Bill Foster wasted no time in getting the Times recommendation on his website

The drumbeat that the St. Petersburg Times was considering an endorsement (errr, recommendation, as the Times will always let a candidate know its preferred term) of Bill Foster. On its surface, it seems ludicrous. After all, Foster is the same guy who wrote to the school board a few years back making a strong pitch against teaching Darwinian evolution alone in public schools, hoping it would mix in a bit of “intelligent design.”

But the lack of an emerging alternative to Foster left the Times in the inexplicable position of endorsing an anti-gay rights, anti-evolution mayor of St. Petersburg. More to the point, however, the editorial board chooses a candidate based on who will play ball with it. Which candidate will kiss the ring over on 1st Avenue S? That’s what gets you the recommendation. Disagree with the Times on a core concern at the paper — say, firing Police Chief Chuck Harmon, as Scott Wagman as vowed to do — and you are at a disadvantage, to say the least.

It is OK to disagree with the Times on social conservative issues, as long as you play your cards right, promise not to let those views play out in public policy at City Hall and generally keep your wingy-ness in the closet. After all, the Times’ former editorial chief, Phil Gailey, was totally tight with Rick Baker, who was also a social conservative who refused to recognize gay pride parades or appear in them.

From its recommendation today:

As mayor, Foster would offer comforting continuity. He recognizes Baker’s considerable efforts to improve public education and pledges to continue them. He would maintain the conservative approach to building city budgets, offering neither wild new spending plans nor drastic cutbacks but a methodical effort to make government more efficient. He has been measured and responsible on the campaign trail, avoiding the rashness of other candidates who have called for the quick removal of the police chief, the hiring of dozens of new police officers and the spending of city reserves on recurring expenses that would risk St. Petersburg’s fiscal stability.

Yet Foster would chart his own course as mayor. He recognizes there is the public perception, at least, that police do not go after drugs and nonviolent crimes in Midtown as aggressively as they would in more affluent neighborhoods. He calls for the police to pay more attention to drugs, prostitution and burglary. He would shift police resources to where they are most needed, seek a gradual return to community policing, stress crime prevention and give Chief Chuck Harmon an opportunity to embrace his priorities.

As for Foster’s right-wing bent? The Times explains it away:

At times, Foster has spoken in haste and escalated the rhetoric rather than cooling passions. We also have disagreed with his conservative social views, including those in his intemperate letter to the School Board last year promoting creationism. Those views have little to do with being mayor. Foster makes a convincing argument that he recognizes the weight his words and tone would carry if he is elected, and his campaign reflects that maturity. He has articulated a reassuring commitment to civil liberties and constitutional rights, and that would be the yard stick to measure his performance.

This week’s column from the print edition of Creative Loafing:

About 500-600 people are voting for a new mayor of St. Petersburg every day now, part of what has become a vote-by-mail system of absentee voting in Florida. Nearly 60,000 city residents have requested an absentee ballot, almost 40 percent of the registered voters.

That’s a big number. So why do I hear so many complaints about the 2009 race to succeed Mayor Rick Baker being a real snoozer? Polling earlier in the month showed that 61 percent of the voters didn’t have a preference among the 10 candidates running. And although nearly 7,000 people had voted by the end of last week, there is very little visible to any of the campaigns, beyond the ubiquitous yard signs. It’s impossible to time the peak of your political campaign when Election Day lasts 45 days, and no candidate has enough money to run a full-bore mass media campaign for that long.

Take the latest mayoral forum, held by St. Pete Preservation last week in front of about 100 good folks at Studio@620. I popped in to shoot a few photos and perhaps hear their stump speeches, but after almost an hour the crowd had heard only from preservationists, who got five minutes apiece to school nine candidates on why historic preservation is important. Even the hometown St. Petersburg Times didn’t staff the preservation forum. When the candidates did begin to talk, there wasn’t much separation.

How can something be anticlimactic before it’s even over?

Here are the reasons why this year’s city election is having a hard time connecting with voters:

There’s no Barack Obama running: To be sure, the field of mayoral candidates is way short on charisma and visionary dreaming. Voters (and news reporters) are a little spoiled after 2008’s rock-star-fest of an election with Obama and his adoring crowds and big ideas and cool-as-shit posters. You get no such electricity from this bunch. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t at least five or six of these candidates who could actually administer the day-to-day operations of the city, who have the political and/or administrative chops regardless of what you think of their ideologies or priorities (Kathleen Ford, Scott Wagman, Larry Williams, Bill Foster, Jamie Bennett and, perhaps, Deveron Gibbons). Ford’s trying hard not to seem bitchy; Wagman’s digital persistence and sense of humor misconnects and earned him the name “douche” in the Splog blog; Gibbons hides out from mainstream media interviews, waiting for his expected TV campaign to kick in;  Foster and Williams are low-key City Hall insiders who speak the language of bureaucracy; and Bennett, given no chance to win after his Peter Schorsch-fueled meltdown (see below)

The field is too big for its own good: As a former political consultant, I can tell you that a field this big (10 total candidates, seven of which are serious contenders) creates a dynamic where nobody wants to criticize or take on their opponents and their ideas or records because they may need that opponent in the runoff election. On Sept. 1, the two top finishers go on to a Nov. 3 final contest. I always advised my clients in such a situation that they wanted to be the No. 2 choice of every one of their opponents, so suck up and be nice to them. And that is exactly what we are seeing, the politics of chummy and nice, for the most part. That all changes on Sept. 2, but for now, snoozerama.

It is a tough campaign for journlists and bloggers to cover: Ahh, the good old days of St. Petersburg politics, when the two major political powers (The Shore Acres-Snell Isle-downtown business-north of Central crowd joined with Midtown voters to take on the populist West St. Petersburg faction). Each side would anoint a champion and the battle was engaged. Black hat vs. white hat. Monied interests vs. anti-tax neighborhoods. That all changed in 2001, with the election of Mayor Rick Baker, who blew away the usual Central Avenue dividing line of St. Petersburg politics. Today’s modern St. Pete politics are very complex, with new players on the scene, empowered neighborhood associations and more players of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Party affiliation plays a bigger role, too, even though it is a nonpartisan race. It’s not just five or six white guys in dark suits who control the city, as a recent Times column pined for. It’s no excuse for shallow reporting, though.

News coverage has been picayune: The Times has written stories about the following missteps/flubs/nonevents: Bill Foster flipped hamburgers with city cops who may or may not have been on duty, possibily violating laws against campaigning at work; Scott Wagman may or may not have violated campaign disclosure laws by not putting the usual “paid political adv” verbiage on small Google Ads; fringe candidate Paul Congemi bitched out a Kentucky Fried Chicken employee so much that the cops were called;  candidate yard signs are in the right of way; and another candidate has a whole bunch of speeding tickets. It’s not that the paper hasn’t written about substantive issues. It’s just that the level of niggling and useless detail on other stories and coverage numbs readers minds.

One politico told me on background, “The coverage is just dreadful. Obvious mistakes are what gets the coverage. (And) several of the candidates are just so poorly informed that they are hard-pressed to say something.”

Peter Schorsch is a one-man election wrecking crew: Former PoHo contributing blogger Schorsch should have been nowhere near the city of St. Petersburg election. After all, his arrest a few years back on charges of ripping off some of his political consulting clients should have put the last nail in the coffin of his political work. But after a few years in the wilderness, he returned as Jamie Bennett’s campaign manager, contributing to the eventual fall of Bennett’s chances when a wide array of inappropriate city luxury box baseball ticket-giving and other unsavory ratfucking political tricks came to light when Bennett and Schorsch had a falling out. Now, Schorsch, who normally reps Democrats, has thrown his support and online poison pen to right-wing Republican Bill Foster. He pops up to question candidates at Tiger Bay Club; he files election law complaints; he snarks on his blog.

(Full Dislcosure: CL Editor David Warner’s partner, Larry Biddle, is a paid consultant to the Scott Wagman campaign. To avoid that conflict influencing our coverage, he plays no role in assigning or editing stories about the mayoral election.)

The St. Petersburg Times tried to do its job; it asked each and every St. Petersburg mayoral candidate if they would supply their campaign finance information (their contributions and expenditures) so the newspaper could create a searchable database for voters to use, just like candidates for national, county or state office do. But not the city, which puts up only .pdf’s of the reports, which cannot be searched for names that contribute to different campaigns or to do other important analyses of who is funding whom.

If you’ll recall, that is one of my six ideas to fix Tampa Bay politics on a recent cover of Creative Loafing.

With one exception, however, the Times‘ request fell on deaf or uncaring or incapable ears. From A-Sharock today:

We’ve been told by computer experts that providing this data would take as little as 15 minutes of work.

The response from candidates: Silence.

Only Scott Wagman’s campaign attempted to comply with our request. Candidate Bill Foster said he didn’t think it was technically possible and candidate Larry Williams declined. The other candidates didn’t even respond to our request.

Here’s St. Petersburg Times Editor, CEO and Chairman Paul Tash vs. Daniel Tosh in our unabashed ripoff feature, Separated at Birth:

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.

“It’s intended to be neither [liberal or conservative], but it is being perceived as both,” Araujo told me in a telephone interview from US Games’ headquarters in Stamford, Conn. She cited the case of an African-America-focused bookstore that reviewed the card deck and told the manufacturer it viewed the cards as being against Obama, as they saw it as challenging Obama’s veracity. Conservative buyers, on the other hand, eschew the deck in the belief that it lifts Obama up for praise.

So if it neither left nor right nor an actual card game,

US Games intended neither as its target audience, and the $17.95 card deck (now available on Amazon.com and in some national chain bookstores) may be finding a better fit in school and educational uses. It has sold about 1,000 of the card decks so far after the company’s owner got the idea for it after seeing PolitiFact online.

The best use for “President Obama’s 500 Promises Card Deck” that I have heard to date, however, comes from the creator of PolitiFact, Times journalist Bill Adair, who wrote to me after I told him I was going to mention the new product:

Allow me to recommend to your readers what we’ve used them for here in the office: PolitiFact charades!

You randomly pick a card — say, Promise No. 309, Support regional innovation clusters — and then you have to silently act it out.

It’s a great a party game! And it’s educational too!

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 from the 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.

But then the editors at the Times dropped the ball. They reassigned Alex and gave her story to Ileana Morales, whose account of the protest is half-assed.

I’m not blaming Morales. She was probably working on a tight deadline with a word-limit more appropriate for elementary school book reports.

The blame lies with the St. Petersburg Times. When they give more space to stories like this one about a horror film, one can’t help but wonder why an important media event like the Channel 8 protests got barely 260 words.

Unlike this video, their article doesn’t quote Nadine Smith, Lorna Bracewell, or any of the major players who could articulate a compelling argument.

I’m not just bitching because she left out my point of view.

I’m bitching because the article makes it look like a handful of troublemakers took to the streets when in reality there were over a hundred well-informed protesters. Mentioning the freak show who put a swastika on his poster is also telling. That idiot doesn’t even come close to representing the majority of intelligent people who braved the heat and abuse of drivers simply to make their voices heard.

I may have disagreed with their premise, but gay rights activists in our community deserve better than they got. Watch out St. Pete Times. Or those red shirts might come for you next.

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.

In a welcome to the Ruthington Post, Dan writes:

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.

h/t to Sticks of Fire

From the there’s-no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity-(or-polling) files comes this pitch to Scott Wagman supporters to pony up some bucks despite a pretty rotten showing in a recent St. Petersburg Times poll that placed Wagman tied for fourth, behind Kathleen Ford, Bill Foster and Deveron Gibbons and tied with Larry Williams.

For those not studied in the art of politics, this is called spin.

But before the Wagman haters chime in, let’s give some context to the poll. More than 60 percent of the voters surveyed said they didn’t have a preference yet, meaning that this is a wide open race and the poll was only an indication of a lack of voter engagement and existing name recognition, not a legit look at who will finish in what order. I don’t say this to defend Wagman’s poor showing; but the truth is not all of the campaigns have spent little or nothing in tems of direct voter contact (direct mail, television ads, radio ads, robo-phone calls, etc.) that is what gets voters ready to make decisions. At best, some of the campaigns have been walking door to door and using some new media advertising on Facebook and the like. That’s not enough to drive serious interest to an off-election year municipal election.

But Wagman felt his placement in the poll could be spun to his advantage with supporters and sent them this e-mail today:

Dear Friend,

About the recent St. Petersburg Times poll:

We were delighted. That’s because as the other candidates made little or no significant progress we increased our percentage of decided voters (as compared with our own poll taken earlier this year).

It simply proves that, as our message of change gets out to undecided voters, we win.

With 61% of voters still undecided, our challenge is to continue on that path over the next week. We can’t do that without you.

In less than 13 days almost 60,000 ballots to elect St. Petersburg’s Mayor will arrive in mailboxes. That’s never happened before.

I believe, with the unprecedented challenges facing our city, that we must have open, fresh, strong, effective executive leadership instead of politics as usual. DONATE NOW

Help us get our message out to early voters while there’s still time. Without it, uninformed voters will decide the future of our beloved city.

Please make a contribution of $13, or $26 or whatever you can afford by midnight June 30th — our final quarterly report before the Primary. It will make a difference.

Many thanks,
signature

P.S. As mayor, I will be a strong leader for change, focused on making city government more efficient and improving public safety. In less than 13 days almost 60,000 voters will have received vote-by-mail ballots. Help me get my message of change and new leadership to those voters while there’s still time.

Disclosure time: My boss, CL Tampa Editor David Warner, is the domestic partner of one of Wagman’s political consultants, Larry Biddle. Because of this conflict, he does not partcipate in any way in CL’s coverage of the mayor’s race.

Yeah, Jamie Bennett.

From today’s opinion page:

St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Jamie Bennett is pitifully ignorant or disappointingly complicit when it comes to a series of campaign mistakes and second-rate dirty tricks. He has fired the campaign manager he never should have hired, but if he stays in the race that will not end the questions or remove the stains.

Sorting out who knew what when between Bennett and his former campaign manager, Peter Schorsch, may be an exercise in futility. But some of their maneuvers cannot be dismissed as low-grade sleaziness. At least one neighborhood president was given campaign literature and requests for contributions along with free baseball tickets to the city’s Tropicana Field suite. Candidates cannot legally use public resources to benefit their campaigns. Bennett said Monday he did not know that happened and has apologized for “a blurring of lines and lack of oversight on the baseball tickets.” But he continued to distribute the baseball suite tickets he receives as a City Council member to neighborhood association presidents even after the issue was publicly raised.

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.

From PR Newswire:

The Poynter Institute, responding to the impact of the economic crisis, today offered a package of incentives to staff members who choose to retire early. The early-retirement plan marks the Institute’s latest effort to reduce expenses, even as it expands its curriculum into new areas and broadens its capacity to teach on a variety of in-person, virtual and e-learning platforms.

“We are facing significant challenges but also experiencing big successes,” said Karen B. Dunlap, Poynter’s president. “Even in this tough environment, Poynter is expanding what we teach and how we teach it – and exploring the most serious questions about how to ensure journalism’s future.”

In many ways, Poynter’s situation parallels the industry it serves. Innovative programs are reaching new audiences and attracting new revenue – but not at a level sufficient to offset the impact of the recession and news organization cuts on Poynter’s income. The Institute relies on dividends from the (St. Petersburg) Times Publishing Company, which Poynter owns; tuition for courses; returns on its investments; and grants and charitable contributions.

In January, like many in the news industry, Poynter froze wages for its staff and reduced the Institute’s contributions to retirement accounts. Dunlap says she hopes the voluntary retirement plan will preclude the need for further reductions, including layoffs.

But even as Poynter has reduced operating expenses in recent months, the Institute has expanded its curriculum and its methods of teaching. A growing number of programs are grant-funded:

* With funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Poynter’s News University now offers more than 85 self-directed, interactive e-learning courses and recently passed the 100,000 mark in registered users.
* Webinars and other forms of virtual teaching, funded in part by the Harnisch Family Foundation, allow Poynter faculty and other leading journalism professionals to reach audiences via the Internet at work, at home or in the classroom.
* The Poynter Sense-Making Project, an initiative funded by the Ford Foundation, is exploring how the future of news is being affected by what has been called the “Fifth Estate” – those who are filling the void created by the diminished influence of mainstream media.
* A companion initiative funded in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York is tracking the transformation of the news business in an effort to discover models for successfully sustaining quality journalism.
* A program funded by the McCormick Foundation is identifying newspaper change leaders and preparing them to train others in leadership, change and innovation.

In addition, funds from the Annie E. Casey Foundation are underwriting core courses, and proceeds from the sale of Poynter’s successful collection of front pages about President Obama’s election are providing matching scholarship funds for Poynter courses.

The Institute continues to expand its development program, seeking grants, individual contributors and major donors. In addition, Poynter also is beginning workshops for non-journalists who may benefit from transferable communication skills such as writing, photography, Web site development and mastering the new social media.

“We’re facing immediate challenges as we adjust to media changes,” Dunlap said, “but we remain very optimistic about Poynter’s long-term future.”

About The Poynter Institute
Serving journalism and citizens in the interest of democracy, The Poynter Institute (http://www.poynter.org) was founded in 1975 in St. Petersburg, Fla. It is one of the nation’s top schools for professional journalists, future journalists, journalism educators and students. Poynter offers training throughout the year in the areas of online and multimedia, leadership and management, reporting, writing and editing, TV and radio, ethics and diversity, journalism education and visual journalism. Poynter’s News University (http://www.newsu.org) offers newsroom training to journalists and journalism students through interactive e-learning modules and links to other journalism education and training opportunities. Poynter Online (http://www.poynter.org), the Institute’s Web site, is a daily destination for news and information about the media industry.