How does the StartleGram even pay its bills?

Seriously.

I'm wondering if the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is about to go broke.

On the way back from Big Bend, I stopped at the Amon Carter Museum Christmas Eve. Saw the great Gordon Parks exhibit for a second time, and had camera with me. Also saw another, new, photography exhibit.

Anyway, in the north side lobby, next to the museum store entrance to the building, was a copy of the StartleGram. As is my wont, I picked it up, in part to catch up on news after four days, but more, as is really my wont, to check out its adhole.

First, only 18 pages of paper. That's bad enough.

Second, I saw NO classys, unless there was a Section C I was missing, and I doubt that.

So, third?

One page, in all, of ROP. That's counting obits, as paid and at the rates charged today, as ROP.

One page, period.

That's a 5.55 percent adhole.

So, unless StartleGram ad staff is on straight commission with zero, zip, zilch, nada salary, how are they not about to go broke?

==

OK, I looked also at the Friday/27th issue when in Denton. It did have 5 pages and change of ads on a 34-pager, to break 15 percent. Of course, 2-plus pages was a front section "wrap" by Spec's for New Year's booze.

At least the vulture capitalist journalism ownership class is honest about their vulture capitalism now

Digiday reports that the mavens (actually, just Marc Benioff, not THOSE Maven-s, nor Meredith) at Time Magazine are selling a tiered membership plan.

Top tier? $20,000 a year.

But WAIT! That's not ALL! You also get a trip to Davos.

Surprised that Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell, missed out on this with Atlantic going behind a paywall.

You could have a $20,000 top tier membership with an invite to Apple's WWDC, the Worldwide (guess two W's is as cool as calling what should be about OS 12 as still OS X) Developers Conference.

But, back to Time.

The other membership tiers?

Seems like Time is trying to buy / bribe people with insider status somewhere to be their version of Instagram influencers.

Per the link, it's clear that's what Forbes is doing.

But, let's not limit it to Time, Atlantic and Forbes.

There's plenty of opportunities here.

Bloomberg Business? Contribute $1 million through a super PAC and you can be President Michael Bloomberg's Treasury Secretary.

Any newspaper owned by CNHI? Contribute $20,000 and get a week of free furlough every quarter.

The remnants of Gawker? Contribute $100,000 and get a free hippy punching of Peter Thiel plus 100 hours of free criminal defense lawyer service.

The Bulwark? Contribute $100,000 and get a super-duper NeverTrump ad and cookies blocker on all devices, plus lifetime free trips to Chez Netanyahu.

The Intercept? Contribute $10,000 plus a special memo with secret encryption to Glenn Greenwald and get to have him (accidentally?) reveal the encryption.

You get the idea.

Newspaper owners and Tolstoy's bon mot

That bon mot I refer to comes from "Anna Karenina":

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

And, this applies to newspaper owners how?

Rich newspaper owners are all alike in being rich, but they're all cheap in their own ways.

The big chains reward top management with bonuses for slashing salaries, workers or both. The bonuses they make would actually pay for most of the workers they fire.

Privately held chains, like Hearst, don't have to disclose what they pay top brass, but I'm sure it's the same. So, whenever you see a columnist at a paper like the Houston Chronicle criticize management at other newspaper companies, ask them to reveal how much THEIR ownership and C-suite management make.

Smaller, so-called "family" chains, usually not owning any seven-day dailies and more and more, not owning dailies period, are cheap in different ways.

With them, it's usually failure to keep machinery and supplies updated for modern times and needs.

I've worked at more than one paper with Macs years out of date. Ownership hadn't even considered the option of joining the PC world, where even with a semi out-of-date computer, your browser software and some other things will still be newer and faster than on a pre-Mac operating system 10.7 or newer. (More and more, I refuse to use the Ohhh Esss Echhhs branding, as Mac went to OS 11 at that point, among other things, but cult groupies still drink the Kool-Aid.)

Sports photojournalism: Change your perspective

One thing many beginning shutterbugs have heard, including editors of community newspapers, is "change your angle."

They hear that, and they only think horizontal angle. Or, if they do think of vertical angle, they forget it again, often because it requires more work.

Well, I was at a recent sports photojournalism seminar at TCU, and one of the presenters talked abut changing vertical angles.

For football, he said he shot on his knees on kneepads. Especially on fields with a high crown, he said he got a great perspective.

I've shot on my butt in basketball, but basketball players are smaller, and don't have the weight of pads. I'll pass on not being on my feet for football shots.

But, said presenter, having mentioned going into the stands for hoops and volleyball to change the vertical the other way, didn't mention, when possible, doing the same for football.

I was shooting Whitesboro vs Bushland last week.

They played in Iowa Park, which is a semi-sunken stadium. (It's a slight climb uphill from the ticket gate to the stands, and you come in at the top of them, so semi-sunken would be 80 percent or so sunken.)

Having gone to the press box for first, coffee, then food at halftime of a cold-for-Texas 40-degree game, at the start of the second half, I thought, "I'm going to stay at the top for a while."

And, I got the picture you see at left, as well as others that are available for use in the Whitesboro paper.

This one is just a throwaway on quality, but you can see that if I were shooting it at ground level, it just wouldn't have worked.

So?

Change your angle.

Change your perspective.

Journalists "less morally developed" than 13 years ago: Is it wingnuts, Gnu Media, some of both?

A new piece at Psy Post says that, compared with 13 years ago, journalists are less moral today.

Background:
1. Priming, namely by reminding them they are journalists, was used to see if that induced more morality. The results were compared to a study 13 years ago.
2. The priming was found to make NO morality inducement this time.
3. It's a fairly small sample size, just 171.
4. Interestingly, all subjects self-identified as digital journalists.

That, in turn, leads me back to a post just a few days ago about how having a YouTube channel and a couple of social media feeds may make you — MAY make you, they don't guarantee you to be — a journalist in the eye of the court system sub specie Primo Amendmento, but they DON'T AT ALL guarantee you're a journalist, let alone a "publisher" in the media world sub specie scribendo atrimento.

I wonder how much of this is winger media. The Project Veritas type stuff is basically all winger-side stuff. No liberals let alone lefties do that.

Gnu Media, political writing, 1st Amendment and Monty Python

Trust me. As usual, mainly where I blog elsewhere, everything in that header will come together.

"Strange women lying in ponds distributing social media accounts is no way to establish a media company. Just because some watery tart in a lake handed you a YouTube channel, that doesn't make you a publishing or media company." —
Monty Python, The Holy Grail and the Gnu Media (2019)



True, the free speech clause says you can call yourself whatever you want. Per Monty, you could call yourself the "Arthur, King of the Britons Publishing House." And, the freedom the press clause, also following the "no law," means that the government cannot define what a media or publishing company is or is not.

In other words, especially on judges ruling whether a blogger or whomever is a media company? Even there, there has to be a certain amount of actions. That said, judges can't rule on whether the falsity of reporting, rather than its truth, disqualifies someone from being a media company.

But, the general public, including yours truly, can proffer exactly such definitions.

Critical reporting (at least on occasion), not using leading questions to fuel conspiracy theories, and other things, can be used as reasonable "tags."

So, if you're a winger (and on some issues, per "horseshoe theory," it doesn't matter WHICH wing, you're just a winger) thrusting a mike in front of minor party political candidates, or interviewing each other?

You're not a media company.

Update, Nov. 18: Maybe some of this is related to journalists (fairly small sample size, but all digital or digital first) being less morally developed than 13 years ago?

No, digital advertisers can't guarantee magic versus old-fashioned print or TV

It may seem that way, but much of the digital advertising world's top sellers appear to throw around economic jargon in a form of hand-waving as much as Mark Carrier throws around Bayesian probability claims in an effort to prove Jesus never existed.

The reality is something QUITE different, as this long piece shows.

It's snark-heavy, with a headline of "The new dot-com bubble is here: It's called online advertising."

A key early point of Jesse Frederick and Maurits Martijn is that here, in the most dismal of the social sciences (advertising as part of economics), as in other sciences, correlation is not causation.

From there, we dive into some actual research, which the hand-wavers didn't.

Finding one? Paid company brand name keyword links? Bupkis.

We then move beyond that to:

The benchmarks that advertising companies use – intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed – are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

Interesting.

Now, that's all true of old-fashioned ads as well.

From the newspaper biz, I know that. I've not sold a lot of ads, but I've sold a few, and working primarily in the community papers biz, I've heard people ask about ads even if I've not been the seller of record.

Can't tell you how many times someone would ask to make a coupon a part of their ad to test ad effectiveness. That ignores whether people remember to clip the ad or not, remember to have the clipped ad with them, etc., and finally, whether the ad, coupon included, is that much of an enticement for a product or service they might not otherwise need.

Per neuroscience, advertising is just a general "primer." And, whether in a newspaper or magazine's print version, a TV station, or on Facebook, it's only going to attract people already interested in the product or service, or in an individual company. In that sense (and god, I hate to give him credit for anything) it's like a Cass Sunstein nudge.

From there, the authors talk further about "selection effects" (i.e., selection bias) vs "advertising effects." And they apply this to the Hucksterman Empire.

In seven of the 15 Facebook experiments, advertising effects without selection effects were so small as to be statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Well, that's pretty serious.

Because the target audience for a lot of ad sales is small, you have to run large sample sizes on testing before you can figure out if you've got something real. The audience for some new Max Factor lipstick is nothing like presidential polling. Rather, going the other way, the authors compare the rarity of many product needs to that of cystic fibrosis.

From here, the authors note that this also shows advertising can't manipulate people as much as digital advertisers claim.

The information above is as true on affiliate marketing as on search.

The biggie behind all of that is this:

It might sound crazy, but companies are not equipped to assess whether their ad spending actually makes money. It is in the best interest of a firm like eBay to know whether its campaigns are profitable, but not so for eBay’s marketing department.

And, per the authors, many of the marketing staff at many of these companies — we're talking buyers of ads, not the sales staff at Google and Facebook — don't WANT to know. 

Per an anecdote about Mel Karmazin, president of Viacom, talking to Google's Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin in 2003, and complaining they were removing the "magic" from advertising, these marketers want to keep the magic, so that they continue to look like Wizards of Oz.

This all means that programmatic advertising is smoke and mirrors, too. So my potential nightmare of the post Gannett merger Craphouse creating an in-house programmatic ad network? Could still happen. In a sense, would be an even bigger fuck-up than I dreamed before.

The Texas Tribune turns 10: A success story, right? Err ...

Well, maybe. It depends on what metrics and how you analyze them, as we look at Evan Smith's hoorah piece.

OK, first, financials.

$10 million intake and $9.7 million expenses. Yes, you're in the black.

At 3 percent.

A total haul of $76 million over that decade?

How much of that haul is from your "sponsors" in what Jim Moore five years ago called pay-to-play journalism, as I blogged here? Care to open your books all the way, Evan? I didn't think so. Remember, at the same time, Moore called you out for lack of transparency, as well.

And, how much of your haul over the years is from advertorial pieces? Easier to do that, maybe, when you have "sponsors."

Ten years in, we still consult at no cost with any wide-eyed, big-hearted social entrepreneurs who want advice and insight on how to create an operation like ours from scratch.

I can consult like that, too, also for free.

"Dear Salt Lake City Tribune, as you now enter the nonprofit world, getcha a bunch of fucking money from big corporations. List them by name to be ethical, but ... don't let that actually bother if you shade your writing their way."

There ya go!

What Evan won't tell you, in addition, is that if that money comes from a foundation, attached to it are foundation terms of use and other strings.

Does that have an effect?

Arguably yes.

Especially when it comes to talking Earl, which the Trib don't have much of in Utah, compared to the Black Gold, the Texas Tea, and the refining thereof in Texas. The Trib has always been light in the loafers about calling Big Oil to account, let alone following fellow light-in-the-loafers Politico to write something about climate change legal liabilities. I noted that at its 3-year mark, with this piece.

Reaching more than 2 million per month on various platforms? Does that include, or not, the New York Times website on cross-produced stories carried at both places?

Speaking of separate platforms and sponsored journalism, running Trib Talk pieces separately is now being killed. That would, therefore, not be a success. How clearly they'll be distinguished in the future, who knows?

About 80 full time and part time employees? Sounds good, as others still gut. But how many are FT and how many PT?

Oh, and per that same environmental piece link, Evan, you were making more than $300 large 7 years ago. Care to tell us what the current haul is? Also within that link, Editor and Publisher had other issues to raise, like Ross Ramsey's cozy past relationship with John Sharp when comptroller, especially since the Aggies that Sharp now runs are an official "partner."

I'm surprised that Evan hasn't branched Trib Talk into a TED Trib Talk channel. He must be slipping.

Finally, given ProPublica's recently announced partnership with the Trib on investigative journalism, what happens when serious dirt gets found on a Trib sponsor?

At least Smith, in an interview with Texas Monthly, admits he got lucky. He refers to livestreaming Wendy Davis and her pink shoes inside the pink dome in 2013.

Sadly, Poynter can only see fit to write a puff piece.

I shouldn't totally bitch on Poynter. It does tell us what Evan didn't — where the money comes from:

Its diverse revenue stream, according to a 2018 financial report, is 25% from foundations, 24% from individuals, 19% from website sponsorship, 18% from events, 10% from membership. 5% is “earned.”

OK. So Poynter doesn't have a breakout of income level of the individuals. Nor $$$ amounts to attend events. Nor does it tell us that at places like The Atlantic, Washington Post and elsewhere, "events" have led to ethical conundrums — conundrums enough for said places to generally drop the "events."

Well, it SHOULD have led to ethical conundrums. In reality, Atlantic tut-tutted the people who were tut-tutting the WaPost's soirees, and this was all so it could turd-polish its own such events. This was a full decade ago, meaning that Atlantic gave Evan cover to do this at the Trib.

==

Update: This year's TribFest is going virtual. How much will that eat into the 18 percent revenue share.

SLC Tribune a nonprofit? Nice, or "nice," but a game-changer? Not by itself

Media analyst pundits like Jay Rosen and many others are raving about the Salt Lake City Tribune getting IRS approval — and quickly — to reconstitute itself as a 501(c)3 nonprofit.

If this is part of a broader package of change issues on the business side, it might mean something. As of right now? No.

Click the link above. You'll likely see a Javascript screen tut-tutting you to turn off whatever ad-blocking program you run.

You WON'T see a hard or even semi-hard paywall. You'll only see a note with something to the effect that only subscribers can read while still running ad-blocking extensions.

This is the latest move by many newspapers and other news websites to avoid an actual paywall of any substance.

We in the business know that digital dimes of ad revenue continue to lose value, especially as they're undercut by mobile nickels.

If you're not going to address that revenue loss in other ways (beyond seeking donations to you as a nonprofit), you're still not facing the revenue issue head on.

So, nice at best to be a nonprofit, and that's only with other steps. If this is the Trib's main move, then "nice" is more like it.

As for those nonprofit partnerships? ProPublica and the Texas Tribune have had some success with them. The Trib, though, has had its reporting questioned at times in the past, over whether any oil-industry partnerships had bad influence, among other things, and I have been a past questioner.

Plus, neither of them is a legacy newspaper still focusing on print operations. Also, neither is in a two newspaper town — the Trib has the larger weekday circ but Deseret News is larger on Sunday. And, the Deseret News, though itself constituted as a for-profit, is of course owned by a massive nonprofit — the Mormons.

Where it's already been done, as a couple of years ago with the two Philly papers, per AP reporting this spring on the Trib's plans? It's helped. But it is not a lifesaver. (Philly had another buyout offer round this spring as well.) And eventually, as more papers consider this, existing journalism foundations, like Knight, which gave the Philly papers a bunch of money, will have less and less to give.

RIP Deadspin, so to speak

Of course, even though the last of the current-until-Thursday editorial staff at the sports (and fairly often, not-sports) blog Deadspin has now quit, as the mounting fallout from new owner G/O Media's "stick to sports" mantra that was enunciated just a few days ago erupted into Vesuvius, the website isn't going away. CEO Jim Spanfeller and the other hacks, including new Deadspin editorial director Paul Maidment, who turned Forbes into 50 percent "contributor" material will probably do what was their ultimate goal anyway — make it another Bleacher Report, or even worse, Barstool Sports.

Neiman Lab offers a roundup of hot takes and Tweets about Deadspin's demise and what it might portend.

As for yours truly?

As I said on Twitter more than once this last week, I visited Deadspin for four reasons:
1. To see ESPN pwned
2. To see Bill Simmons pwned
3. To read some often-wrong sports hot takes, sometimes almost as wrong as Bleacher Report, Barstool Sports or Fansided sites (along with seeing them pwned)
4. To read some of that non-sports writing that Spanfeller wanted to gut and that on Nieman's roundup, contra his claims, got more views than sports stuff.

A lot of the stuff under No. 4 had political overtones, usually at least mildly left of center. And THAT was the problem for the G/O vulture capitalists. That's why they simply closed down Deadspin's sister, Splinter, shortly after they bought the former Gawker carcass from Univision. To riff on what Ben Mathis-Lilley notes at Slate in talking about zombie websites, much of what remains at a place like Forbes is not just clickbait, but in the hands of these vulture capitalists, it's wingnut clickbait.

New Republic salutes Deadspin staff's courage in walking out, while noting they were in a rare situation — apparently profitable.

And that gets me back to bullet points 1-3, and those other sports sites.

Deadspin didn't really do sports reporting. It did, on its sports work, oh, 20 percent analysis, and 80 percent in the categories 1-3 plus other hot take type opinion, and an occasional cold take.

Sure, it was fun.

But, it was also, for me, like the stereotypical Chinese dinner. Digested and gone from an empty stomach half an hour later.

I'd read it little in the past 3-4 months, I confess. So, I'll kind of miss it. But not really miss it. The non-sports hot takes will find new homes. And people will follow the hot takers on Twitter if they need to. (That said, it's easier when they're all on one site, just like when much of the best basketball, and I think football, reporting is at ESPN. ESPN, with the exception of the relatively recent add of Jeff Passan, largely sux on baseball, and The Athletic is behind a paywall.)

And, to riff on New Republic, there's probably more "reckoning" like this. We've seen on the news website site, "readjustments" at places like Vice. Look how ESPN poached from and crowded out Yahoo on the sports news side, then The Athletic went paywall with premium sports news. NBC Sports went with a mix of bloggers and the occasional actual writer. There's only so many sports teams, and just so much, or so little, in the way of breaking news, and insightful analysis, and ever-shrinking online ad dollars at the same time.

And the "Mavening of sportswriting" that Bryan Curtis decries? Maven itself has already moved it beyond sports in the narrow sense to broader "leisure" writing. (It owns Backpacker, for example.)

The final lesson? Back to New Republic. If your company, especially but not only if you're in the media, is taken over by the vulture capitalists of private equity, start updating your escape plans immediately.

Nobody wants CNHI

After Gray Media bought Raycom in 2018, the Retirement System of Alabama remained stuck with CNHI, formerly known by its original full name of Community Newspaper Holdings Inc.

CNHI has long been known as the bottom rung of larger sized newspaper ownership companies. Even as Gatehouse, I mean Craphouse, approaches official merger time with Gannett, even as Alden continues to slash and burn Dead Fucking Media, they still don't fully approach the craptaculartude of CNHI.

CNHI already had a bad reputation before 2009. I saw that 20 years ago in the greater Metroplex area when it ran two daily newspapers, Mineral Wells and Weatherford, with one publisher. No, no. Both papers would need to cooperate on press runs for special sections, etc. But, Mineral Wells needed a separate publisher, not a general manager.

But in 2009, the ground really shifted. In response to the Great Recession, CNHI started requiring one week of furlough every quarter from almost every employee.

And, it saved so much money, even as it drove quality further downhill, that it still continues to do that a full decade later.

The real deal is that, instead of furloughs, CNHI probably needed to file bankruptcy during the Great Recession, like so many other chains. But, given its state pension system ownership, it probably couldn't, for various legal reasons.

Other stupid things continue as well, as I can see from CNHI papers that are near me today.

First? Those Alabama golf course ads that insiders know are really CNHI house ads, as the courses are RSA owned, and make ZERO sense outside of Alabama. (Another sign of the stupidity of CNHI; I'm sure these are required ads, and probably a tax write-off for CNHI's parent as part of it.)

That said, the golf courses make almost zero money for the RSA. That's as golf continues to decline in interest among the under 40 crowd. Second, yes, a resort like WinStar may advertise gaming and concerts in some of your north Texas and southern Oklahoma papers, but their golf course doesn't. Is the Alabama golf ad part of why? Maybe.

Second, doing things like printing TV guide sections. Nobody who subscribes to daily papers, at least, reads those. Cut them and cut your print bills.

Of course, you're stuck with these problems. After Gray Television bought Raycom, RSA said it wanted to sell CNHI's papers, piecemeal if need be. RSA is obviously overvaluing them, cuz I ain't heard of any of them, at least not any great number of them, being sold to anybody.

Part of the overvaluing is probably that many CHNI small dailies need to be cut to triweeklies or something. Not facing that reality is part of why CNHI has them overpriced.

Florida journalists' group slouches toward Gomorrah AND irrelevance

Emily Bloch and other members of the Florida Pro chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists have hatched a true Bizarro World idea: Trademark the words "fake news" so that Trump can't use them.

First, that's not how trademarks work in general. I can say "Coca Cola" any time I want, as long as it's not monetized commercial speech that infringes on a trademark.

Second, political speech (including non-verbal speech) is recognized as having extra rights in things like this. Since Trump IS president, that would give him more protection yet.

Third, contra her claim that it's "uncertain" that the Patent and Trademark Office will grant this, I can say it's almost CERTAIN it will NOT. Google four words: "Taco Tuesday" and "LeBron James."

Fourth, this clearly violates at least the spirit of the First Amendment. Beyond it being hare-brained, it's unethical and unprofessional. It's a sad state of affairs that she roped an entire chapter of the SPJ into this stupidity.

Ms. Bloch, per her bio, has contributed to Teen Vogue, among other things. This sounds about that level of thought. I mean, the story is posted on Teen Vogue. That's something that calls itself a "magazine," isn't it?

Worse yet, at a time when ever more Americans are willing to fold, spindle and mutilate the First Amendment, and especially among youth, giving them this mental swill as intellectual feeding is more unethical yet IMO.

I Tweeted — two delayed via TweetDeck — on three themes:
1. The general nutteryness
2. The LeBron/Taco Tuesday angle
3. The not understanding trademark law.

Florida SPJ responded ... with Bloch liking the Tweet, which doubled down on what's essentially a clickbait angle.

Thanks for weighing in! As we’ve explained multiple times, across multiple platforms: We wanted to start a conversation and share resources about how to be critical about what is and isn’t news. We’re glad to have done so. Learn more at https://t.co/tEtOlGIzPs

— SPJ Florida (@SPJFla) October 24, 2019

To which I fired back:

As many journos have weighed in on #FakeNews 4 mths/years, you cld have done much better IMO. Re yr website, I start w/ MediaBias FactCheck to examine websites with which I'm unfamiliar, then go from there. W/in media, I don't always trust Politifact et al https://t.co/zGb92JBlC8

— reallyDonaldTrump 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 24, 2019

Beyond clickbait, the one other thing I think of is related to that — it's a membership recruitment tool. I'm sure that at anything below larger-level dailies, individual memberships in groups such as SPJ has continued to drop along with flatlined or dropping salaries.

A programmatic advertising potential nightmare

I'm "awaiting" with something less than baited bated (shame on me for misspelling that like an AP reporter or something) breath the day when CrapHouse launches its own programmatic ad network while simultaneously shit-canning half of their on-the-ground salespeople at various newspapers. (That's assuming I haven't missed something and it already has one.)

Given the latest word on the CrapHouse-Gannett merger, this may not be quite such an unrealistic (as in, won't happen) nightmare.

Slouching toward Gomorrah rival CNHI, since it has no production hub, would be unable to do this. Besides, programmatic advertising is computer based, and you can't furlough a computer for a week every quarter, so CNHI would be confused about what to do with this. CNHI is too stupid and disorganized to pull something like that off anyway.

Sherman-Denison ain't doing so well either

A week or two ago, I blogged about a Thursday issue of the Fort Worth StartleGram that had ZERO on ROP, yes, NO display ads (outside of a house ad).

Well, recently, I saw the front section, at least, of a Tuesday Sherman-Denison Herald-Democrat. I assume that the B had classys as well as sports.

Well, dunno what display ads, besides display classifieds, might have been in that B section. But, there were none in that A section. Oof. And, no AP or other wire; inside was a bunch of "staff report" stuff that wasn't local, and mainly wasn't from any of its Texoma-area feeders, but wasn't Texas Tribune, either. I suspect it was from other dailies owned by GateHouse plus content mill stuff produced at CrapHouse HQ.

FW StartleGram: Slouching toward a JOA with the Snooze?

Every time I look at either one of the Metromess' two larger dailies, I see yet more cratering and yet more wondering about their viability.

The latest comes from the Oct. 3 issue of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

First, it's its normal weekday 20 pages. (Well, Mondays is usually shorter.) On its web press size and length that is approaching Berliner size.

AND AND AND?!?!?!

I've never seen a daily paper run ZERO display ads in an issue.

You read that right.

The StartleGram had a paid adhole of a bit under 15 percent.

It was five-sixth of a page of obits (which I count as paid adhole).

Two pages of classifieds.

And that was it.

No, really.

Again, ZERO ROP.

Now, a metro issue rather than one in the exurbs? Maybe it has a few ads.

But out here in the country? No display ads. At least not paid ones. (There was one quarter-page house ad.)

Wow.

Now, let's flip to the editorial side.

Lead story? From the other side of the Metromess, of course, the sentencing on Amber Guyger.

Photo?

From the Snooze.

Even five years ago, no way the Dallas Morning News is giving the Star Telegram a news photo. They'd started down the road of sports and entertainment coverage collaboration, but no way the Snooze does something like this.

Yes, I know the News' Tom Fox was part of a pool. Still, in the past, if that was sent to the AP, the Snooze would have said "no local media" or some similar restrictions. And, doesn't AP have its own photogs? Answer is yes, of course. Were none of them there? Were none of them allowed? There ARE other photographs. Plus, from the StartleGram's POV, there was the option of asking a TV station, or a network, for a still off video. Today's HD video would give you a fine quality picture for the front.

To me, that's poor optics and poor judgment.

Wow.

And layouts? Almost exactly the same on the front.

There you are, whichever way you slice your comparative viewing of the two papers.

Trying to figure out whether that looks worse (for the StartleGram) as a vertical or a horizontal.

So, JOA time? I mean, you might as well if you're to the point of sharing photos and having a semi-identical layout. And, if you're to the point of the StartleGram and you can't even sell an ad into your paper, you can't be making money, can you?

So, if no JOA, does this mean more layoffs ahead?

==

To give credit to where it's due, nine days later, their late Saturday bulldog had 40 percent ads, and the two Tuesdays since have been above 20 percent total, so more than 1 full page of ROP. Still.

Real reporting, no he said, she said, stilll happens: mainstream media hits a homer on antivaxxerism

A lot of media critics, including yours truly, likes to critique and criticize much of the main stream media for false equivalence reporting. Until fairly recently, a lot of this was done on climate change, for example.

But, if you thought reporters and editors would get flamed by wingers for not giving climate change denialism a pass, what about not giving antivaxxers a pass?

Nonetheless, a pair of NBC News reporters did some REAL reporting.

And, on something tough within antivaxxerism — parents of deceased infants and toddlers mourning their dead children, then grasping at antivaxxer straws for balm. Brandy Zadrozny and Aliza Nadi talked to the medical examiner who looked at Evee Clobes' death and noted he disagreed with Catelin Clobes. Then then looked at an antivaxxer friendly doctor who does inquests for hire; he claimed he hadn't talked to Clobes and otherwise refused to talk to the reporters. Ms. Clobes definitely didn't.

But Zadrozny and Nadi didn't stop there.

They instead looked at how some antivaxxer advocates go shopping for parents of SIDS-death children to recruit them for the cause. Per Mark Twain, it would be an insult to vultures to call these people vultures.

Anyway, it takes a LOT of assurance to do this. Maybe being female helped.

In any case, it's a great story. I saw it via Orac, who has more background on the vultures.

More reasons not to trust Politifact

All the fact-checking agencies have problems from time to time. With many of them, part of their problem is that they have a target audience of the gamut from Never Trumper Republicans to mainstream Democrats — ie, the sweet spot within the duopoly.

Or, to put it in terms of bipartisan foreign policy establishment and inside the Beltway stenos, that's their target audience.

But, per a Politifact scoring of Rachel Maddow's "guns" question to Bernie Sanders, there are other reasons to question Politifact, as I explained there.

What Politifact is doing the scoring? Politifact National or a state Politifact?

What? There's more than one Politifact?

Damn straight, and Poynter doesn't explain why it uses just one media outlet in state-level Politifacts where it does that, rather than a university's journalism department, which it does elsewhere. And in those states, it doesn't explain why it uses just that university J-school.

Is there some "branding" involved? Behind that, some financial consideration?

Wouldn't surprise me.

Beyond that, though he's writing about the Washington Post's fact checkers, and about them versus Sanders as being too radical, Jeet Heer's cautions can be extended beyond that. Politically weaponizing fact checking is a dangerous proposition. In this particular case, he says it can give Trump an opening to questioning the whole enterprise.

Tis true both ways, Jeet. Spin-doctoring fact checking in Bernie's favor, as I have just pointed out, does the same thing.

And, some of this then goes to Beltway media using fact checkers as part of horse-race coverage of political campaigns.

"They're up to 113 Pinocchios in the last six months!"

It still doesn't address Poynter's lack of transparency. Or other issues with Poynter beyond, but including, Politifact.

And this is not the first time I've blogged about problems with Politifact.

No, local TV folks, you're still not doing OK

Several months ago, I blogged about how TV stations face their own newspaper-like problems and issues, just on a more-delayed timeframe. That was after a local programmer on the TV side said "we're doing fine."

I cited a number of links to show that, even if his individual station is doing fine (he may have been extrapolating from just it, but didn't explicitly say so) his industry is not.

And, a snafu on the Trump campaign express illustrates. In two ways.

Per Joe Monahan, now independent, but former media, and a dean of New Mexico political consultants and analysts, talks about Trump's visit to New Mexico this week.

KOB, long one of the two biggies in Albuquerque, went dark just as Air Force One touched down. Bugs in a new graphics system did it.

First, that really shouldn't happen. Second, it shouldn't have long-lasting effect. But it did. Monahan quotes an unnamed source at the station:

Joe, the station just went to a new graphics system. It had a bug in it and took the entire system down, We could not get any remote camera coverage from KAFB or the Santa Ana center or the studio. Obviously, it could not have happened at a worse time. Of course, everything is done on a shoestring budget around here these days. 

KOAT, the other biggie, was live and lapped up. Why?

KRQE didn't even bother. That's NBC, ABC and CBS in order.

Fox? Don't have a station in Albuquerque on a main channel, per Wiki. KRQE runs them as a second channel at 13.2. In one sense, that doesn't matter in today's digital TV age. But, in another sense, it's interesting that a top-50 TV media market doesn't have four fully independent stations.

As for why KRQE didn't show? Joe knows:

While the early going was a disaster for KOB it hardly registered with much of the public (especially those younger) who long ago abandoned TV news for social media and/or alternate video streams. 

The TV news audience is much smaller than it was back in 2000 when another disaster befell local media. That's when the Los Alamos fires broke out.

So, no, TV guy, you're not doing so well. It's OK to join newspaper folks and stop whistling in the dark.

For security reasons, there probably wasn't much private video of the Air Force One touchdown. But the Trump rally? People were surely Facebook Living that all over the place off their smartphones.

Why does the Cal Legislature hate newspapers?

A new bill that has just passed the California Legislature and been sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom for (let us hope not) his signature attempts to rein in the worst of the "gig economy."

With a blunderbuss sized gun firing indiscriminately.

It would be a killer to the non-daily and small daily "community" newspaper industry. Namely, it would require any paper that gets more than 35 submissions a year from a freelancer to make that person a regular employee. It would also require route delivery drivers to be made paid employees on similar terms.

That said, THAT one I don't object to.

Community newspapers could, instead, go back to using people like me 45 years ago — kids delivering the newspaper when they couldn't work yet at a "regular" job, and making a few bucks, and by doing the monthly "collect" calls on subscribers for money, learning a little responsibility, too.

The end of a newspaper era

It looks like Today Newspapers, a group of south suburban Dallas newspapers, and my employer for most the last 9 and 1/2 years, less an eight-month hiatus, is now history.

Editor's note: This blog was a "draft" that I saw in my "drafts" section. I saw it there, and figured I may well have published another version, at the time. But, with it being the 10-year anniversary, and change, of Today Newspapers closing, it was good to actually publish this, even if it's "again."

Causes? Many.

The recession and the newspaper economy in general.

Others in particular? South suburban Dallas is tough. The Dallas Morning News never even tried to run a free-standing paper here, other than their (subsidized?) freebie tabs they do now in different parts of the Metroplex.

At the same time, in a Tar Baby style dysfunctional relationship, many civic leaders in the “Best Southwest” suburbs have, for years, done what I call “whoring after the Morning News,” riffing on the Old Testament prophets’ comments about Israel “whoring after the Ba’als.”

Schadenfreude, in a large glass says, Fine, now you have the News, or either a small daily paper with unaudited circulation which doesn’t run school lunch menus, honor rolls and more, to cover your area.

And, some of the problems were peculiar to our staff. Without going into details, or throwing people too far under the bus, we never did get much in the way of online ad sales from our staff, who never seemed that interested in learning more about doing online sales, sales techniques for online ads, etc. (Of course, one of our ad reps claimed she could always get a job up at the News, which wasn’t likely even before all of its cuts.)

I do feel sorry for people in our area who will miss us and know what they’re missing. As for the rest, no.

Beyond that, I’ve been wanting out of newspaper journalism more and more. If I have to stay in it shorter-term, fine. But, I know there are other things that better fit my skills and acumen, even if I didn’t go to the right Ivy League or other school.

Unfortunately (perhaps) this part was sadly wrong, even as I have not only not gotten out of the papers biz, but once for sure (IMO) have faced age discrimination within it.

ADDENDUM a decade later: One other cause? Marlon Hanson's Focus Daily News. When you have your pressmen (almost all of whom, if not every one, a decade ago, probably lacking green cards and not being citizens) also do your delivery driving at a five-day daily while you own the press and its old and crappy but you don't care because you want to be a daily so you can exploit your old Dallas Times Herald national ad contacts, even while you lie about your circulation which was never audited, even with the massive loopholes it had, by the old ABC before it changed names and then went out of the circulation audit business, it's hard to compete with that. (Hanson claimed a higher circ than, by my guesstimates, the Snooze had in the Best Southwest; part of it, in my guesstimate and by what I saw on many lawns, was that he was doing a Total Market Circulation/shopper type angle, but rather than total saturation every week, was doing a rotated selective saturation. I know this because two years later, I interviewed at the Rio Rancho Observer and its owner explicitly said he did that, dividing Rio Rancho into four quadrants for his weekly and doing one quadrant each week on a TMC free throw.)

A strange way to write a headline at the Snooze

Attention, Dallas Morning News copy editors/page designers:

Cars don’t kill people, car drivers do, unless an unattended car has its “Park” lock shear off or something.

And, it takes two people to byline a story that short? Is this make-work before the next layoff ax?

Is CJR pulling punches in the face of Zionism?

Columbia Journalism Review recently had a good piece about how, within the precariat that is modern journalism, editorial cartoonists have become a precariat squared.

The main thrust of the piece is that cheapskate owners in general, and wingnut owners in particular using finances as an excuse, have accelerated the die-off, killing off cartoonists who won't toe a MAGA line.

However, the piece was sadly spoiled in the middle by this:

In April, after the Times international edition published an antisemitic cartoon, James Bennet, the opinion editor, who oversaw cartoons, disciplined the production editor responsible and dumped the syndication service that had provided the offensive image. Two months later, Bennet vowed to never publish a cartoon in the international edition again. Patrick Chappatte and Heng Kim Song, the international edition’s two in-house cartoonists, who had nothing to do with the image in question, lost their jobs. Joel Pett, a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, called the move “chickenshit.” 

Well, that's probably not the most chickenshit thing.

CJR showed several anti-Trump cartoons, but not this one. It wouldn't even link to a site that showed it. 

I'll do both.

Here's the cartoon as it appears in Haaretz:

Why did I go there?

Because Haaretz has it in an opinion piece which says, in essence, the cartoon isn't antisemitic and that it's run worse itself.

As much of the mainstream media (and apparently the media that analyzes the mainstream media) still kowtows to Zionist stances, it's important to call it out. Many journalists know the truth about these issues — that American newspapers still self-censor a lot on Zionism issue and self-censor a lot more than Israeli papers do.

Shame on CJR (and Sam Thielman as author) for being too cowardly or craven to not even run a link, let alone the actual cartoon.

After all, it ran pictures of multiple allegedly anti-Islamic Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

Editor and Publisher sold

Interesting. Well, it's no longer owned by a boating magazines company.

No wonder terms weren't disclosed. They were probably dirt cheap.

We'll see how well the new ownership's goal of diving (back) more into the editorial side of journalism plays out. Yeah, E and P once did that, but that was what, 20 years ago? Maybe 12-15 if I'm charitable?

And, old and new owners are jointly holding a print copy of the mag? I didn't even know it still had a print version. That's even as E and P's own website has a new piece about the all-digital world getting closer.

No, free puzzle books won't save you either

This is true for both small daily and nondaily papers and the self-allegedly mighty Dallas Snooze.

I speak from experience on the former side of the coin. A previous newspaper, when moving from daily to nondaily publication, thought that adding a puzzle book to one of the triweekly print days would sweeten the downsizing pot.

(Sidebar: I have NEVER understood papers who, when they do downsize, don't do it in the smallest increment possible. That is, if you don't want to be a six-day daily, go to a five-day daily. Don't go to a tri-weekly, like this place did, or worse, other places that go from six-day to semiweekly. SMH.)

Anyway, no, that didn't work.

But, wait! In the tradition of the CueCat (or similar stupidity adopted by the papers of dumb fuck Deano Singleton), an initial failed stab at a paywall, a second failed stab with dual paywalls, including a premium paywall touted by a former Google VP who thought people didn't know what AdBlock was and that Snooze digital subscribers would pay more for an ads-free version, and various other online mistakes —

You get a 48-page puzzle book if you become a print subscriber.

(Sidebar No. 2 before I go on. I have also never understood papers who offered premium paywalls that offered a website free of ads as part of the inducement. Yes, digital advertising pays bupkis back to you and continues to decline, but at least in theory, "eager" customers behind a paywall are more desirable ones. In any case, you're telling advertisers you think their content is worth crap with a premium website. Plus, the typical newspaper probably does no advance number crunching to find out if they'll actually come out ahead on this deal or not.)

Anyway, that 48-page book is just monthly, not weekly.

BFD.

The previous paper I was at offered 16 pages weekly, at that little bitty triweekly.

I mean, if you do think this would boost circ, you run it every week. Otherwise, people who actually are interested in puzzles and don't do the NYT crossword online, or old ones for free online, buy just that one issue a month at a newsstand and that's that.

Once again, Belo Blows.

But .. it's the ULTIMATE Puzzle Book. Because it's from THE Dallas Morning News.

Pacific Standard magazine shutting down

The news was announced several days ago; the last official day is Aug. 16.

I get employees being angry, per Daily Beast, especially full-time or contract editorial employees. But, I think managing editor Nicholas Jackson let his anger get the best of him when he told the terminated employees to "consider what sort of legal options might be available to them."

The story makes clear that its board, at least in their own comments, worked to do due diligence on severances and all other legal issues. It also seems like they were probably somewhat blindsided by founder and chief funder Sarah Miller McCune's decision to pull the plug.

OTOH, per the LA Times, even if she is a billionaire, I can't blame her. If 90-95 percent of the mag's revenue was from her largesse, via a foundation, you have to consider making that call, IMO.

It appears that PS Mag was the sole beneficiary of the Social Justice Foundation. Whether McCune, 77, is pulling the plug on the foundation entirely, or instead moving it in new directions, wasn't announced.

Gatehouse-Gannett merging — maybe

Just wow. Here's the company announcement, here's Ken Doctor's initial take at Nieman, and here's his follow-up analysis, complete with the "maybe" becoming more serious now that Alden Global Capital, owner of Digital First Media, aka Dead Fucking Media, apparently missed over Gannett's earlier rebuff of its takeover attempt, is spitting in the soup by allegedly taking a 9.4 percent stake in the new merger.

In his initial piece, Ken notes the two companies had become more comfortable with one another, and in the follow-up, that some sort of merger kind of fit both. Fortress Capital, still the de facto owner of Craphouse, was seeing its investment strategy run out of steam. A big acquisition helped. Gannett, kind of puttering around even before Alden's attempted takeover, probably could use a gray, if not totally white knight, and one further down the digital "transformation" road than it.

Later on, in talking to USA Today, Doctor says he thinks Alden might be looking at dumping its papers. Color me skeptical, with it's milking the Denver Post not for money for other papers, but for flailing and failing non-newspaper enterprises it owns. (Unless it thinks the last easy dollar has been milked out of that turnip.) Another angle, which I think more likely, is that Alden will do its best to cock-block this unless the combined company takes its papers off its hands.

And, where will they get that kind of money from, other than a potentially extortionate loan from Alden? So, Dead Fucking Media and Craphouse could have a dual between their hedge-fund owners, which would include Gannett being the piñata in a three-way bashing.

Now, the fallout?

First, Ken notes, the merged company (assuming federal approval) has to raise money to pay off loans.

Some of that comes through making two HQs into one. Some comes through whacking middle managers, especially, it seems, at Gannett.

Update, Oct. 9: Doctor has details on the chainsaw side. Expect a 10 percent jobs cut; he notes 3K lost jobs would equal McClatchy's entire workforce.

Advertising, production, finance and circulation will take most of the cuts.

No surprise, in various ways.

• Advertising? I'd joked about CrapHouse having the idea of centralized programmatic ad sales. Might not be a joke now.
• Production? Most of Gannett's copy editors and graphic artists will be told to apply for jobs at CrapHouse design hubs.
• Finance? Centralized billing, which will surely get fucked up. CrapHouse may, at this size, make its collections all in-house. (And then peddle that as a service to other papers.)
• Circulation? Dunno how much actual savings is there, but stand by.

Back to the initial story.

And some will come from selling semi-orphan papers and concentrating on areas where one or both chains are already somewhat clustered.

Ken lists Florida, Wisconsin and Ohio. I see that.

But, why he missed Texas, I don't know. Gannett already had a number of properties here after its Journal-Sentinel takeover. Gatehouse, ditto, even before the Statesman buy in Austin. Combined, they'll own every 7-day west of I-35 except Plainview, Midland and Odessa. They'll have several five-day and six-days in North Central and West Central Texas.

Hearst owns Midland and Plainview. Dunno if it will sell or not. AIM Texas Media owns Odessa; all of its other papers are in the Valley. Would they swap Odessa, and maybe a little cash, for Alice? Would they sell out entirely, to the new chain owning Alice and Corpus now? Would Hearst swap Midland, or Midland and Plainview for Corpus, which would let it cluster more than now in Gulf Coast (plus San Antonio) Texas?

Finally, which of the two corporate cultures (assuming Alden remains spurned) wins out? Read Ken for that. But let me offer some thoughts, too.

First, the Gatehouse takeover of the Statesman was such a shocker because their MO had been community dailies and non-dailies before that. (IMO, this also shows that, for whatever reasons, Cox had become desperate to unload the Stateless.)

Gannett, on the other hand, is still a "big dailies" type of company. Those seven-day dailies in Texas? All but Austin are Gatehouse properties, though it does own a few five and six-day dailies of decent size (Sherman-Denison the biggest).

Those different focuses will be difficult to merge, themselves. And if Alden wedges its way in, more difficult yet.

As for the cost-cutting? It will be middle managers more than top brass, even with the two HQs merging. They'll get their own on golden parachutes. And, although things have changed somewhat since 2007, big newspaper chains still get their own off the top.

As for whether this will "work"? From Deano Singleton's stupidity on the "TV Model" to AP being run earlier this decade by a bunch of CEO failures doing more stupidity, and the AP further prostituting itself more recently, it's hard to say.

More thoughts of mine on pagination hubs here.

For you the employee?

Given that Craphouse has had its design shop for years, and from what I know, it sucking about as bad as Granite Newspapers' small one sucked (and yes, I believe it was done to spin off Gatehouse), if you're a graphic artist, you'll lose your job. You may be given "first-in-line" status to apply for the new (and lower paying) ones that Craphouse will create in Austin, but that's it.

Given that Craphouse was aggressive enough on expanding its pagination shop to take on the Snooze on contract even before buying the Stateless, the same's going to happen to you as a copy editor. On, and their layout is get-it-out-the-door crappy.

I assume Craphouse may create one or two other hubs in Ohio and Florida.

Oh, and insider pro tip? If you're a minority, and maybe also if you're a woman? At least as of a few years ago, you don't want to work for Craphouse's design hub.

==

Sept. 28: The two companies say they have US regulatory approval; Craphouse adds that it's already been cutting jobs in anticipation.

The Snooze slouches further toward Gomorrah

At the Dallas Observer, Stephen Young has the details.

Yea, it made a $17M profit in the second quarter, but that's including the sale of the Belo Building and its nearly $26 million in closing net profit on that, on which it took a haircut from its initial asking price anyway. So the faux silver lining itself is actually leaden.

So really, it lost $11 million this quarter vs one year ago where it lost $500K. Ouch. Here's the actual report.

Other teh sucks, or other faux silver linings?

Yeah, it saved money on print costs.

That's because it prints fewer pages.

That's because it sells fewer ads.

Out here in the hinterlands, where they apparently just yank the biz section but don't re-letter the comix or other sections that come after that, it's bad. Tuesday, July 30? A 13.5 percent adhole on 30 pages. Thursday, Aug. 1? Slightly better, with a 15 percent adhole on the same number of pages.

Outside printing revenue dropped from no longer printing ... the Observer, among other things. Maybe the Belo Bunch worried that printers were reading Young and Jim Schutze more than their own paper?

The Snooze is also, according to Young, ditching its current content management system for the website and adopting that of the Washington Post, which reportedly allows more flexible paywalling. Not that I'm going to pay for it in general. (Circ revenue, despite the Snooze having a hard paywall [IIRC it was still somewhat leaky in 2Q 2018] dropped 5.1 percent.)

Supposedly, using Arc, in partnership with the Post, will give the Snooze more digital ads, too.

Even as digital ad prices continue to fall. (Ad revenue was down 1.8 percent.)

Wait, wait.

All these new ads will surely mean new business for Belo's digital marketing shop, which Bob Dechard will spin in some nutty new way.

Is Julian Assange a journalist?

I promised in my initial post about Assange's arrest on my primary blog that I would address this further. And here we are.

A simple answer is two words: "Yes, but ..."

And, that's with everything implied by folk psychology tropes by adding "but" after the "yes."

So, I'm going to break that out more, with a nutgraf of sorts kept down at the bottom.

So, here we go ...

Journalists don't just seek out, gather and collate information.

They analyze it.

Then they write about it.

Assange did little of the analysis or writing work even with the initial information he got from Chelsea Manning, when he had much greater degrees of freedom of space, time, and working space than he does now.

Writers, and even more, editors, make judgment calls with information they receive. Some of those judgments are whether the material is true or not. Others are whether it would be harmful to release some of it.

I think Glenn Greenwald, for whatever reasons, has gone overboard on what Edward Snowden information he and Laura Poitras have chosen not to release, but, they have made a judgment call. I think they went way beyond just going overboard when they yanked the rights to the Snowden information from the eyes of everybody but themselves — ie, no Guardian, no Intercept, etc. Frankly,  wouldn't be surprised if Ken Silverstein is right and the Russkies honeypotted Snowden but that's another story.

Assange? In the past, at a point after his working space freedom started to close up but was not that tight, made decisions to dump information without redactions, and in the case of some Afghanistan material, was rightly criticized for an endangerment factor.

That's just one issue. As Wikipedia's page on Wikileaks notes, it's released Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and more. With basically no effort at redaction.

In short, he's as much a sub-Redditor as he is a journalist.

I also said in my initial piece on the actual "yes," that to the degree it's true, he's actually like a Beltway steno in reverse in some way. He's an opiner, not a news writer, to the degree we consider him a journalist, by what he gathers, and what he solicits. I've already, along with others, criticized him for not seeking and encouraging leakers inside places like Russia and China. I've criticized more his response to that initial criticism. Today, Russia has a home-grown version of something like Wikileaks — no thanks to Assange.

I can't prove what's behind that. But, between that, and his likely lies about the source of the initial round of 2016 DNC emails — that VERY likely source being Russians, whether or not on paper officially connected to the Russian government and not a DNC employee — Assange is at least open to the charge that he deliberately refused, for clandestine reasons, to help get a Russian version of Wikileaks started. Countervailing that would be the idea that if Assange was hands-on, on getting such a movement started, even with alleged anonymity, he could turn people in.

(That said, this is a good spot for a side note.

For all the people not only (rightly) denying Russiagate, but claiming Russia can basically do no wrong? I'm thinking of the specific issue of the claim that the Internet Research Agency has no direct connection to the Russian government. Big fucking deal on a nothingburger claim. China says the same thing all the time about its Red Army hacker squads.)

Counterpunch publisher Jeff St. Clair here has the number of not only Assange, but of people like that, and of the people who believe them:

I think Julian Assange's lowest moment was his inculcation of the Seth Rich conspiracy in some of the more credulous precincts of the Left. The strangest part of the affair is that if the preposterous Rich conspiracy had proved true, it meant that Assange would have outed his source.

Now, the likes of Mark Ames and Aaron Mate haven't signed off on Seth Richism, just the IRA type stuff. But, I do Google from time to time.

When Assange, or Wikileaks as its mouthpiece, HAS made editorial judgment calls, sometimes they've been off the wall. Like criticizing the leak of the Panama Papers.

Here? I suspect 190-proof red-eyed jealousy at work — as one motive.

Another? I'm still not ready to call him a Russian agent, but the Panama Papers' attacks on Russian businessmen (Mafiyya, let's be honest) is another reason Assange attacked their release, claiming the U.S. government was behind this, which is nonsense. Ken Silverstein had done some work on Mossack Fonseca even before the main Panama Papers leak and I KNOW he's not a government agent.

And? Vlad the Impaler Putin himself cited Wikileaks in fighting to defend Russkies with likely government ties. Again, Assange may not be a Russian agent, but he has certainly left himself open to accusations of such.

Jealousy is not a one-off issue with Assange, either. Edward Snowden was among those who criticized Assange for not sufficiently curating and editing leaked materials, and Assange claimed Snowden was pandering to Hillary Clinton.

Good journalists also have good ethics. In promoting the totally base and vile Seth Rich conspiracy theory, primarily to try to cover up that the initial DNC emails came from a Russian hack, Assange has shown his lack of ethics and his willingness to outrightly lie. (Given that nobody — not Assange, Patrick Lawrence, Adam Carter or anybody else that I know of — has tried to explicitly claim that the spearphishing attack that got the later emails was not Russian-done, why the lie was engaged in was perplexing, too, and remains so.)

And, related, Silverstein thinks Snowden, if not originally a Russian agent, got compromised at some point, so who knows?

Wikipedia also raises the issue of whether or not Assange is anti-Semitic. First, to the Assange nutbar fanbois, I know well myself the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and the use of the latter as a weapon against people calling out the former. As with Russian agent questions, at a minimum, I think Assange has left himself open to anti-Semitism claims.

And, per Andrew Stewart at Washington Babylon, Assange is definitely anti-feminist, which ties back to his troubles in Sweden (which have now been opened legally AGAIN!) He's also, weirdly but openly, anti-atheist, at least on Tweets that Stew collated. And his call for more births in Europe make him come off a bit like an Anders Breivik, or other white nationalists in Europe and America. If this is journalism, it's op-ed journalism.

Assange is also an idiot at times. In the link above, I mentioned his previous issues with lack of password protection. His belief that Trump would give him a pardon or something for all the DNC leaks further shows this idiocy. By the way, to riff on Janice Joplin, schadenfreude is just another word for someone else who arrogantly still has plenty to lose.

Journalism is also a collaborate effort in some way. Even at a small community newspaper, the managing editor will bounce ideas off other staff. A publisher will be a check, if the editor doesn't voluntarily include the publisher in his or her advisors.

Assange is managing editor and publisher all in one, with a sycophantic, perhaps even cowering, editorial board, even if Kristinn Hrafnsson is listed as editor in chief.

Journalism is an art or a craft, not a science. It will always have a demarcation problem, per philosopher friend Massimo Pigliucci and his writings (in the sciences) on demarcation issues.

I wouldn't put Assange outside the bounds of journalism. But I would put him in the borderlands.

And I'm comfortable with saying that.

And if we stopped calling him a journalist, I'd be OK with that, too. We don't call Snowden one, nor has he ever presented himself as one. And, that's that buried nutgraf.

So, why IS Assange a journalist, if he is one, and Snowden is not? Is it anything other than Assange having an organized backing behind him and Snowden not? Is it Assange-generated PR related to that?

Here's option three — we call Wikileaks a journalistic organization but don't call Assange a journalist. For my personal value, this has the petard-hoisting factor of, on paper, forcing Hrafnsson and others to defend Wikileaks separately from defending Assange.

Don't blame Craigslist, etc. for the Youngstown Vindicator

The Youngstown Vindicator (Wiki) recently made news when it said it would go out of biz on Aug. 31.

Many people lamented this as part of the decline of newspapers, pointing fingers at places like Craigslist.

Instead, start by pointing the finger at Youngstown's economy.

Per City-Data, Youngstown is about 65 percent the size of Flint, Michigan, and Mahoning County is half the size of Genesee County.

Youngstown's economy is just about as bad as Flint's and Mahoning's is worse than Genesee's.

Neighboring Warren is not so bad off. Ditto for Trumbull County.

If Wiki is right that the Vindicator has still been publishing three sections on weekdays, sounds like there's been a series of ongoing bad editor's and publisher's decisions. I mean, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram only publishes two sections on Mondays, and sometimes on other weekdays. The Denton Record-Chronicle, in a healthier city twice the size of Youngstown only publishes two sections even on Saturdays, though it remains a seven-day daily. (Interestingly, both the Startlegram and the Morning Snooze circulate in the Gainesville area, but the Wrecked Chronicle does not. Questionable publisher's ideas there, too, probably dating back to when the Snooze briefly owned the DRC.)

Anyway, that's only half the problem.

The other? The Vindicator's website appears to still have NO paywall. Not even a leaky or half-assed one.

On that? Start the blame with Deano Singleton during his time as chairman of AP's board of directors and his touting of the "TV model" for online newspapers, even though pay cable channels existed back then and this grossly misunderstood how TV and radio advertising works. Blame the rest of the AP board for going along with this stupidity. Blame AP member newspapers for going along with that stupidity.

And, as far as the Vindicator's owner?

Let's say it was a seven-day daily. Had it cut to six-day or even five-day, as well as cutting a few pages, it would be alive and well. Its ownership also has one of Youngstown's TV stations and an FM radio station.

This leads to two other issues.

One is "clustering." It was a buzz word 25 years ago, and even with FTC worries, purely within the newspaper biz and not electronic media, it's still buzz word as much as reality today.

The other is that newspapers were long one of the most capitalistic businesses in America. Adjustments were belated.