The Political Whore

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.

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.”

See the video clip after the jump.

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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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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.

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).

Another installment from our Sad, But True Dep’t. “I love the Weather & Opera section…”

Yes, we journalists did it to ourselves, in part. And yes, I know this vid mocks The New York Times, but I think the lesson applies across the board. I found it silly earlier this week to see a great newspaper being forced to offer buyouts and cut benefits and yet still throw four (yes, that’s 4, count ‘em) reporters and at least one photog on a story about Denny’s offering free Grand Slam Breakfasts.

I was on vacation last week when I got an e-mail from a former Tampa Tribune reporter, pointing out that the Tallahassee Democrat had reported that our former print journalism home (I was a staff writer there from 1988-1992) was going to soon cease publishing on newsprint in favor of an online-only presence in tbo.com:

The Christian Science Monitor quit being a newspaper: It will publish online only. Reportedly, the Tampa Tribune will follow suit in January.

I was flabbergasted. Not because of the idea of something drastic happening to the print product (which just about everyone in the business that I speak with expects) but because I thought I had missed it being verified. Sticks of Fire even picked it up. So I e-mailed the writer of the piece, the Democrat’s Gerald Ensley, about where this story had been reported, and he replied:

No, it hasn’t been reported. I had heard it from several people in the business and originally wrote it as “Rumor has it that the Tampa Tribune . . . ” For brevity, it got shortened to “Reportedly.” I wish it hadn’t.

Sorry.
Gerald Ensley

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With daily print newspapers in a revenue free-fall, some of the “luxuries” they once provided to their readers are going by the wayside. The latest? The downsizing of the Tallahassee Capitol press corps, as reported by the St. Petersburg Times:

Recent departures have left the Palm Beach Post with two reporters, the Tampa Tribune with one. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel last year reduced its staff from two to one. The Orlando Sentinel is holding at two reporters. The Miami Herald has three. Four New York Times-owned regional papers share a staff of two.

The largest news operation belongs to Gannett, which has five reporting positions for readers in Pensacola, Fort Myers, Cocoa Beach and Tallahassee.

… That brings us to the St. Petersburg Times, which has three full-time reporters based in the capital and senior correspondent Lucy Morgan. That’s down from four a year ago (what this bureau chief calls “a 25 percent cutback” to his bosses).

Those departures include S.V. Date from the Post. Date, you may recall, literally wrote the book on Jeb Bush’s terms as governor but was none too beloved by his fellow newsies. He used to write his own “Omega Blog” on state politics, but it has disappeared from his website.

Yes, young children, there was a time when the Capitol press corps was busting at the seams with hungry reporters looking to get a “pelt,” taking down a legislator who was doing wrong. The combined press offices on College Avenue was bustling. Not so much any more. We voters back home are the ones who suffer. Legislators know how much attention is paid to Tallahassee by the folks back home in the absence of any scrutiny. And finding out what is going on in the Capitol is not exactly something you can do 100 percent just by clicking on your computer screen at Online Sunshine.

Has the digital world stepped up to take its place? Let me know what you think and which blogs you read that are doing (even partially) primary source reporting of the goings-on in the state Legislature.

The St. Pete Times weighed in this weekend with an installment of what will certainly be a commonplace news story theme in the coming weeks: An expose of how state workers, using state computers, spend their time — in both serious and silly, is how the story put it — editing the online Wikipedia.

The Times did not tell you, until a separate blurb at the bottom of the story, that it’s employees appear to be Wiki-editors, as well. Using Virgil, the same search engine that the Times used, you can find the 21 occasions over the past year in which Times‘ computers were used to change Wikipedia entries, from poker player David Singer to the US embargo against Cuba. All but one were simple corrections to errors in entries; earlier this year, however, someone at the Times added a link to the entry on Lou Pearlman that pointed readers to Helen Huntley’s Money Talk blog. Huntley has done some groundbreaking work on Pearlman over the years.

There may or may not be something wrong with linking to your own info, but on the whole, the Times‘ time spent wiki-ing appears fairly innocuous. And I get the fact that state workers on your dime are hardly the same as privately employed individuals working on 1st Ave. S. Still, it would have been nice to inform readers higher up in the main story that wiki-editing apparently goes on just about anywhere there is a computer network.

A search on Virgil for Creative Loafing IP’s turned up just three Wiki-edits in three years, one of which concerns a story that our Atlanta senior editor John Sugg has been writing about for years — the court fight between Fox 13 in Tampa and its former reporters, Steve Wilson and Jane Akre. The edit, which disputes a contention earlier in the entry, echoes language that Sugg has used in CL and on his own blog.

Also in 2005, a CL employee added the phrase “And a great place to work ;)” at the bottom of the entry describing this newspaper chain. Yes, fairly childish. No, I didn’t write it.

The Tampa Tribune doesn’t show up as an IP, but its parent company, Media General, does, with more than 1,000 Wiki-edits performed. Most are minor changes to update on-air personalities or editors at its various media companies, but one trivial change seems particularly funny: In a paragraph comparing the newspaper to the cross-Bay rival St. Petersburg Times, somebody at Media General felt compelled to add the phrase “,published in Tampa, Florida,” after the “The Tampa Tribune.”

Finally, for all you aspiring investigative journalists, two more local governments are devoting your tax dollars to Wiki-editing: the Hillsborough County School Board shows more than 5,000 edits, while USF shows 1,534. They are accuracy-obsessed teachers, after all.

Great weather outside. Good day to sneak in a cigar:

• How exactly did the TV crew become part of the story, as the headline asserts? Other than emotionally?
• $250 million for Pinellas County turkeys/worthwhile local projects, your choice of terminology.
• $70 million for Palm Beach County turkeys/worthwhile local projects, your choice of terminology.
• $8 million for Hillsborough … you know the rest.
• $3.2 million in cuts to nonprofits in Tampa.
• “The newspapers are gone forever.”
  
• World Bank meets on Wolfie Tuesday.
• Does Mitt Romney believe in evolution? Maybe, sort of.
• Oh, and by the way, we’re winning the war in Iraq.
• State of the Democracy: More watched O’Reilly than GOP debate.
• Bob Ross is back; just not at the Tribune.
• The city of Tampa needs to straighten out the West Tampa overlay committee.