The Political Whore

So wrong. So very wrong.

(As penance, here is the link to the American Association for the Deaf-Blind. Go there and you’ll feel better.)

By Jim Johnson
PoHo contributor and founder of The State of Sunshine blog

Jack Shafer has an excellent piece on Slate.com about the real impact Americans will see when newspapers across the country stop.
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Former Creative Loafing reporter and mensch Max Linsky (picture, above, in the good old days in Tampa, moonlighting as a freelance restroom attendant) has an exciting new gig: Managing editor at The Stimulist, an Internet news start-up being headed by MSNBC’s Carlos Watson.

From Business Week:

Another personality who first made a name in traditional media is putting the final touches on an ambitious online destination. Carlos Watson, an MSNBC anchor who also hosts a weekend show on talk radio network Air America, and a small band of staffers are readying The Stimulist, a news and opinion site slated to go live on May 12.

Watson bills The Stimulist as being aimed at what he terms “the change generation;” that is, an audience of young professionals between the ages of 25 and 49. Watson is still on the shy side of 40 and counts himself as a card-carrying member of this cohort, and freely uses the words “we” and “us” to describe his intended audience. “People in their 20s, 30s, and 40s—educated but edgy,” he says. “I don’t think of us as the same as the yuppies of 20 years ago. We are more down to earth, more digitally savvy, and more diverse.” And more global: The Stimulist aims to draw 30% of its traffic from outside of the U.S., which would be significantly more than even a site like nytimes.com gets.

Obviously, the Web is a very crowded place, and many who have succeeded in more traditional precincts of media have encountered less success online. The ultimate success of The Stimulist may hinge less on its precise editorial positioning than on whether Watson can supercharge his career and to what degree his personal brand takes root in the market. There is chatter regarding his roles being expanded at both Air America and MSNBC.

… Watson, who worked for McKinsey & Co. and started and sold an educational company before beginning a media career, is the sole bankroller behind The Stimulist, though he expects to lure outside investors eventually. The site’s managing editor is Max Linsky, a former editor in the Creative Loafing chain of alternative-weekly newspapers. Its chief operating officer and chief revenue officer is Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu, who has worked closely with Watson on his TV shows.

The Poynter Institute, the nonprofit media educational facility and think-tank, owns the St. Petersburg Times in a unique relationship in U.S. newspapers, one that allowed it to avoid being snapped up by Wall Street (and then ruined) or other ownership succession entanglements. The Poynter, located just south of downtown St. Petersburg, does great work to forward the state of knowledge in news media and once was flush with cash, as its lush offices demonstrate.

But with revenues down at the main money generator, the Times, the Poynter is tightening its belt. Poynter officials today said they are following up a January pay freeze with voluntary retirements packages for all employees 55 and older.

Details after the jump. And here’s Dean Karen Brown Dunlap’s memo to the Poynter staff.

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The news story that helped set the tone for the public discussion about torture and waterboarding during the Bush Administration was (you guessed it) bullshit, as it turns out.

A high-profile 2007 story by ABC News and correspondent Brian Ross was wrong when it reported that an Al-Quaeda suspect broke after a brief waterboarding.

The Plum Line reports:

The original 2007 story aired former CIA officer John Kiriakou’s unverified and second-hand claims that suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah broke after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds.” The story was suddenly the focus of renewed attention when The New York Times ran a big story earlier this week pointing out that the extensive waterboarding detailed in the torture memos sharply contradicted ABC’s widely-cited tale.

ABC News’ correction appears almost in passing in the network’s new story. It mentions that the new memos show that waterboarding was used far more often than originally thought, adding that Zubaydah was waterboarded “at least 83 times.” It continues:

That contradicts what former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who led the Zubaydah capture team, told ABC News in 2007 when he first revealed publicly that waterboarding had been used.

ABC doesn’t mention the huge role played by original story in shaping the subsequent debate, and to my knowledge the network hasn’t said it regrets the error. While it’s good that ABC corrected the record, the damage of the original story has long since been done.

I suppose that looking at print circulation numbers is anachronistic, if not downright depressing. But the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s Fas-Fax report is out and it is across-the-board bad news for Florida print journalism.

Circulation fell at all major FLA dailies, and it fell 7 percent across the nation. That is 3 million-plus fewer print readers than six months ago.

Michael Hinman over at The Business Journal reports:

The St. Petersburg Times remains one of the nation’s top 25 circulated newspapers, but like its counterparts, the Times’ daily numbers are eroding.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations ranked the Times 22nd in the nation in Monday through Friday circulation over a six-month period ending in March despite a 10 percent dip that brought its daily print run to 283,093 compared to 316,007 a year ago. Although it lost more than 32,000 subscribers over the past year, its declines weren’t as sharp as many other newspapers in the top 25, and it even moved ahead of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in overall Monday through Friday circulation.

Daily circulation at The Tampa Tribune dropped by more than 25,000 subscribers Monday through Friday, representing an 11.4 percent drop to 195,277 subscribers. The Sarasota-Herald Tribune lost 17,650 subscribers, a 15.4 percent fall to an average of 97,254 subscribers.

From Mashable:

Before Twitter, before Facebook (Facebook reviews), before MySpace (MySpace reviews) – heck, even before Friendster (Friendster reviews), there was a service known as GeoCities. For those who grew up on the Net in the 90s, it was about as close as you get to what we know today as social networks. It was essentially an organization of like-minded user-created homepages in different topical communities like sports, entertainment, and tech.

Yahoo bought the company near the peak of the dotcom bubble for more than $3 billion, which, along with the rise of alternative services, quickly spelled the end of GeoCities’ prominence. Today, it appears that the end of GeoCities is being made official, as Yahoo has closed the service to new accounts and posted an FAQ with some details as to how the shutdown will go.

Bienvenidos a El Paso!

In my two decades in Tampa Bay, there have been three dominant Metro columnists at the Tampa Tribune: Steve Otto, Howard Troxler and Dan Ruth (who was on 1B for a while before being moved inside the A section and god knows where else).

So it is an indication of the Trib’s decline that two of those three now work for the rival St. Petersburg Times. And here is a weekly video segment with Ruth and Troxler discussing the ideas of the day, and it is surprisingly good (for two old print guys sitting in front of a camera, that is).

No softballs for Carrie Prejean, the Christian college student who is Miss California competing in the Miss USA pageant. (She didn’t win, by the way.) She drew something more than the normal “Why do you want world peace” fluff query during the show last night, a question from Perez Hilton about gay rights:

Perez Hilton: “Vermont recently became the 4th state to legalize same-sex marriage. Do you think every state should follow suit. Why or why not?”

Prejean: “Well I think its great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised and that’s how I think it should be between a man and a woman. Thank you very much.”

Then all hell broke loose backstage. Read about it here.

Damn, the only thing that made the WFLA morning show bearable, Bill Ratliff, is leaving the station, TBO.com reports:

After more than 27 years at WFLA, Channel 8, news anchor Bill Ratliff is leaving the station in June, station officials announced today.

“It’s been a great ride but the economy did me in,” said Ratliff, who has been on the News Channel 8 morning newscasts for 20 years.

Ratliff said he was offered a new contract for fewer hours and much less pay.

“I decided that it made more sense financially to leave now and take a severance package,” he said.

Who will say, “Oh yeah” when Gayle Guyardo goes off during Gasparilla Parade coverage? Who will wear the boots with the furrrrr??

Here’s a look back at a WFLA morning show promo with a younger Ratliff:

And more bad earnings for News Channel 8 parent Media General after the jump:
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Wow, I have to award a douchebaggery medal for all the “news media” folks involved in this round robin of bullshit. The only person who even appears mildly intelligent is the tea-bagger, even if his history lesson about Lincoln is a bit off topic…

First, the CNN kerfuffle:

Then, Shep Smith’s retort on Fox:

Our country is headed to hell in a handbasket if this is what is going to pass for journalism going forward.

From time to time I either teach or lecture about public records and how our government information can be accessed. I almost always focus on Florida records for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the federal equivalent of our state’s Chapter 119, the Freedom of Information Act, is so cumbersome and useless that I never, ever use it.

Now a new quantitative study by the Sunshine in Government Initiative confirms that despite presidential efforts and directives, getting an FOIA request answered still remains a long-term endeavor.

Despite reforms enacted by Congress and an order from the last administration to do a better job, federal agencies continue to give those seeking information a frustrating and oftentimes unsatisfying experience, an analysis of federal agency FOIA reports shows.

Backlogs persist despite fewer FOIA requests, agencies continue to miss the statutory response deadline in a majority of cases, and agencies said they rejected a highest percentage of requests since performance reporting began, according a quantitative review by the Sunshine in Government Initiative of federal agency FOIA reports.

The worst agencies for backlog, ranked by their longest standing request?

Central Intelligence Agency

May 1, 1992

National Archives

September 2, 1992

Defense

December 1, 1992

Justice

February 13, 1995

Energy

November 16, 1999

Homeland Security

February 25, 2000

Don’t know where people are going to get reliable, fact-checked news once the dailies go under, but it looks like we will get to find out pretty soon:

NEWSPAPER advertising, already in its worst slump since the Depression, suffered by far the sharpest drop in generations during the first quarter of 2009, down 30 percent for some papers, industry executives and analysts say.

Publishers will start to report first-quarter results this week, but people who follow the industry and have had a glimpse of the 2009 numbers say it is clear that once again, even the most pessimistic predictions were not dark enough. They are expecting declines sharp enough to wipe out profit margins at many papers that, despite two years of battering, had stayed comfortably in the black, and to push already-weak publishers closer to bankruptcy, perhaps even closure. “I think over all we’re going to see a decline somewhere in the mid-20s” compared to the first quarter of last year, said Edward Atorino, a media analyst at the Benchmark Company, a research firm. “There have been a lot of signals that things have gotten much worse in the last couple of months – the furloughs, the pay cuts, the layoffs.”

Full, depressing story in The New York Times.

‘Memba when Tampa Tribune top editor Janet Coats wrote a front-page double-bylined fluffer with her publisher about how vital the Trib remains etc.?

Well, now the Miami Herald has copied that journalistic model, with the ailing newspaper’s publisher writing a column today that is the equivalent of Kevin Bacon’s “Stay calm, all is well” speech in Animal House:

I want to assure you that our company remains a strong, stable and vital organization. We are proud of the fact that we have the largest news staff by far in South Florida. We are dedicated to providing the highest quality news and information, in English and in Spanish, day in and day out.

Read the entire plea here. (h/t to The Daily Pulp)

Media times are tough all over. The Tribune Co., owner of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, is in bankruptcy court and apparently is having trouble paying its file copying tab on a timely manner. So the clerk’s office in Palm Beach County has cut off Sun-Sentinel reporters, according to the Daily Pulp:

Hi all,

Just a heads up about something that may impact you the next time you request a court record from the Clerk’s office (either in person or by email). Unfortunately, until further notice, Sun Sentinel reporters will need to pay for court records when they receive them. The practice of billing your company at a later date is being suspended due to outstanding invoices with Tribune Media. We know the suspension of the Sentinel’s copy charge account makes your job more difficult, so we sincerely hope to we able to resume the convenience someday in the near future.

Julie Rosborough
Media Relations/External Communications Specialist – Communications Management

She’s semi-retired and yet still winning awards for the St. Petersburg Times. But Pulitzer Prize winner Lucy Morgan added another recognition today when she won the Sigma Delta Chi Non-Deadline Reporting (circulation of 100,000 or greater) Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for her stories “Double Dipping,” which detailed how Florida and local governments allow workers to enter the DROP program, retire and then be rehired for their old jobs or ones similar.

Photographer Melissa Lyttle won in the Photography Features category for “Girl in the Window.”

Bay News 9 won for Breaking News Coverage (Large Market Station 1-50) for “Overturned Tanker.” It was a staff award.

The full list of national winners after the jump:

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Holy sagging revenues, Batman, it’s a fire sale over at The News Center on Parker Street in downtown Tampa as the Media General-owned properties shed newscasts, employees, sections and real estate. The Tampa Tribune is shutting its bureaus and killing the BayLife magazine on Sunday; the TV station is cutting a newscast.

Details:

First, News Channel 8 is killing its midday newscast. Anchored by Gayle Guyardo and Bill Ratliff, the 11 a.m. newscast just wasn’t attracting advertisers, station officials said in a TBO.com report.

[News Director Don] North says the cutbacks at WFLA are the result of the continuing decline of advertising that is affecting television stations throughout the country.

“Advertisers just aren’t buying the 11 a.m. newscast,” he says. There has not been a decision made on what will replace the newscast, he added.

“Midday” anchors Bill Ratliff and Gayle Guyardo will continue on the “News Channel 8″ morning newscasts and contribute to online coverage.

More shocking is the loss of the Tampa Tribune,’s Sunday BayLife section, home to Twitter-champ Jeff Houck’s food writing. Not surprising from the standpoint of a dearth of ads in the section, but stunning from a readability angle. It is the only section of the now-miserable Sunday Trib that was worth reading, for Houck and for the gardening info alone, stuff you don’t see a whole lot of in other local publications.

The story gives no indication what will happen to that content, so I’m checking to see what I can hear.

Updates after the jump:

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I knew those hours of compiling names like Red Ruffensore and Ben Dover in middle school would pay off one day. I just didn’t know it would pay off in local broadcast television news.

h/t to my buddy Kathy at Watch This Now.

More budget cuts at Media General’s converged Tampa operations, as the company axed 65 positions, 12 of which were vacant. Doing the math, that means 53 news industry professionals hit the bricks.

The highest profile was sports co-anchor Dave Reynolds, one of a handful of journalists of color at the TV station. From The Feed:

Reynolds, 45, had been covering sports with one other anchor, Dan Lucas; he said WFLA never really named another lead sports anchor after former top dog J.P. Peterson left more than a year ago. The change also means WFLA has just three people of color among an on-air staff of 26 reporters and anchors.

Now, Reynolds says WFLA plans to use more staffers from the Tampa Tribune to help report sports stories on air. The station also has cut back the Sunday Sports Extra show, he says.

“It’s obviously tremendously disappointing,” adds Reynolds, who has a wife and 4-year-old son. “After a certain while, you think you might be safe…This year was arguably the biggest year ever for sports in the Tampa Bay area, with the World Series and Super Bowl and so many other stories. for us to do what we did with two people…we worked very hard.”

UPDATE: Re/Creating Tampa’s take is titled “Tribune Death Watch.”

Fox News has essentially rejiggered its online content to create FOXNation.com. Its supporters see its lofty goal as to transform the ‘Nets the way it claims to have reinvented television. This introductory mission statement from Grover Norquist:
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From the Associated Press:

The pall looming over U.S. newspapers grew even darker Monday as Gannett Co. informed most of its employees that they will have to take another week of unpaid leave this spring, while a Michigan daily unveiled plans to close its print edition after 174 years.

And The Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper, also ordered pay cuts of 8 percent and 10-day furloughs for nonunion employees Monday to cut costs as advertising revenue drops.

The moves were just the latest sign of the distress afflicting newspapers across the country as they try to cope with a dramatic shift in advertising that is forcing publishers to figure out how to survive with substantially less revenue.

In the Tampa Bay media market, Gannett owns WTSP-TV 10 Connects.

Don’t wait up for a decision in our Tampa bankruptcy court hearing today; Judge Caryl Delano said early this evening that she did not plan on ruling immediately on whether lender Atalaya Capital Management should be allowed to declare Creative Loafing in default of its $31 million in loans and take over the alt-weekly chain.

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Creative Loafing CFO Angela LaFon spent the morning testifying in our bankruptcy case today, describing how she assembled various budgets and financial forecasts that are at the heart of the company’s disputed value. Federal Bankruptcy Judge Caryl Delano’s decision on who ends up with control of the alt-weekly chain could come late today at the end of testimony.

LaFon was asked about a summary of cost savings she prepared for the hearing, one that shows cuts made both before and after the bankruptcy filing on Sept. 29, 2008, and asked by an attorney for Atalaya Capital Management if it was proper to include the pre-bankruptcy costs cuts that were already in place as evidence of the company’s efforts to mitigate losses post-bankruptcy.

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I mentioned former CL reporter Alex Pickett’s new blog last week but just realized I never mentioned the new blogs from the other two editorial colleagues laid off in December.

Copy editor Anthony “Sal” Salveggi’s VIrtual Journalist keeps you up-to-date on media news and pop culture.

And music writer/Bar Tabber Wade Tatangelo is pointing to his freelance work from all over (*tbt, St Pete Times, New York Daily News et al.) on his eponymous blog.

I recommend you add all three to your RSS reader.

By Jim Johnson
PoHo Contributor

Jim Johnson is the creator of The State of Sunshine blog.

What would you do if the Tampa Tribune or St. Petersburg Times (or both) folded?
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It was A Tale of Two Media Companies as Creative Loafing CEO and President Ben Eason testified Thursday afternoon during a hearing to determine whether he keeps ownership of the alt-newspaper chain.

Or perhaps I should write, ownership of the alt-digital media company. Much of Eason’s testimony concerned the collapse of the print news publishing economic model starting in 2005 and accelerating with the advent of the current recession in mid-2008. Under direct examination from CL’s bankruptcy lawyer David Jennis, Eason detailed how the company responded to 20 percent decreases in advertising revenues that he says company officials started seeing in July 2008.

“There’s been significant changes in our business…” Eason said in what qualified as the understatement of the day.

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h/t to the folks over at the Splog.

My former news colleague Alex PIckett, let go in a round of layoffs in December, has surfaced with a new blog of his own, Tales of an Unemployed Journalist. I love his story from earlier today, “BayWalk loses its protestors:”

In a blast to like-minded souls on their e-mail list, St. Pete for Peace announced the decision:

Due to the dramatic drop in business at Baywalk, we no longer find it to be the best use of our time and energy to continue our monthly protests there.  We believe we can reach more people in venues other than Baywalk, but if business at Baywalk increases or there are future attempts to restrict demonstrations on the public sidewalks near Baywalk, we will then reevaluate our decision.

When even the protesters won’t show up to a leisure entertainment destination, you know times are tough.

The Creative Loafing chain is in a Tampa bankruptcy court hearing today as owner Ben Eason tries to fend off his biggest creditor, which wants to take ownership of the chain and says it has “lost confidence” in Eason’s management.

Atalaya Capital Management LP, an investment fund that is owed $31 million from financing CL’s 2007 pay-down of debt and purchase of the Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper, said in court this morning that it would continue to operate the newspaper chain “as a going concern” and put more dollars into it rather than get rid of it in a fire sale.

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From Erik Wemple, at our Washington City Paper:

Real-time blogging going on right here. I’m in a conference call with my bosses at Creative Loafing Inc. (CL), which owns us, Washington City Paper, as well as five other alt-weeklies. One purpose of the conference call, according to our corporate No. 2 Kirk MacDonald, is to address our “cost structure.”

Actually, that’s my cost structure. Starting in April, CL will be cutting executive compensation by five to 15 percent. MacDonald said that he and our CEO, Ben Eason, will take the highest percentage cut–15 percent–and others will get more moderate slices. Those others include publishers, sales execs, and top editors at the publications as well as some other corporate types.

Read the full post here.

And here is our Tampa Editor David Warner’s post from sis blog, Daily Loaf:

During a conference call this morning, Creative Loafing President Ben Eason and COO Kirk MacDonald told managers at the six papers in the CL chain (CL Tampa, Sarasota, Atlanta and Charlotte, the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper) that their salaries are going to be cut in the range of 5%-15%, effective the first payroll period in April. Eason and MacDonald will take the biggest cuts. City Paper Editor Eric Wemple expressed gratitude during the call that the company had decided to go this route instead of laying off any more staff. (Here’s his post, live-blogged during the call.) In Tampa, in addition to the salary reductions at the corporate level, the paper’s publisher, ad director and editor — that’s me — will be taking cuts.

MacDonald explained the cuts as a reaction to declining ad revenues. In this climate, he said, “the cost structure at all media companies, including ours, is too high.” Creative Loafing filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last October, and is in the midst of reorganization; Eason expressed confidence that the company will emerge from bankruptcy by late summer.

Meanwhile, Tampa’s paper has something to celebrate. Preliminary financials for the month of February show the paper breaking even after a stretch of losses, and traffic to the paper’s website has markedly increased since a redesign was introduced in mid-January.

So, with good bad news and good good news at hand, CL Tampa is throwing a party. We’ll be formally launching the new site tonight at an Open House at the CL offices from 6-8 p.m. Meet the CL staff, talk with our new team of bloggers and have a drink on us.

Love that Twitter, and 10 Connects reporter Preston Rudie has been doing a good job of telling the story of the missing boaters for the past two days from his Twitter account. This afternoon, he reports:

prestonrudie Coast Guard also said it found a life jacket and cooler about 16 miles SW of where the boat capsized. They believe it belonged to the men.
19 minutes ago from web

prestonrudie Missing boaters’ families were briefed by CG before they anounced the search would be called off.
20 minutes ago from web

prestonrudie Coast Guard will be calling off the search for the remaining 3 missing boaters at 6:30 pm EST. Watch at www.10connects.com
25 minutes ago from web

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Follow my tweets about news, politics and media at Twitter.

Who won this round?

I couldn’t have said it any better than Eric Boehlert did:

The idea that the Matthews live-mic “Oh God” utterance should be pounced on as an “aha” moment for the unprofessional press corps is absurd. Not when Rick Santelli, a reporter for CNBC, went on live TV and uncorked an anti-Obama rant and then paraded around on right-wing radio shows for days while concocting stories about being targeted by the White House.

Despite crossing all normal bounds of journalism, Santelli was celebrated in the press as a populist. (Y’know, the Drexel Burnham Lambert kind.) And CNBC seemed to do everything it could to market and hype the rant. (Imagine if MSNBC replayed Matthews’ “Oh God” clip incessantly, bragging about how Matthews had “touched a nerve” with Americans.)

In terms of revealing deep truths about the corporate media, I’d suggest Santelli’s off-kilter tirade, followed by his puffed-up prancing around, and the press corps that cheered him on, told us a helluva lot more abut the press than did Matthews’ split-second “Oh God” utterance.

Read the entire article on HuffPo.

THE_REAL_SHAQ IF u r readin this, u shud b ashamed ov yurself, u shud b sleep,go 2 bed i say
about 2 hours ago from web

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Tweet with PoHo to get and give political and media news, commentary and heavy snark. Follow me at PoHo.

There are so many blog posts about “the future of journalism” (we had one here just this week), but this one is about its past, an attitude of service and storytelling that is getting increasingly rare.

Some day, unfortunately in the very near future, Stephanie Hayes’ work is the kind of writing we are going to miss about old-fashioned, storytelling journalism. Not because no one will want to do it, or that no one will think of doing it, but because nobody can pay you to do it any more.

Here is the St. Petersburg Times‘ Hayes’ story about her time on the obit beat, during which she crafted some amazing, small gems of narrative storytelling under tough situations and in relatively few words. She is 25, and she rocks. I’m sorry I missed it in Sunday’s paper, and I’m sorry the Times can’t afford to have a Floridian section every day because this is the kind of thing you could expect daily from it:

The week before I started the job, I sat at the kitchen table with my grandpa. I explained what I’d be doing, the best I could. Truthfully, I wasn’t totally sure.

Dead people. Obituaries.

He had just the gift for me! He went to the basement and brought back a rusty old biscuit tin. I flipped it open, a mushroom of must and news clips swelling out.

A box of death.

For years, he’d snipped obits from his Lorain, Ohio, paper, the Morning Journal. There were a couple of interesting locals, but mostly celebrities like Dinah Shore and Burt Lancaster and Gene Autry and Gene Autry’s sidekick. People he spent his life watching.

Buried deep, there was a prayer card for Padre Pio, a saint believed to have cured the sick.

As we sat together reading of heart attacks and cancer and stroke, I wondered – what was the fascination with death? And how could I spend my days in it?

You can (and should) read the full story here. And understand the passion that still drives some people in this financially troubled industry.