The Political Whore

By William McKeen
PoHo contributor

Cross-posted from The Farm Report

I noticed it 30 years ago, when I began teaching. In my history class, students seemed to have little interest in the cast of characters until photography came along. Pictures changed the way we looked at history. We were never as interested in George Washington as were in Abraham Lincoln. It was because of those portraits of Lincoln, where we could look into his haunted eyes.

You can’t hide from pictures. The horrific video of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, bleeding out on a Tehran street not only makes the political upheaval in Iran more tangible, it also shows the power of new media. We don’t turn to television, toward any immaculately dressed network news anchor, to see these images. We click on YouTube and get handheld cell phone video from a helpless bystander.

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The News Media Guildi is protesting (and rightly) on behalf of its members at the AP because of new social media policies at the news organization that will now require reporters and editors to remove comments and other info on their Facebook pages that don’t meet AP standards.

From Editor & Publisher:

“It is making some people cringe,” said Kevin Keane, News Media Guild administrator. “It is not appropriate for a company that heralds free speech.”

Keane also objected to another portion of the new rules that states: “Posting material about the AP’s internal operations is prohibited on employees’ personal pages.”

“You can’t tell people not to talk about anything internal to AP,” Keane said. “It is too broad. People have the right.”

Equally is its backwards policy on reporters using Twitter to communicate news. Here is both the Facebook and Twitter provisions from AP’s Q&A-format policy:

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It’s not just U.S. daily print journalism that is dying a horrible, twisting death; it is also happening in Great Britain.

This from the Guardian:

Claire Enders, the chief executive of Enders Analysis, told a Commons committee that newspapers would close across Britain because revenues would collapse by 52% – or £1.3bn – between 2007 and 2013.

“We are expecting up to half of all the 1,300 titles will close in the next five years,” Enders told the Commons culture, media and sport select committee hearing on the future of local and regional media.

(Editor’s note: here’s the latest from our RNC correspondent and Tampa Bay political activist and past candidate Kelly Benjamin)

— As of now, I’m still being charged with three ridiculous misdemeanors by the St. Paul City Attorney’s office: Unlawful Assembly, Obstructing Legal Process, and Disorderly Conduct — all of which I’m pretty confident I’m innocent of. I was all set to fly back to St. Paul and defend myself at my arraignment last week when I finally got a call back from the city attorney who is prosecuting my case. Reeking of “Minnesota Nice,” she advised me to hold off on flying up there so she could have more time to review my case and maybe even drop my charges. That was sincerely nice of her but I wish she would have told me that BEFORE I purchased another $350 roundtrip ticket. She didn’t have much to say about that. (Minnesota niced out I guess.) I postponed my court date and somehow managed to get a credit for my flight. Then I sent the prosecutor the video I was shooting right up to my arrest so she could see for herself that I was just sort of milling about peacefully when the cops chased me down and beat me up. She watched it and agreed that it didn’t look like I did anything illegal…”BUT“, she said, “you paused the tape.”

“Um, yeah, I think I pressed pause for a second or two by accident.”

“Aha! And how am I supposed to know that you didn’t break any laws while the tape was paused?”

“Well, I’m just not the kind of person that would do that…”

“Uh huh.”

(NOTE: This is not verbatim, just the gist .)

So now it’s a waiting game for me to see if the cops can come up with any evidence whatsoever to support their claim that I acted disorderly, obstructed their legal process, and/or assembled with others illegally (which I find particularly hilarious, seeing as Freedom of Assembly is one of those constitutionally guaranteed rights we supposedly enjoy).

But the most beautiful irony of the whole debacle, the one that puts a pretty red bow on top of this whole ugly mess, is that the court rescheduled my hearing in Minnesota for Nov. 4. Election Day.

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Yesterday the Sarasota Herald-Tribune let it slip announced more details about how it is joining the long list of daily newspapers that are slashing their newsrooms, bureaus and coverage.

I say let it slip because Last month, as E&P points out, the newspaper buried the lede its woes in a broader story about industrywide problems and only deep in the story getting around to the 58 news jobs that are going bye-bye. it looks like. This week, the newspaper was more forthcoming and prominently played the changes.

(Thanks to a sharper reader than I for pointing out that my original take on this was wrong and that the E&P piece was published last month. Mea culpa.)

Aaron Peter showed up at Tropicana Field Wednesday loaded for bear: His handmade sign criticized Rays outfielder Elijah Dukes, who that morning graced 1A of the St. Petersburg Times and the cover of the tabloid tbt* in a great scoop about allegations he threatened to kill his wife.

Peter, a season ticketholder, wasn’t surprised that Trop security screeners tore up his “Dukes A Hazzard” sign. But when he went looking for a copy of either newspaper to hold up in protest of Dukes’ alleged domestic threats, he found all the racks in and around the ballpark empty.

Did someone — the Rays? — lift all the copies, something that wouldn’t have been unimaginable back in the days of Vince Naimoli’s ownership?

No. It turns out it was the Times itself that was responsible for the missing papers. In an e-mail response that Peter provided to Creative Loafing, tbt* distribution manager Craig Holley wrote on Thursday:

Aaron – thanks for the heads up. We made the choice not to distribute at Tropicana Field yesterday. Naturally there is a fine line we have to walk at times and that seemed like the best choice. Things are back to normal today.

When I called Holley, he said, “This has been a hot topic today.” He deferred any detailed questions about the matter to higher ups.

Tbt* publisher Joe DeLuca, however, blamed the distribution problem on an error in communication at the newspapers. The Times is often sold outside the stadium by youth groups as a fundraising tool, he explained. On Wednesday, there was no group signed up for the outside sales. DeLuca said that distribution workers misunderstood the message that there would be no fundraising sales and instead believed they were being told not to put out any newspapers at all at the ballpark.

“We did have a screw-up,” DeLuca said late this afternoon. “We made no conscious decision not to distribute tbt*.”

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Short of the Pulitzer Prize, as a print journalist you want to win big awards such as the ASNE’s or the Green Eyeshade, which is given for Southeastern journalism by the Society for Professional Journalists. The St. Petersburg Times was the biggest local winner, with six awards that included two first places finishes.

While all but one of the Times‘ awards came in the print catetory, Media General’s TBO.com was dominant in the online section, winning one first place and four second places. Media General (which owns Newschannel 8 the Tampa Tribune) simply can’t compete with the better-financed Times and has chosen, instead, to put its journalistic juice into its online future.

Bay News 9 and ABC Action News won awards in the television category; Tampa Bay radio was shut out.

The Times won:

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