Posted by Wayne Garcia on Aug. 21, 2009, at 5:00 am
For logistical purposes, CL has been consolidating its multiple blog platforms into one, and now it is The Political Whore’s turn to hang out the “We’re Moving” sign. It makes sense: we can’t use a common search engine among more than one blog right now. And we have to cross-post Green Community posts to both sites, to use just one example of content that fits into both blogs.
This will be the last post in this old blog site (Friday, August 21, 2009). Future PoHo posts will appear in our Daily Loaf blog, which also includes Green Community, arts, entertainment, sports, sex & love, film, TV and other pop culture posts.
You can read PoHo news pretty much the same way you read PoHo now, if you just want news & politics and not the rest of the Daily Loaf fare. Just change your bookmark from http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/politicalwhore/
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Aug. 12, 2009, at 5:58 am
Last night some Facebook users were invited to be part of a beta test for Facebook Lite (the link now bounces you not to Lite but to regular Facebook), but they soon found that the invitation was premature: Facebook pulled the trigger on too many beta testers, only to shut down the link.
So, what is Facebook Lite?
Depends on who you ask. Tech Crunch reports that it looks much like Twitter or FriendFeed:
Okay, while it seems that most of the users who are getting this message now are not seeing much different, earlier this week, it looks like a very select few may have gotten a sneak peak at Facebook Lite. According to their tweets on it, it appears to be a more Twitter-like. One user notes that it, “looks like a simplified version of twitter with comments enabled. On 2nd thought, it looks like simplified FriendFeed.”
That is of course very interesting since Facebook just bought FriendFeed for around $50 million yesterday.
Tech Crunch features this screen capture of Facebook Lite.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Aug. 11, 2009, at 2:00 pm
Back when it started, TBO.com was a pioneering website, easy to navigate with lots of good info fed into it from a robust Tampa Tribune and WFLA-TV newsroom.
Today, 15 years after its birth, TBO.com is the growth engine on Parker Street for Media General, but it is a shadow of itself content-wise. It also uses video poorly (given all its access to video from owning the top-rated local TV station) and has an absolutely incomprehensible and unnavigable blog structure.
August 11, 2009 – Today, TBO.com celebrates 15 years of serving the Tampa Bay community online. August 11, 1994 marked the first date of online publishing for TBO.com, making The Tampa Tribune one of the first newspapers in the nation with a dedicated news Web site.
… Today, TBO.com serves more than 3 million unique visitors each month with well over 20 million page views every month. TBO.com recently introduced new interactive elements to its site including VIPIR Interactive Radar from Storm Team 8 allowing users to zoom down to street level and view storms just above their neighborhoods. TBOsnap.com launched as the new user video submission tool, allowing Tampa Bay residents to record news and report it straight from their video cell phones via e-mail to myshots@tbosnap.com. Also as a leader in mobile Web technology, m.tbo.com recently released news and weather videos on the iphone platform and is receiving record views from TBO mobile iphone users.
“The biggest change in 15 years has been the growth of digital news – first on the Web, and now on mobile and social networks. We’re proud of the team that’s dedicated to the success of this 24 hour news service and that continues to work every day to make us Tampa’s No.1 source for breaking news,” says TBO.com’s Content Director, Loren Omoto.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Aug. 10, 2009, at 10:45 am
Another TV news personality has been urged not to have children. The twist is that this time it is a male anchor, not a woman.
For those not enamored of following Florida media insider baseball, you can bail out now. But for the rest of us media whores, there is a wonderful story that has been playing out for a week or so in Miami, where the ABC affiliate WPLG has fired one of its anchors who now claims it is because he is (gasp!) gay.
Charles Perez has fought back, with a sexual orientation discrimination complaint (which he claims triggered the firing) and a blog post in the Daily Beast in which he details his claims that station management was afraid of his increasing gay profile and urged him not to have children with his male partner. (The station, in written statements, denies Perez’s allegations.)
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 29, 2009, at 2:40 pm
Nobody emerged with a clear advantage from today’s federal bankruptcy court hearing in Tampa for the post-bankruptcy ownership of Creative Loafing. Judge Caryl E. Delano kept intact a negotiated set of auction rules while saying that she’s waiting until the Aug. 25 equity auction bidding to decide how to define and decide what the “highest and best” offer will be.
While today’s hearing about the rules and procedures for the bidding was given a pretty high-drama buildup in a 1B St. Petersburg Times story and in the Chicago Reader last week, it didn’t live up to its billing and was actually a complex, confusing, and undramatic court session.
Delano approved the negotiated set of bidding rules that was contested for two hours today, but she left some core issues unresolved and said, “I’ll make my ruling as to what the highest and best offer is” on Aug. 25.
If there was real news out of today’s hearing, it was that Creative Loafing CEO Ben Eason is considering stepping down temporarily to focus on formulating a new equity bid for the post-bankruptcy company.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 29, 2009, at 9:47 am
I’m headed over to the Tampa federal courthouse to report on Federal Bankruptcy Judge Caryl E. Delano expected ruling after she hears both sides (and maybe more) argue about the rules and procedures for the planned Aug. 25 equity auction that will determine who owns the post-Chapter 11 Creative Loafing alt-newspaper and online news company. Will update once the 11:45 am hearing is over.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 28, 2009, at 11:21 am
Because we just can’t get enough of her, the farewell speech of (now former) Alaska Gov. and Head GOP Whacko Sarah Palin is on full display on the interwebs, first off with this link to stunning interpretation of the Republican grande dame’s verbiage, as performed on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien by “master thespian” William Shatner.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 24, 2009, at 8:59 am
Mrs. Former Fort Myers Beach Town Manager
This week’s HoCast marks a revamp of my format. While I will continue to do long-form interviews with political figures as podcasts, the PoHo brand will feature a fairly regular cast and a quick, funny format that looks at the top political and media issues, the Quotable soundbite and the Political Whore of the Week.
1. The shameful Today Show coverage of the Obama health care newser
2. The firing of the town manager of Fort Myers Beach for marrying a porn actress (shown above)
3. The Barack Obama-as-Witch Doctor e-mail flap
4. ESPN’s multi-problems with censorship (the Ben Rothlisberger story)
5. Mary Mulhern uses tax dollars to go to Cuba
This week’s PoHo Award nominees are:
New York stripper Christy Yamanaka, who was involved in the Judge Thomas Stringer scandal. He pleaded guilty this week to one count of mortgage fraud in connection with a house the two bought in Hawaii.
And, via txt message from an anonymous politician, this nomination:
“The Jersey 44, that’s lookin’ like a real political gangbang! Even by Jersey’s standards.”
Listen to the HoCast after the jump to find out who won:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 23, 2009, at 8:34 am
A few weeks ago I announced to my wife that I would not be watching The Today Show in the mornings any more. I just got fed up with its growing tabloid style and insistence on flogging non-stories to death. Like this week’s “exclusive” multi-day interview with Susan Boyle. Or the dude trying to get his kid back from Brazil who is interviewed at least twice a week. Or the latest family with a loved one attacked by a critter/rescued from a certain death/dying from a disease/etc.
But this morning, I broke my rule and paid the price for it. Meredith, Matt, Al and the rest of the formerly great NBC morning news show led the broadcast with this top story: Barack Obama had ruined his newser on health care last night by criticizing the wrongful arrest of prominent Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates Jr. last week.
ABC’s Good Morning America apparently did the same thing.
St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans noticed, too, writing this AM:
…[W]hy did the Today show — by far TV’s most-watched morning show — spend its first segment this morning discussing what the president said about the arrest of a black scholar in Cambridge, Mass.?
Here is how the “journalists” left at NBC played the president’s desperate attempt to pull out his health care victory on the website this AM:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 22, 2009, at 10:05 am
From Media General, which owns TBO.com, the Tampa Tribune and News Channel 8 in this market:
RICHMOND, Va., July 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Media General, Inc. (NYSE: MEG – News) today reported net income for the second quarter of 2009 of $20.6 million, or 90 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $532.2 million in the 2008 period, which included a non-cash, after-tax impairment charge of $532.1 million. The current quarter included a $7.1 million after-tax gain on the sale of a CW television station in Jacksonville, Fla., a $3.6 million tax benefit that resulted from a favorable determination concerning a state tax issue, and $7.5 million of tax benefits attributable to the company’s first-half results from continuing operations. Excluding severance expense from both quarters, and last year’s impairment charge, income from continuing operations before taxes was $3.8 million in 2009’s second quarter compared with $2.6 million in the year-ago quarter.
“A 23-percent decrease in total operating costs year-over-year was a major contributor to the company’s improved operating results, helping to offset a 20 percent revenue decline. Actions driving the lower expenses included reductions in force across the company, a furlough program, a suspension of matching in the company’s 401(k) plan in 2009, and the final freeze of the company’s pension plan effective May 31, 2009. Service accruals ceased in the partial freeze of the plan in 2006 and now future salary increases do not affect retirement benefits. Media General has implemented many difficult but necessary expense reductions that strengthen our ability to weather the deep recession and recognize the reduced revenue streams available in our business. As a result, we are in a stronger position to take advantage of an economic recovery,” said Marshall N. Morton, president and chief executive officer.
“Our aggressive cost elimination actions were particularly evident in our Publishing segment, which generated a $12 million profit in the current quarter compared with $6.8 million in the prior-year. Publishing revenues declined 20.3 percent in the second quarter, about the same as the first quarter. We saw the rate of Classified advertising declines abate somewhat in the second quarter compared to the first quarter of 2009, mostly in the automotive category, and particularly in our Florida, Virginia and Alabama markets. The decline in Retail advertising in the current period was also less severe than in the first quarter of 2009.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 22, 2009, at 5:30 am
Thanks to a little internal housecleaning at Creative Loafing (I mean that literally, not in the figurative sense of firing folks), a copy of “President Obama’s 500 Promises Deck” showed up on my desk this week. The card deck — not quite a game — is a partnership between the St. Petersburg Times‘ Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact and U.S. Game Systems Inc.
The Deck features 500 campaign promises that Barack Obama made during his campaign and that PolitiFact is tracking after the president said, “I want you to hold me accountable.”
It has been on the market for several months, but it’s not tearing up the sales registers of America.
“I think it had a little bit of a problem finding its niche,” said Lynn Araujo, communications director for US Games Systems.
The cards don’t have a partisan slant; they merely recite one of the many campaign promises that candidate Obama made and invite card owners to go to PolitiFact’s online site to see an update on what progress President Obama has made on each pledge. They look like this:
But while that is pretty nonpartisan, apparently would-be buyers don’t see it that way.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 18, 2009, at 6:30 am
I’m starting a new Saturday feature to wrap up news and blog posts you might have missed during your busy week. Here’s a look at the Week in Review:
New book blasts sportswriters for ‘hysteria’ regarding steroids – Mitch Perry. The WMNF anchor writes about a new book that lays the blame for steroid-mania at the foot of writers who aren’t aggressive. “The writers, the supposed experts, watched over the last 20-30 years as steroids became a very, very common substance. And they didn’t see it.”
POTUS and the Pope — Peter Schweitzer. Our contributors asks: if the US bishops are sideways with Barack Obama over his abortion stance, why is the pope so warmly receiving him?
By Catherine Durkin Robinson
PoHo contributor Catherine Durkin Robinson is a “feminist mother of twins” and a political blogger, working under the title Out in Left Field.
When Alexandra Zayas fromthe St. Petersburg Times called to talk about the Channel 8 protests, I couldn’t have been happier. Intelligent, friendly, compassionate — Zayas understood the topic and had done the research. She was covering the protest and surrounding story, gathering opposing points of view from friend and foe alike.
Hers would be a well-rounded story. I could just tell. So I was happy to contribute a verse.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 16, 2009, at 1:55 pm
David Simanoff was a reporter at the Tampa Tribune for a decade before leaving just as massive layoffs and contraction began at the daily newspaper. He was pretty high profile and a business writer, showing up on News Channel 8 segments often. He is also a gay man.
Now, on his blog, Daily Dave 3.0, he writes about his mixed feelings about whether to join yesterday’s protest of his former employer, Media General, for broadcasting the anti-gay Speechless: Silencing Christians hour-long paid television show on the same evening as St. Pete Pride.
He ultimately decided not to join the Red Flag Rally, but most interesting are his recollections about how his former employer treated GLBT issues. Here’s what he wrote, using the acronym MFE for “my former employer”:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 16, 2009, at 1:24 pm
Dan Ruth, unceremoniously dumped from 200 S. Parker St. earlier this year, is apparently not content with his every-Friday column in the rival St. Petersburg Times; he has started his own blog.
It has taken a while for someone who began in the newspaper business back in the lead type days to come around to the vast world of the emerging new technologies, but with the help and encouragement of friends, here it is – the Ruthington Post blog of Daniel Ruth.
I’m still learning how to work with this form, so please bear with me. I will probably spend the next few days playing around and experimenting. But in the future I hope to be posting a daily blog that will deal with all manner of issues, from politics, to popular culture to who knows what?
Stay tuned. Let’s see what the future holds.
Welcome to the blogosphere and its world of quality journalism, Dan.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 15, 2009, at 9:57 am
Organizers of today’s 5:30 pm protest at Media General-owned News Channel 8 in downtown Tampa have released two logos they are putting on signs and T-shirts for the event, playing on the station’s logo and the word “hate” that represents the station’s airing of the anti-gay Speechless Christian infomercial on Gay Pride day.
Here they are:
CL will be staffing the protest and bring you coverage on Twitter and video we’ll post on the blog.
On Saturday, June 27, thousands of people gathered in the streets of St. Petersburg, FL for the city’s annual Gay Pride parade and festival. While we were celebrating and honoring the legacy of the LGBT civil rights movement, our local NBC affiliate (WFLA-Ch. 8) was airing Speechless: Silencing the Christians, an hour long special paid for by the conservative American Family Association (AFA) that makes a series of specious and demeaning claims about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Rhodes, 50, was supposed to be tried today on charges tied to his Jan. 16 arrest. But the trial was continued until Wednesday because his attorney was awaiting transcripts from a previous hearing.
Now, instead of going to trial, Rhodes will plead no contest on Wednesday to a misdemeanor obstruction charge, defense attorney Jeff Brown said.
As part of the plea deal, Rhodes will serve 50 hours of community service. Adjudication will be withheld, meaning he will not have a conviction on his record.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 29, 2009, at 9:45 am
A stunning admission, if completely unsurprising to anybody who has run campaigns in any African-American community in this state: The way to get coverage in black-owned media is to pay for it.
That was the direct message to Jim Greer, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, from a group of African-American media execs over the weekend:
“At the end of the day, it’s about money. If you buy advertising, you’re more likely to get coverage,” said Johnny Hunter, president of the Florida Association of Black Owned Media and publisher of Sarasota’s Tempo News.
That according to coverage of the meeting in the Orlando Sentinel. Greer’s response?
Greer promised that the party would stop ignoring black media. He said that mainstream newspapers such as the Orlando Sentinel, Tampa Tribune and Tallahassee Democrat cover the party’s issues regardless of whether they advertise, but the party chairman nevertheless seemed willing to accept the quid-pro-quo arrangement.
“When I hear that when we advertise, the paper will be more likely to disseminate Republican issues, am I hearing right?” Greer asked. “I don’t understand the legitimacy of disseminating information and having a tie-in to revenue — but I get it.”
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.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 19, 2009, at 9:53 am
Our sister paper, the Chicago Reader, and its excellent media writer Michael Miner has a piece about the (ta-dah) future of journalism, but it makes some good points to ponder, including this one:
EveryBlock cofounder Daniel X. O’Neil, speaking on the panel “Why the News Still Matters,” went this tweet one better. “I think there’s just a lot of real unnecessary negativism about journalism,” he told the 170 or so people in attendance. “Frankly, I think it’s going to be great. I swear to God we’ll look back ten years from now and we’ll all be making an insane amount of money and we’re going to look at each other and we’re going to say, ‘Hey, you were there that day! Remember, we all thought we were screwed?’ No, we’re not. Everything’s great. It’s literally impossible for the answer to the question ‘What happened?’ not to be valuable.”
Wow, the rosiest assessment ever. I believe I am going to be making an “insane amount of money” in 10 years. Just not in journalism.
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.
By Catherine Durkin Robinson PoHo contributor, “feminist mother of twins” and a political blogger, working under the title Out in Left Field
I grew up listening to Q105. That’s right, before I developed taste in music, I would tune in regularly to the WRBQ Morning Zoo, and Mason Dixon with his recorded laughter tracks. If you peered into my bedroom circa 1984, you’d certainly find me singing along with safe standards like The Fixx, Michael Jackson, and Cyndi Lauper.
Oh. The. Horror.
Eventually I discovered WMNF, mixed tapes, and the Cuban Club. I soon forgot all about Top 40 radio, its censored, dissected tunes that represented the lamest of corporate rock, and never looked back.
Q105 was dead to me.
Recently, though, I began listening again. The station now plays oldies from the 1960s and 1970s and occasionally such songs provide a history lesson from which my kids could learn to appreciate music.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 17, 2009, at 11:16 am
Twelve-year-olds throughout the world are in mourning today as the rumored corporate shrinkage of MySpace is coming true. About 480 workers will be hitting the bricks by the end of the day, according to its news release:
MYSPACE REDUCES STAFF BY NEARLY 30%
Return to Start-Up Culture a Focus for Company Moving Forward
LOS ANGELES—June 16, 2009—As part of a plan to restructure itself into a more innovative, efficient, and entrepreneurial business, MySpace announced today that it will reduce its staff by nearly 30%. This restructuring plan crosses all U.S. divisions of the company and lowers the total number of domestic staff at MySpace to 1,000 employees.
“Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” said MySpace Chief Executive Officer Owen Van Natta. “I understand that these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace. Our intent is to return to an environment of innovation that is centered on our user and our product.”
“MySpace grew too big considering the realities of today’s marketplace,” said Jonathan Miller, News Corporation’s CEO of Digital Media and Chief Digital Officer. “I believe this restructuring will help MySpace operate much more effectively both structurally and financially moving forward. I am confident in MySpace’s next phase under the leadership of Owen and his team.”
Is Facebook far behind? Although we loooooove us some Facebook…
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 14, 2009, at 8:09 am
As the new models for journalism start to emerge, here is another piece of that puzzle, from The New York Times:
Four nonprofit groups devoted to investigative journalism will have their work distributed by The Associated Press, The A.P. will announce on Saturday, greatly expanding their potential audience and helping newspapers fill the gap left by their own shrinking resources.
Starting on July 1, the A.P. will deliver work by the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica to the 1,500 American newspapers that are A.P. members, which will be free to publish the material.
The A.P. called the arrangement a six-month experiment that could later be broadened to include other investigative nonprofits, and to serve its nonmember clients, which include broadcast and Internet outlets.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 11, 2009, at 11:01 am
Ouch. This one goes into the “I-don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry-or-both” file. Correspondent Jason Jones intones, “You guys are like a walking Colonial Williamsburg.”
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 10, 2009, at 8:38 am
Great article in our Washington City Paper sister pub last week by Andrew Beaujon about how the changes to adult-use ads at Craigslist could affect the alt-newspaper industry.
From the article:
Last year Craigslist, which lists 18 employees on its “about us” page, made somewhere between $20 and $80 million dollars. So why is its CEO, Jim Buckmaster, so p.o.’d about sex ads in alt-weeklies?
Because these bottom-feeding free publications are making an erotic comeback in the classifieds biz, with an assist from law enforcement.
Buckmaster has even taken to the blogosphere to air his frustrations with alt-weekly encroachment. In a recent post, he lists several titles of adult ads he found on backpage.com, a collection of classifieds sites owned by Village Voice Media (VVM). “Cum lay your hotdog on my bun for memorial day” (Dallas); “Let me put you to bed backdoor available $80? (Columbia, S.C.); “An Irish blowjob and a cum showering rainbow” (New York). He links to a screenshot of the last ad, which has photos of a woman performing fellatio.
“It’s worth noting that these ads’ TITLES ALONE contain more explicit content than you will find in all craigslist adult service ads combined,” he writes in the post.
It is an interesting subject given the historical use and reliance on adult-use advertising by publications such as Creative Loafing. It always pits free speech (free love?) advocates against those who have concerns about the objectification of women and the violence that can result.
In our new CLTampa.com, the hottest-growing section seems to be the often explicit Sex & Love articles, to the point where some readers (and CL staffers, in internal discussions and e-mails) have raised questions about the balance between news and erotica/porn/sex coverage. Our publisher and classified ad manager tell me, unlike in Washington, that our adult-use advertising hasn’t seen a bump upward since the change in Craigslist policy.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 2, 2009, at 10:41 am
I never really talk about it much or pimp it to you, but indulge me for a sec: Our News & Politics section page is a great companion to this blog and has lots more headlines, video, Twitter feeds and podcasts than you will find here on any given day.
Here’s how it works:
NEWS HEADLINES: All the important news in Tampa Bay and Florida politics and public affairs that we don’t have time to expand upon with a separate story in PoHo ends up being aggregated into our News & Politics section, with links to the original articles. In other words, I find the news so you don’t have to. Just read the headline and blurb, or click on the link and read the whole thing. Plus, headlines from PoHo posts automatically feed into the News & Politics section, so if you miss checking on PoHo you won’t miss a blog post.
TWITTER FEED: If the word “Tampa” or the hashtag “#cltampa” is in a tweet, it will show up on our Twitter Feed panel. Sort of a cross between micronews and voyeurism.
PODCASTS: Our streaming podcast player for the Political Whore podcast is always on the News & Politics section front, so if you missed an episode and can’t find it in the blog archives you can get it easily.
USER COMMENTS: The most recent three comments on PoHo blog roll up here, no matter which post they were posted on.
CL TV: I scour the best political videos and news bites on YouTube and elsewhere and post them here, so that you can get lost in the joy of streaming video and screw off for another 2-3 hours at work. Wanna see Tom Tancredo call La Raza the Latino equivalent of the KKK? This is the place to do it.
CONTRIBUTORS: Click on each PoHo contributor’s picture to learn more about them and see their latest posts.
If you haven’t checked it out, give it a shot and let me know if you like, dislike or want me to add new features or types of news to it.
Posted by Jim Johnson on May. 22, 2009, at 6:04 am
With a hat tip to Peter Schorsch at his blog, it appears the St. Petersburg Times local politics blog Bay Buzz had a post late Wednesday, about St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Paul Congemi and an incident at a KFC restaurant. The post was subsequently pulled from the blog (and restored after further reporting on Thursday). But thanks to Google Reader (and Google is forever) the original can be shared here. Read the rest of this entry »
