his new book The Uprising, a chronicle of the “burgeoning backlash against the Establishment, government, and media’s unrealistic representation of the people.” The interview is set to run on tonight’s WMNF evening news, but you can get a sneak peak here. Or, tune in to WMNF tonight between 6-7 p.m. on your final hellish commute of the week.
If that doesn’t work for you, hit up the WMNF website in a few days for an archived clip.
I was struck by something in the coverage today about Tampa Bay’s 10 morning anchor Mario Diaz going to be a flack for the McCain for President campaign in the Southeast. From the Trib’s Walt Belcher:
Diaz says the offer from the McCain camp came after he attended a Republican Hispanic political conference in Orlando in May.
Diaz was one of several journalists who participated in a panel discussion on issues that concern Florida’s Latino community.
“I had the blessing of Channel 10 to attend the conference,” he points out. “After the session, people were coming up to me asking if I had ever considered going into politics.”
So, how far along were Mario’s talks with the McCain campaign when he conducted 10’s interview with Barack Obama last month? The Republican Hispanic Conference he references was held on May 10. Obama spoke in Tampa — and was interviewed by Diaz — on May 21.
I asked Tampa Bay’s 10 spokesman Pete Nikiel if the issue came up with Diaz when he let the station know he was leaving. Nikiel said it did not but was fairly certain that Diaz was not in talks with McCain when he did the Obama interview. “I don’t believe he was,” Nikiel told PoHo. “This all came up very quickly. We were all set to sign a contract with him.”
Nikiel said he did not have a way to contact Diaz, whose last day at the station was yesterday. I’m trying to track him down for comment and will update if I can.
UPDATE: I haven’t spoken with Diaz yet, but he did tell Eric Deggans at The Feed that he was offered the McCain gig on June 11, after he conducted the Obama interview:
Diaz said he talked to McCain’s regional campaign manager after interviewing the candidate at his June 5 fundraiser at the Vinoy in St. Petersburg.
“I knew they had needs in the state of Florida, so why not take that opportunity?” he said. “When Barack Obama came to town (in May) I fought hard for those stories…(And) I asked the same questions an anybody else.”
The job offer came less than a week later, on June 11, he said. Diaz’s last day at WTSP was Tuesday, and the former reporter said he filed no more political stories after informing the station’s general manager on June 11 that he was taking the McCain job.
Seriously, it is Day 7 of the carpet-bombing coverage of the tragedy that was the death of NBC’s Washington bureau chief, and I had enough on Day 2. The news reports about Russert’s untimely passing illustrate just how far the mainstream media has moved away from true journalism and into the realm of infotainment. Russert’s death has a classic story arc with great characters: working-class kid, loves his dad and dotes on his son, writes a popular book, hosts a national show, is a good, old-fashioned journalist and not just a pretty TV face; his son is articulate, his friends in the biz are legion; a nation in mourning.
Let’s hope today’s coverage of yesterday’s memorial service end this madness.
Bonus cuts: DailyKos removed anti-Russert posts; in death, Russert dragged into oil debate; Deggans: Of course Russert coverage was over the top; “What has possessed NBC News to televise a never-ending video wake?”
Hate to make today a Bob Norman pimpathon, but this piece he wrote about how the media handled the tomato-salmonella scare is just too good not to share:
First you must understand that the tomato story was perfect for newspapers. Think about it — nothing like deadly tomatoes on a dull news day. Tomatoes are everywhere! In our homes, restaurants, spaghetti sauce, salads … everywhere. The odds that any Sentinel readers would be affected by the salmonella scare was about the same as one of them getting stuck in a pool drain or killed by a candle (both old Help Team bugaboos). Since April, one person has died nationally with 167 reported ill. And Florida tomatoes weren’t affected at all.
But don’t let the facts get in the way of a sensational lede story. On Tuesday, the Sun-Sentinel put the story on the front page with a large bold headline headline: “HOLD THE TOMATOES.”
The article wasn’t about how Browardites were coming down ill. There were, of course, no illnesses here since the tomatoes were fine. The local hook was that some restaurants had pulled tomotoes from their menus even though they were believed to be safe (the entire headline, including the smaller print: “Many Fast-Food Restaurants Say: HOLD THE TOMATOES”).
The article itself was basically a primer on different types of tomatoes and the finer points of the salmonella you weren’t going to get in Florida.
Fine. Okay. The Sentinel, however, wasn’t finished with this juicy story. They put the Help Team on the job and the next day came out with this lead front-page headline: “Florida’s tomatoes declared OK to eat.”
Forget that Florida’s tomatoes were never declared not OK to eat in the first place. Just pass the pizza pie. The article rehashed the previous day’s information and, admirably, contained a bit of self-referential criticism on the absurdity of the piece appearing in the newspaper at all….
So, how did the Tampa Bay dailies do?
The Tampa Tribune went much the same route as the rest of the dailies, playing up the voluntary ban by some large corporations before declaring tomatoes safe the next day. June 9’s blog “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” (never mind that salmonella isn’t exactly a brutally deadly thing, although one death was linked to the tainted tomatoes) and June 10’s “Tainted Tomato Varieties Pulled From Supermarkets” vs. June 11’s “FDA Clears Bay Area Tomatoes; Harvesting Stopped in South Florida” and “Florida Tomatoes Rejected Over Scare.”
At the Times, the paper led with a pretty balanced and non-tabloidy FAQ on the story that pointed out the voluntary nature of the ban and that no Florida cases had been reported. The story was very low-key and non-inflammatory. (It appears from the Times’ website that an earlier headline online about tomato-borne salmonella sickening dozens “nationwide” was replaced with a more precise headline that didn’t lead you to believe that every state was affected.) The paper even did a good story two days later on what the scare cost Florida growers: $500 million.
(photo by Manjith Kainickara)
For those who (like me) were distracted by the whole Father’s Day thing and forgot to set their DVR to tape PoHo on Brendan McLaughlin’s Sunday public affairs news show, here’s a link (unable to embed the video so far) to me and Renee Dabbs of The Victory Group on Segment 3 of this week’s show.
Pardon the blatant self-propping, but this lil ol’ political blog was named Best Media Blog at the Netroots Conference down at the JJ Dinner in Hollywood, Fla., yesterday. (Congrats to the folks over at St. Petersblog for winning Best Local Blog as well.)
