Small newspapers not getting it on magazine inserts

 As Louis DeJoy kills the joy in newspaper Mudville with the ever-continuing rate hikes (mixed with the ever-continuing kowtowing to Amazon), newspapers that deliver by mail (which includes some small five-day dailies these days as well as non-dailies) need to be rethinking their bromance with magazine inserts.

NOT tabs on newsprint.

Magazines on the gloss.

First, with newsprint cost issues, magazine stock, even cheaper, is on the rise.

Second, and to the point of this post, magazine stock, even the flimsier stuff, definitely weighs more than newsprint.

Those of us editors with some advertising experience, or GMs or small-town publishers, already know there's an issue as to whether or not magazine ads primarily poach from newspaper ads, anyway.

But, those quarterly neighborhood magazines often more than double the cost of the newspaper into which they're inserted.

And, are the ads paying for that?

Take my beloved nearest CNHI paper.

Its "holidays" quarterly issue of a month ago was 32 pages and just over 25 percent adhole.  Not sure how much net profit that returned.

And, the editorial side, the printing turnaround time was slow enough that a "coming" event mentioned in a feature interview had already happened.

The Texas Observer needs more of your money

 They're looking for $317K by the end of the year.

To that end, they've finally gotten smart enough to add two donor levels to their original Javascript screen of "supporter" at a paltry $11.87/yr and "advocate" at $48, which is higher than it originally was. "Defender" is at $71.88 and "muckraker" at $131.88. (I have no idea why these are the exact amounts, but it sounds like they could still learn something from NPR/PBS type fundraising.)

Speaking of?

If they get money, it will be "your" money, not mine." They still don't move the needle much on most their stories, and, while Counterpunch may not accept ads, The Nation does, and they're a local of The Nation, not Counterpunch. (Plus, NPR/PBS have "sponsors" if not ads.)

(Update, March 29, 2024: In fact, The Nation now has a Javascript screen, like many newspapers, saying: We see you have an ad-blocker on. Please disable it to continue reading our articles.)

And, more weirdly? On this donations page, the donation amounts do not align with what's on the Javascript. So, Observer, next time you write something about education, include yourself.

Back to the no-ads schtick. I discussed that and more this spring. Speaking of Counterpunch and the Nation, this time, it's both vs. the Observer, whether an articles-limit paywall (The Nation) or a premium section (Counterpunch), vs neither at the Observer.

Speaking of The Nation and Counterpunch in another way?

The Texas Trib has made the Observer as currently focused semi-irrelevant in my point of view. At one time, to look at the political alignment of national magazines, the Observer was Texas' version of, say, The New Republic or Mother Jones. Now? Though the Trib isn't that far out there, it is close enough to that at times, and is also perceived that way.

The Observer needs to more explicitly make itself Texas' version of at least The Nation, if not a Counterpunch or Alternet. (As well as getting a clue about a paywall, ads or both.)

Moahr puzzles at CHNI!

Or, at least, at my local CNHI installment.

Wonder why?

Were people bitching about the amount of Texas Trib content? Bitching about seeing three days worth of comics at one time because it hasn't gotten a clue about not doing that and overvaluing its fishwrap at $1.25 Tuesday and $1.75 Saturday, higher than places like Bowie and Decatur which still have more than fishwrap?

Were they bitching about all those Alabama ads (without knowing why they're there)?

In any case, moahr puzzles, as teased on the banner of the Dec. 9 issue, is "the answer."

And, having seen the first new installment, it's apparently to keep from running more and more of those CHNI corporate-wide prebuilt pages, though the Dec. 12 Register still has one of those, plus this new full page of puzzles for four pages of puzzles or puzzles/comics. Add in it still having one of those other prebuilt pages, and that's five pages of birdcage filler on a 10-pager.

NOT the answer? Nobody biting on the "get paid to write sports for us" ongoing house ad ZERO basketball coverage during the non-district season (and who knows after that)? Going on five weeks since the start of hoops at the 4A level and nope, still nothing.

With an editor AND a staff writer (and, AFAIK, pages built at a pagination hub), they could do better.

Back to the header, though. What they need is FEWER puzzles, as well as more editorial content. And, of course, more ads.

As for CNHI in general? I remember when the Snooze touted "moahr puzzles" as "the answer four-plus years ago. Shock me that CNHI is that far behind the curve.

Texas Press Association giving away the store

 One again, it's time to criticize (not just critique, but criticize) the TPA, specifically, its Texas Press Service.

I presume no newspaper editor in the state is dumb enough to run the news release TPS sent out Nov. 30, because it DIRECTLY UNDERCUTS this thing called "advertising."

I'm just going to give the header, subhead and first two graphs in the quote:

T-Mobile Bringing New Stores and More 5G to Texas

The Un-carrier opened 18 new retail stores and expanded 5G network coverage and capacity

BELLEVUE, Wash. — November 30, 2023 — T-Mobile continues to ramp up its presence in Texas with the opening of 18 new retail stores across the state in 2023 and the planned opening of more than a dozen additional stores now through 2024. The new stores have created about 120 new jobs for the state.

“Opening even more stores in Texas continues to be a great way for T-Mobile to build relationships with our customers,” said John Stevens, Vice President for T-Mobile’s Small Markets & Rural Areas. “This is especially true in smaller and more rural communities where we’re opening doors for the very first time. Our strategy of meeting wireless consumers where they live, work, and play helps us to establish closer connections with them while also enabling us to tap into the local workforce. We just couldn’t be more excited about our growth here in Texas and look forward to continuing to make a positive impact across the state.”

Yes, TPA via TPS wants member newspapers to think about giving T-Mobile free advertising.

As I said above, presumably no editor worth his salt runs a word of this. But, a pink-slime, non-politicized version like CherryRoad's Sherman Dumpacrap might say, "Hey, there's no paper in Bonham and we can make this Bonham news!" (Bonham is one of those new stores.) Or Marlon Hanson's Focus Daily News running it, as it looks to be ever more a dumpster fire. (Will have a post all about it next month.)

Removed: Dan Froomkin

 When he was at the Washington Post, Froomkin actually had something to say, so I added his Presswatchers to my blogroll.

It's leaving.

Froomkin has become nothing but a #BlueAnon shill. He doesn't cover how the press do or don't cover independent and / or third party presidential candidates, except maybe tangentially on how that ties to Democrats. He doesn't at all cover press coverage of the two big US foreign-policy issues, Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza. He's basically wasted space trying to "work the refs."

CNHI clickbait

 It's interesting how articles from one CNHI paper appear on another's website even if they have no real relevance there.

For instance, Gainesville ISD, in Gainesville, Texas, looking for substitute teachers? Nice. I'm sure that readers in Cleburne, Texas, 100 miles away, and 100 miles of driving across the Fort Worth half of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, have no real interest. 

Yet, the story is on the website of Cleburne's paper as well as Gainesville's.

I guess it's an attempt to goose online pageviews. 

It probably won't be that successful of one. And, it sounds typical of CNHI.

The Texas Press Association in 20 years?

It's no secret that "The Great Hollowing Out" is happening, or rather, accelerating, in the High Plains of all Plains states. This includes Texas, and it includes the escarpment areas to the east of the 100th meridian, where, to use biological descriptors, the mixed-grass prairie starts giving way to shortgrass. In Texas, think everything west of Abilene, in every county of less than 10,000 population, and some bigger than that.

But hold on to that thought.

In many cases, it's not totally a hollowing out, especially at the southern end. It's "The Great (Hispanic) Replacement." Or, it's "The Great (Hispanic) Replacement" keeping a "Great Hollowing Out" from being a "Humongous Implosion."

Take Crockett County. After a spike in the 1940s, has been fairly flat (a smaller surge in the 1970s) until the turn of the century. Then, it started declining more.

Counties similar in size that haven't imploded as much is due just to oil. But, just as farms kept getting bigger, especially out on the High Plains, after the most recent oil bust due to overpumping shale, big oil companies vowed to automate more and this time, they're at least halfway holding on to that.

A few counties, like Fort Davis, have bucked the trend. That said, Wiki notes that its average age is over 60 (just one of six counties in the US; two of the others are New Mexico counties with old fart Anglos), meaning the Anglo White folks there are old indeed. In another decade, let alone 20 years, it too will be Hispanic majority, and younger. (For the non-Texans, that's not an oil area.) Or Presidio, where Alpine, especially, has become a retirement area.

But, in the "cis-Pecos" (take that, wingnuts) High Plains of southern Texas, The Great (Hispanic) Replacement" is the thing.

Why did I focus on Crockett County?

A story in the TPA Messenger this summer about the Ozona Stockman fixing to go belly-up before being acquired by Rambler Media.

I don't see that paper as the hub of a seven-county area, though. Of the nine counties it borders, five have papers. Of the four that don't, one is closer to Midland and the other to San Angelo than to Ozona. (And, that county is smaller in size than Crockett, and has been without a paper 15 years or more.) The third, Terrell, home of Sanderson, has less than 1,000 in the county. 

The fourth, Val Verde? Southern Newspapers, referred to here in years past as the "southern front" or similar, owned the Times-News until killing it in late 2020. (Del Rio.)

Nobody's tried to restart it, right?

Not totally. A paper out of Eagle Pass, website and weekly print, purports to cover Del Rio and to deliver the paper there. Yeah, Eagle Pass is 55 miles away, but Ozona is more than 100.

And? The Eagle Pass paper bills itself as bilingual and Val Verde County is more than 90 percent Hispanic (of any race). There's also the web-only (and monolingual, I venture) 830 Times.

And, that Eagle Pass paper, despite including a print product, is NOT a TPA member.

Folks, IMO, that's where West Texas, and especially Southwest Texas, newspapering is headed in the longer-term future. Yeah, it's nice for a Rambler Media, or other nonprofit corporation or whatever, to step in. (That said, sometimes noblesse oblige is more "nice" than nice.) But, Anglo White folks will likely have limited success.

Plus, if you're acquiring papers like that for the legals? Well, most those counties will likely have two, tiny, incorporated towns max. (Terrell has none.) They'll likely have no more than two school districts. And, the county government.

So, outside of budget and tax stuff, very few other legals. Not in oil country in some of these cases, so no legals there. No other environmental or industrial legals. 

And, if the only display advertising you're getting in a monolingual paper is the old White folks stores that will soon close, you're in trouble. The dollar store that's the only "grocery" if your county is less than 5,000 will likely lowball you on insert rates or even stiff you outright, because it has a captive audience.

Finally, no matter the ethnicity of the inhabitants, this area will surely continue to become ever more despoblado due to climate change. Del Rio at nearly 115 and the crappy Texas electric grid doesn't help.

So, as I see it, on the High Plains and in the upper Valley above Laredo and the gateway to the actual valley, the TPA faces a combination of more papers closing, or, if they're being replaced, replaced by bilingual ones that just don't see much value in the TPA. It's going to have to do recruiting and selling.

Flip side? If the Hispanic-oriented press, outside of East Texas' metroplexes, grows a lot more, could we see a Texas Hispanic Press Association, and not as part of TPA, but as its own entity?

Applying to Wick, not knowing it

 I've written here before about Wick Communications, both some general problems with it being ultra-cheap assed with its daily papers and a laughable idea of an in-house social media system for people to report ideas or even extended Facebook style stories to its newspapers.

Well, I applied via LinkedIn to another Wick property that I didn't realize at the time was a Wick property. Five-day daily, still, town of 6K and change, county of 11K. Bigger papers to south and east, so really not much circ outside the county. Gutted AP after long-time former editor retired. Suspect that this is a recent acquisition by Wick and they did the "dirty" after said person retired. Indeed, it's so new that wasn't on Wikipedia's page about Wick before I posted an edit. And, per what I've said about Wick and dailies? Montrose still is a daily in print. Some part of me appreciates the desire to continue to do that, but some part of me says HUH?

Or so it seems, on still being 5-day daily. Their website sucks on not having an "about" link anywhere. But, their e-edition page confirms.

Back to the newspaper of application. Assuming the takeover was in the last year, even with Wick's continued wedding to daily print, I can't see it staying that way. If so, would my salary be cut?

And, why did Wick buy this paper? Outside of Aridzona, and to a lesser degree, Washington, North Dakota and Colorado, they still don't have a concept of "clustering."

Wick strikes me as similar to Southern.

RIP Bruce Alsobrook

 I knew Bruce when I was in Sulphur Springs, at the News-Telegram. He had moved from being the editor there at one time to "Country World," a weekly ag magazine. After he was let go, I was moved into his spot AS WELL AS expected to still contribute stuff for the daily paper, per the shitheads at Southern Newspapers, for whom I will not work. (I guess nobody at the paper edited his obit, as it says "Town and Country" magazine.)

Bruce, from what I had heard from people who were there before me, was a good editor of writers for style and content, and presumably a good assignment editor. But, man, was he slothful. That's why he was let go. (And the cheap-asses at Southern made me their rented mule.)

He was a good person, as was his wife and family. He was in less than the best of health five years ago, as was his wife, who died last year.

Don't blindly romanticize the dying community newspaper

Great piece, to just that critical end, by Pro Publica.

This:

As they vanish, local newspapers are taking on a halo of everything that used to be good about America. They’ve come to symbolize not just halcyon days of neighborly virtues — imagine “It’s a Wonderful Life” if Jimmy Stewart played the editor of the Bedford Falls paper — but the very “bedrock of American democracy.”

Is indeed how the remnant of readership of many newspapers remembers the "golden days" of the print media world.

That remnant, as we all know, is itself older to much older, and Whiter to much Whiter, than the national population.

Daniel Golden, who worked for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Daily News and its post-merger renamed successor for more than 40 years, notes the reality was different, often far different.

Riffing on the situtation described at the top of the story, where the town of Ware was debating in government meeting whether or not to privatize the city's water and sewer system, he goes back to around the time he started in Springfield:

The same focus that inundated readers with information about every committee meeting, crime and high school football game fostered a certain coziness with the area’s power players. Boosterism and conflicts of interest occasionally interfered with telling the full story. It’s possible we would have done a searching examination of a plan to privatize Ware’s water system — unless we risked offending a powerful local figure or business interest.

That's about right.

There were other things as well, things that fortunately I never ran into when a cub or brave at a newspaper under somebody else's editorship and never tried on my own. (Springfield, Massachusetts having an ME insisting that Mount Saint Helens needed to be localized is laughable.)

OR, more seriously, things that today's digital-era reporters bitch about happening then. Not wanting your pay to be dependent on the number of clicks? But a Springfield Daily News reporter back in the 1970s and 1980s was paid by how many different small-town meetings he hit with stories filed.

That said, personally, I'd call Springfield a regional newspaper, more than a community newspaper.

The herd of money behind the UnHerd

 I am assuming that the UnHerd Ventures mentioned in this piece by the Guardian as part of a team looking to acquire Britain's The Telegraph, owner of what the Guardian elsewhere calls "right-leaning" GB News with scandals, is also behind the UnHerd online newspaper of the infamy of fake leftists and horseshoe leftists like Thomas Fazi.

The first link notes that Sir Paul Marshall, owner of the London-based Marshall Wace hedge fund, owns the UnHerd Ventures media group, and is looking to join with US hedge fund magnate Ken Griffin.

And, UnHerd Ventures' website confirms it owns the newspaper/magazine.

And, MediaBias/FactCheck confirms that UnHerd is "center-right bias." (I agree that it's not total wingnut; the degree to which it has British or American, but not continental European, leftism, is not always horseshoe theory leftism. But, enough of it was, and both in that and non-horseshoe theory leftism, there just wasn't enough, and I unsubbed long ago.)

It also has failed one fact check and is climate denialists.

AND? MBFC also says Marshall was a major Brexit donor.

The Telegraph is conservative, giving the upper-crust appearance of not being Murdoch-wingnut in Britain, but actually, it pretty much is.

So, toff owners of New Wave gussied up toff media looking to buy old toff media.

That said, on The Telegraph, they're competing with other toffish types, including the Daily Mail's owner looking for Saudi money to help his bid. 

It's going to be nasty; the Barclays, who own the paper, have bad debt and are trying to, essentially, fight a creditor takeover by Lloyd's.

Journalism Protection and Competition Act: Another misfiring bill?

Per a recent presser, the National Newspaper Association supports the Journalism Protection and Competition Act, S 1094, to make large social media companies? and news aggregators? pay for using newspaper content. I oppose, partially but not entirely based on what's happening in Canada with its social media journalism law. 

There are several issues here.

One, per what IS happening in Canada, Facebook et al are not "grabbing" your newspaper's story links. Rather, individual people are posting links. How do you address this? Related? The NNA presser says only "social media," which to me means Facebook, Twitter, etc., but, the law appears to point to search engines like Google and Bing and news aggregators like Google News and MSN. Can't NNA write a news release accurately? I quote:

Publishers asked Members of Congress to support two important journalism bills — the Journalism Protection and Competition Act, S 1094, to force large social media platforms to pay for the journalism they take from newspapers — and the Community News and Small Business Support Act, HR 4756, which would provide tax credits for small businesses to advertise in their local newspapers.

Oy. I do NOT consider Google News a "social media platform" and don't know who does. So, now that we're clear? 

The bill itself is about Google and other search engines, first, and presumably Google News and similar aggregators, second. I think. This piece says that three entities fall under the distribution minimum size: Google, Google News and Facebook. (It's from the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, and, is about an earlier version of the bill; but I presume the same distribution size or similar applies.) So, we're back to the Facebook issue of, "it doesn't grab stories." Beyond that, per this Garbage Day Substack, on its algorithm and such, you're competing with weirdness at Facebook these days. (And competing with arbitrary whims, of course.)

Two, however you address that, what's a fair compensation level? I know it says "negotiations," but what happens if they simply stiff you?

Three, how tight is your paywall? If it isn't, why are you protesting? This is true whether we're talking about Google / Google News, or about Facebook et al.

Four, if you're a community newspaper of any size and get an attention-grabbing story out of the blue, like Marion, Kansas, how do you stop the MSNs and Yahoos of the world from re-running this, like their news aggregation with the wire services? If that's not airtightly clamped down, then it needs to be. From my time as a copy editor at a seven-day daily, I remember daily papers sending stories to AP but putting geographical restrictions on them.

The News Media Alliance has a presser about "myths vs realities." It's not bad, but I think it misses points, too.

If you don't want your stories on Facebook, make your paywall harder. If you don't want them on Google or Google News, get hard protection against your website being crawled. That simple. (At Nieman Lab, Joshua Benton wonders/fantasizes about what would happen if Google had a legit competitor.)

One-siderism on killing journos in Ukraine

 Nieman Lab reprints a piece from The Conversation decrying Russian attacks on journalists.

It ignores that Ukrainian journos could themselves be killed in Ukraine pre-invasion and that Russia has accused Ukraine of deliberately targeting journos during the war.

BIG negatory on this idea from Nieman Lab

 There, Sophie Culpepper says "ask your readership for story ideas."

Uhh, no.

First, even without some political specifics, out here in South Wingnutistan, that's asking you to report on Facebook community group page rumors and shite like that. And, if you tell them, no we can't do that, the portion of the people who want that will likely accuse you of head-faking them or more.

Second, WITH political specifics. You're going to shoot down their asking you to do local or state level versions of #StartTheSteal (that's what it is)? I say that with a husband-and-wife team from my coverage area being arrested on J6 charges and using a variety of legal attacks for deliberate dilatory reasons on their not-yet trial after backing out of a plea deal. Oh, the husband was also a local GOP precinct chair.

A local version of why masking is fascism? (I had someone buy a half page ad to that effect in my newspaper two years ago.) And, then, when you explain the actual facts on that, you just redouble their belief that you're "part of the media." (Which, yes, I am.)

Yes, she says you have people vote on the allegedly best, actually most popular, ideas. And, how do you stop poll crashers? 

And, Culpepper's bio makes clear why she'd offer such stupidity without big caveats. Brown University grad. Starter of a high-end online-only paper in Lexington, Massachusetts, a high-dollar, very blue, city and county. (The county as a whole isn't quite as Dem as I would have guessed.) And, someone who graduated just two years ago, and probably had family dinero help to be able to start her own newspaper.

Arrogance.

That's the word.

And, not just from Culpepper.

It's also from Nieman Lab, presuming someone this young and with relative lack of experience has "solutions" to offer.

The Snooze continues to Snooze toward Gomorrah

 The Snooze would be my "beloved" Dallas Morning News, last print product of A.H. (does not stand for Adolf Hitler) Belo, now called DallasNews Corporation and its last print product since Al Dia (Spanish for "The Snooze") is now digital only.

Continues to snooze?

It's whacking more jobs, either by buyouts or firing.

"Adjusting digital memberships"? What the hell does that mean? I still hit (not complaining) plenty of non-paywalled items there. For example, this piece, part of what seems to be a very good series of pieces on lives damaged by fentanyl. Claims to be "member-exclusive content." Didn't drop a paywall on me. I clicked on a half-dozen such stories. No paywall.

What it really needs to do is two things.

1. Stop circulating on the west side of I-35 outside the Metromess itself. (Where I live, I can get it, and I see it in places where the StartleGram isn't, which is a commentary it and parent McLatchKey, and don't get me started on not even finding the Denton Wrecked Chronic.)

2. Take a page from the StartleGram and whack a day (two?) of print publication. (I haven't checked to see if it's already at six-day, so maybe it's done that.)

Remember, this is a company with a forearm's-length litany of screw-ups. CueCat? Selling off its share of Cars dot Com? Multiple screwups on paywalls? Selling off non-Dallas print products? Check on all of the above, with the paywalls screwup continuing as I type.

'Digital' isn't the answer to rural journalism's problems

And, boy, community newspaper owners, publishers and general managers need to hear that.

In fact, to state it again?

Community newspaper owners, publishers and general managers need to hear that.

So, hear it! 

From the Community Journalism Project:

To me, this is spot-on. 

Quick takeaways:

1. Community newspapers are ever-more stretched out. Asking them to do yet more with less is just no bueno.

2. Are you doing renewal postcards for subscribers and other "hygiene"? (Ten percent — I would have guessed more — have past due subscribers, 90 days or more past.) Without embedding this one, here's a related CJP video about retention strategies in particular. In basic, it notes about 65 percent of people renew automatically to the community paper, about 5 percent you lose, and so you need to focus on retaining 30 percent or so.

3. Have you thought about outsourcing some of this "hygiene" to folks like CJP?

4. The meat of the webinar is IF you have people who want something digital, how to offer something without cannibalizing the print newspaper. Related to that is, if you have digital customers, doing the digital version of "hygiene."

On point 4, what I relate to is, as "no DeJoy in Mudville" continues to raise USPS rates, using digital to target out-of-county readers who are move-aways but might have grandkids who live locally and want to see them in sports pictures, etc.

They also note that digital should NOT be seen as a way of "converting" subscribers there to print.

Now, that said, CJP did not offer prices for its services at the end of the piece. 

They do talk about managing rate increases on this, but it seems that they're only talking about subscription rates. The elephant in the room, of course, for many smaller community papers, is advertising rates.

OTOH, some of it seems out-of-date. They talk about somebody at the high school football game posting score updates from a smartphone to the company website. Really? You're competing with Facebook pages, Dave Campbell's website here in Texas, and other things.

And, if you're a publisher who isn't comfortable with at least the basics of a Blox-based website, and isn't comfortable asking a staff member to do that, you should maybe ask whether you shouldn't be paying CPJ to do this.

But, back on the good side, they say don't overpay for digital bells and whistles if you don't know how to use it. And, boy, this is true. 

Back more to No. 4. If you're part of a group of anything more than three-four local newspapers, much of this can be done at the corporate level. Any group of half a dozen or more papers, and definitely 10 or more, whether having a presence of moderate, modest or none digitally, and whatever they're behind on, on print "hygiene," should have a dedicated staffer at corporate level. If there's no single corporate office, run it out of the largest newspaper in ownership and bill out prorated charges.

Tomorrow is Texas Press Association D-day

 Yep, starting tomorrow, by state law, you're supposed to post your legals with the TPA webpage run by that grifting Column.

If I owned a paper that were a TPA member, since the new state law applies only to TPA members, especially if I were a smaller newspaper that didn't have its own website, especially if I were not a "full" TPA member and wasn't getting the 2x2 ads and TexScan, etc.?

I believe I'd quit, Mike Hodges. At a minimum, the onus would be on TPA staff to talk me out of it. I know, we get a run a year, maybe two, every other year, of constitutional amendments ads, and once a year, maybe, of the affordable housing ad since COVID started, but I think that's gone away again, and I know that, last year, shockingly, Danny Goeb placed some political campaign ads via TPA. But, other than that, if you're not paying the extra freight for the 2x2s (most of which are oilfield ads anyway), what do you get?

And, mark my words: By 2027, more of the camel's nose and head that was let in the tent this spring will be shoved inside by a future Texas Legislature. (I wouldn't be surprised if somebody makes a run at that in 2025, but doubt it will pass then.)

Notes from the field?

First, setting up default rates sucks if they're not an even dollar, and your liner rates and mine aren't if they're per-word or per-line based. You CANNOT enter ".35" for 35 cents a word. You have to start with $1 and then use the up/down (down in this case) cursors. AND? Despite that I've never heard of a paper charging fractional cents for anything. Column's "wizardry" calculates out to not just mills, or tenths of a cent, but to tenths of mills, or hundredths of a cent. Hey, Hodges, as long as you're paying Column for its Florida public benefit corporation stable genyus, can you get that fixed? Or, rather than Hodges, Kevin King, the guy who emailed me? (I tried, after I started the cursor going, editing "within the field," but when I hit save, it changed 0.35 to $35. More stable genyus there.

And, my office puter being a 10.6.8 Mac, of course it is not compatible there.

Wonder how many other papers hadn't set up accounts, and of them, how many are hitting the old Mac issue.

Finally, per my owner's desire not to give away the store, my newspapers DO NOT HAVE WEBSITES. I'd argue that the TPA, in conjunction with the Lege, is involved in a reverse-spin restraint of trade. Why didn't the stable genyuses, TPA version, get newspapers like us exempted? We're not the only newspapers in the state without websites.

More notes for the stable genyuses at Column?

First, supposably, I can adjust my templates under "my organization." Don't see that. Don't see any place to input column widths for legal displays. 

I do see under "my organization," a Column employee also listed as part of the "team." More "ugh" and probably more snooping by TPA, which has also in the past couple of months increased its nagging about "you have a missing issue." Technically, NewzGroup, but on TPA's behalf. Since we don't have a website, and no current full-page wind farm ads, I delay posting there by a month, ever since the county's IT person asked if we had a website and I mentioned we have that as an option. Sorry, Hodges and NewzGroup but that's the way it is.

"Community News and Small Business Support Act" thoughts

 First, this legislation, overviewed by Nieman Lab, appears to be somewhat better than the old Local Journalism Sustainability Act, harshly critiqued by me here, but that's a low bar.

It does address the issue of "pink slime" getting any money, though not really on hedge funds.

The 750-employee size limit remains unchanged and is still too large.

It does double the LJSA's 100-hours-per-quarter standard of eligibility for employee tax credits to 200, which is definitely good. (I had suggested 250, but could live with 200.)

It does not mention requiring the Ad Council to advertise in community newspapers, a blown opportunity.

So, on some big-ticket items, it's one-third better than the LJSA, or 40 percent if we split the diff on pink slime and hedge funds. Still should go back to the drawing board on the Ad Council issue. (And on the employee max size issue, of course.) And, a Congresscritter who used to be a newspaper editor shouldn't have missed that, unless Claudia Tenney thinks that's "socialism," which means that how much brainstorming she will do will be problematic.

Update, Oct. 4: NNA supports this because of tax credits to small biz to advertise in local newspapers. Also at its convention, it called on the feds to get various agencies to advertise more in local papers, but did NOT mention, at least by name in a presser I got, the Ad Council.

NNA also supports the Journalism Protection and Competition Act, S 1094, to make large social media companies pay for using newspaper content. I oppose, partially but not entirely based on what's happening in Canada with its social media journalism law.

Riddle me this on Texas newspaper jobs ...

 Why would a pair of weekly papers with known ownership, a website, and contact email addresses, namely Cuero and Yorktown, advertise for what is essentially a general manager position, and do so with a Gmail contact address? And, that known ownership is ... Moser.

So, Hearne is for sale

Dennis Phillips, after the passing of his wife Theresa, reportedly wants to sell it. Understandable in some ways. Interesting only it; info I had mentioned neither Marlin nor Cameron, which I had heard he was also acquiring or going to acquire, but apparently that never happened.

I'm not interested, personally, and wouldn't trust his books.

You know who COULD buy it? And I told him on Twitter. Dennis' old best buddy, Ty Clevenger. Ty would surely like to slow down his life from national-level wingnuttery, now that the Seth Rich conspiracy theory has been legally thrashed and crashed six ways from Sunday.

The anti-First Amendment fascist hell of Marion, Kansas

Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the Marion County Record, speaks in more detail about last week’s police raid on his newspaper, which included seizure of ALL newspaper computers and other items.

The big new takeaway? Besides the story already printed about restaurateur Kari Newell booting Record staff out of a meeting she was having with Congressman Jake LaTurner, and beyond information provided by an anonymous source to both her and the town’s assistant mayor about a previous DUI that might, indeed, have affected her application for a special event liquor permit?

The paper had been investigating information from anonymous sources about newly hired Police Chief Gideon Cody about him possibly leaving his previous policing position rather than face fines and/or demotion over sexual misconduct issues.

That would, of course, be the same person who led and organized this raid, and who would have assisted in getting the warrant for it, and who might have known that federal law requires a subpoena in such cases — and who now claims the Privacy Protection Act’s subpoena requirement does not apply in criminal cases. Per its Facebook statement, there is a HUGE conflict of interest when the Marion PD sets itself up as judge, jury and executioner on deetermining when an alleged loophole on the Privacy Protection Act exists when its own chief is under investigation.

And, Chief Cody (no hiding behind “police department statement,” since you ARE the police department in a small town) is STILL wrong. The PPA notes that when a newspaper or other First Amendment-protected institution faces a warrant without subpoena it is STILL supposed to be given adequate opportunity to file an affidavit of objection. That CLEARLY did not happen.

This is more than just prior restraint, although that’s part of it. It’s also clearly an illegal, authoritarian attempt to uncover anonymous sources.

As a newspaper editor myself, I hope the Record’s federal lawsuit names individuals, not just the city of Marion.

When I grow up, I want to ...

 Will a newspaper that I own to an NPR radio station.

Was looking at a recent issue of the Denton paper.

Kicking out all the frequency runs that say "Vote for Me" for the upcoming Best Of special (I ASSUME they're discounted and that Denton businesses aren't dumb enough or vain enough to pay Bill Patterson full price), and adjusting for the number of pages they ate up as well? Less than 25 percent adhole for a paper in a city of nearly 200K that's cut itself to weekly in print. No wonder he wants to get rid of print entirely. But, remember, there's no paywall with KERA running you, when that finalizes.

And, if I were Pilot Point (not that Dave Lewis needs an excuse to go poaching for legal ads), I would consider doing exactly that if Patterson junks print.

How much does the Texas Press Assn get paid to push PR releases?

 Because this one, just by the first paragraph, is a doozy:

Austin, Texas – Rather than raising venture capital (VC) to finance his tech startup, Michael Ramirez has opted to list his home for sale to generate funds. A marketing SaaS company founded in 2017, Evisio is a search engine optimization platform designed to streamline the SEO process and improve search rankings for users of all skill levels.

Given the full story, to me, re Evisio, this is definitely "buy an ad." In a sense, the story is nice, not just "nice," as a feature story. It's also selection bias — have other people tried this and failed? An investigative news piece might find that out. Even a non-investigative feature piece might find it out by asking him where he got the idea.

And, I hope TPA got its cash up front, rather than a slice of a mortgage.

I use a lot of TPA's guest columns, especially if they're about serious stuff like National Child Abuse Prevention Month. (I use about one-third of Texas 2036's stuff, and I've become less and less interested in what the George Bush Republicans have to say overall.)

Hypocrisy alert, Dan Froomkin world

 Dan Froomkin blared on Thursday the actual headline of "Political reporters encourage DeSantis to cheat."

What's up is that Froomkin is butt-hurt that national stenos aren't distinguishing between DeSantis' PAC and his Super PAC.

If he called it reporter stenography or laziness, I'd be with him. And he's right on the ever-tighter PAC-Super PAC "coordination."

Yes, it's Fox, but Warmonger Joe Biden's Super PAC isn't exactly clean of dark money.

To put it another way? Despite the likes of Ballot-Access News calling out Mother Jones for getting campaign finance law wrong vis-a-vis No Labels, and The Atlantic printing the current electoral cycle's tired, old and certainly false tropes about how a vote for Cornel West is a vote for Donald Trump, I see nothing about stuff like this on Froomkin's site.

And under his headline rubrics, MoJo and The Atlantic are "encouraging the Democratic National Committee to cheat."

In essence, Froomkin strikes me as a one-man band semi-parallel to Media Matters for America or similar, the guy working the refs for the #BlueAnon half of duopoly media on election reporting.

A 33 percent adhole in Denton sounds good, right?

 The June 17-18 Denton Record Chronicle had that on 30 pages, if I remember my ad count and page count correctly.

Just one thing. 70 percent of those were frequency rate ads for businesses saying "Vote for Me" in the Best of Denton or whatever exactly the paper's annual contest is.

Whether a quasi-metro paper, a quasi-metro trying to look like a community paper or a community paper, I've  NEVER seen a paper do this. (I hadn't looked as closely at the Wrecked Chronic on this in previous years, I'll admit.) They HAVE to be on frequency rates as this was at least the third week in a row for them to run, if not more than that.

But, even at a big discount, are you THAT desperate? I guess so.

It may say something about the city of Denton, for both better and worse, as well as the Wrecked Chronic.

That said, throw out all those ads (and the page count they generate) and it was 3 1/4 pages of ads on what would have been either 18 or 20 pages. Even on just 18 pages, that's still below 20 percent.

Of course, if you got rid of running six days worth of comics and various puzzles in a weekly newspaper, you'd have 3 1/4 pages of ads on, say, 12 pages of print. That's almost 30 percent.

Of course, nobody this side of being a true idiot would pay Bill Patterson $2.50 or whatever for that. Nor would KERA be half as interested in acquiring that. (And, why are you anyway, and are you paying attention to the Trib, and between this and WRR are you biting off more than you can chew?)

A&M shoots itself in journalism foot (and again); Trib raises eyebrows on edits

The Aggies wanted to revive their J-school, which went belly-up a few years ago. So, they decided to hire alumna, and Houston native, Kathleen McElroy away from the Tea-Sippers in Austin.

Until the mouth-breathers got word of a Black woman who used to work at the New York Times running Aggie Pride journalism. Then Texas Scorecard started a lynch mob about her alleged DEI-ing. 

And, then, Aggie leadership, starting from the top down in College Station, including, it seems, the Board of Regents, and definitely an interim dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, José Luis Bermúdez, essentially decided to dirk her. The Trib has details at that link. After McElroy agreed to, under some pressure, have the job description changed to make it a non-tenure track position, the Gag Me Aggies changed it AGAIN.

There is stuff missing from the piece, though. As in, didn't the Trib try to get A&M System Chancellor John Sharp (Rethuglican in Democrap drag, still?) to comment? Or College Station President M. Katherine Banks? So what if they no-comment you. Shame 'em, if it does any shaming.

Update, July 21: Banks has resigned! She said "negative press has become a distraction." What a KAREN. And, she's not the only Karen in College Station. John Sharp is, too, because the A&M SYSTEM that released this is his baby:

The A&M System said in a statement that Banks told faculty leaders this week that she took responsibility for the “flawed hiring process.” The statement said “a wave of national publicity” suggested McElroy “was a victim of ‘anti-woke’ hysteria and outside interference in the faculty hiring process.”

Fuck off.

Sadly, as I said on Twitter, there's a possibility the System's regents try to replace Banks with a real wingnut, and given that statement, that would not at all surprise me.

==

New update, July 23: To put it bluntly, per this new Trib story, Banks reportedly is some kind of a racist, overarchingly intervened in the hiring process, and essentially forged, or had someone else forge, a signature. That's all according to Hart Blanton, head of the department of journalism and communications and the person whose signature was forged.

Otherwise, it looks like Bermúdez is kind of being hung out to dry, or else is dumb enough to sign up for that voluntarily. 

The update story also notes that Bermudez is stepping down as interim dean to head back to a teaching-only faculty spot. Sharp et al will likely look for a winger to run the College of Arts and Sciences.

And, per people warning about Texas (and other anti-DEI-ing states) having problems getting new faculty? A shoe is dropping. With that, I note that McElroy added that "nothing has changed" since her own undergrad days in College Station. Shock me.

Update July 21 from a weekly office email newsletter. The A&M Faculty Senate's executive committee says it wants more transparency in the hiring process and mentioned outside interference. I don't know if they're referring to mouthbreathers like the Rudder Association interfering or they're parroting Sharp's news release and claiming "woke groups" interfered. (It IS Sharp's release at bottom line.) The former is surely more likely, and looking at an earlier update I posted, yeah, that's clearly the case. but it could be either one in these days. As for the mouthbreathers, given that their namesake, when A&M prez, moved the Aggies away from an an all-male college, as well as moving it away from a quasi-military institute, he might not agree with them.

Meanwhile, the Chronic has also weighed in, but its piece doesn't even mention Banks, let alone Sharp, and obviously doesn't try to get comment from either one.

Update, Aug. 28: Did this play any factor in the Trib's recent layoffs? I mean, A&M IS a "sponsor."

Update, Sept. 25: The Observer has a short first-person profile from McElroy, back with the Tea Sippers.

The StartleGram is no longer a seven-day daily

 Not in print, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is not

June 23, I saw an issue at one of the Denton library branches. It said: "Friday-Saturday, June 23-24." In other words, the StartleGram now has a pre-weekend bulldog issue. (I know "bulldog" is technically, in the past, a Saturday-Sunday weekender, but it's the word that works here.) And, it's not like it's printing a separate "three-star" for Denton, just 30 miles up the road from Cowtown.

And, even with the two days combined, it was 24 percent ads at 28 pages, not counting paid obits, of which there weren't that many.

That said, as I noted here a month or so ago, it should get rid of its Monday paper, if anything. The most recent one I eyeballed had a SEVEN percent adhole.

Sam Houston is cutting and consolidating the news

 For those in the biz in Tex-ass, they know it's not THAT Sam Houston, but the guy who is owner and publisher of the Hood County News (Granbury) and formerly of both The Springtown Epigraph and Azle News.

Formerly? Yes, per the TPA Messenger, which ran a full column of Sam's straight up, he's merging them into something called the Tri-County Reporter. Springtown is officially in both Parker and Wise counties, and Azle is officially in both Parker and Tarrant. 

He's also cutting Granbury down to weekly while humble-bragging, or just bragging, that it will be as big as a typical StartleGram as a weekly. He already cut Gatesville to a weekly.

As for its brag to be "fastest growing paper in Texas"? I heard this from the horse's mouth, and pulled out old TPA directories.

A couple of years ago, Glen Rose, right down the street from him, had a 20 percent growth spurt. Kyle (Hays County Free Press) has had growth, before major loss. It's called "exurban population sprawl," Sam, as much as anything you personally may be doing right, or correcting what Jerry Tidwell was doing wrong or not at all. I have no doubt that your growth has probably plateaued.

Specifically, as I can't find a 2020 directory, we will have 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023 numbers.

Glen Rose 740 949 941 937

Granbury 6,338 5,573 5,213*  5,580  * = year of Houston's takeover

Kyle 2,861 3,106 4,359 1,978** ** Cindy Slovak-Barton, long-time publisher, retired. The implosion is surely tied to this, but in exactly what ways, I'm not sure. I've done other googling and I'll just leave it there.

Anyway? Sam is only at where HCN was the year before he took over. Glen Rose has plateaued again, but had a 25 percent jump from 2019 to 2021. Kyle jumped 35 percent between 2021 and 2022 after a 10 percent jump between 2019 and 2021. 

Sam? Flat from two years ago. Up 7 percent from last year, giving him the allowance of a full year of work.

Oh, and while we're here, Sam? Azle fell from 2,141 in 2022 to 1,932 in 2023. Springtown had a smaller decline. Gatesville, to give credit, has climbed from 2,351 to 2,769. That's a bit over 20 percent, and a puzzler as to why Sam isn't actually bragging on it. (It was at 2,640 in 2019.)

Anyway, there's the background. Should I remember, and should I be in a position where I can get it, I'll update this in 2024. 

Otherwise, I'm trying to figure out if the TPA really believes all this, or as with all the paid press releases through the Texas Press Service, it's just being a pass-through.

As for him cutting HCN to weekly? Don't get it, especially if you're bragging over increases in print advertising as well as circ (which he has). You're throwing away one of two issues of print ad revenue. And, I suspect those subscribers will baulk if you keep subscription rates the same.

Yes, I know that Louis DeJoy's continued rate hikes are hitting we newspapers hard, even with NNA's continued, and so far futile protests to Congress. (Have you tried Amtrak Joe Biden more yet?) I don't think they're hitting THAT hard, and newsprint, while up, isn't up THAT much.

Were it I, I'd keep both issues, but trim 2-4 pages from each.

And, speaking of that, the "Hood County News expands" in the header isn't true unless the 32 pages Houston plans to run is more than the total of the two previous days. And, I insist you count both issues' classified pages and everything, precisely because you're now eliminating them 1x a week.

Next, is there really that much room for that much more business news? If you're trying to localize national and state economic trends, that's not a bad idea, but I do bits of that already, expanding the monthly sales tax report and other things.

And, beyond that? At least during the school year, if I removed 1x a week of both classified and biz card pages, Wise County and Bowie would still be pushing more than 32 pages a week most weeks. In other words, this is blather. (And, while Wise County may be bigger than Hood County, Montague County most certainly is not.) 

Houston says nothing will change about subscriptions. What about single-copy pricing?Assuming you're currently a buck an issue, you charging $2 for the single one? Or if you're at $1.25, then $2.50? Really?

The rest of the column, to deliberately mash up metaphors? It looks like Houston has rediscovered sliced bread.

Scrutinizing the Epoch Times

Or, as I call it, the E-pooch Times, as in Screw the E-Pooch.

What led to this?

When taking back newspaper issue remainders to a recycling bin, I saw some other paper on top of material already in there. I knew it wasn't the nearby sub-daily, and at first thought it was the Snooze or the StartleGram.

So I pulled it out. Actually pulled two out. 

And, voila! Two issues, from last December, of the E-pooch.

First, the price? $4.50! Thar's gold in them thar suckers that have been born every minute!

Second, page count? 48 for one, 36 for the other, unless I missed a section on it.

Ad hole? A whopping 1/8 of a page that wasn't house or semi-house (Falun Gong classes, or a book about Falun Gong, that might not be under direct control of E-pooch but probably pass on a cut — the Shen Yun dance troupe is direct Falun Gong) on the 48 pager and ZERO in the second.

And, there's no way that many $4.50 suckers exist to pick up the slack. So, what gives?

The NYT in 2020 said the paper — but mainly referring to its online presence, obviously — grew bigly by betting on Trump and Facebook. Betting on Hucksterman would do nothing to boost a print issue. (The NYT missed that it's also bet big on SEO flooding and botting. If most of the top returns on DuckDuckGo are its own, I can bet what Google looks like.)

So, does founder Li Hongzhi have Daddy Warbucks money? Whether he does or not, he IS a fucking nutter:

In 1998 Li Hongzhi stated that he believes alien invaders walk the Earth and that modern science and race-mixing are part of their ploy to overtake humanity, and he has reportedly said that he can walk through walls and make himself invisible.

Even the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi didn't claim to be able to walk through walls like post-resurrection Jesus. 

Moving beyond him, Wiki says Robert Mercer shoveled the funds in from 2012-2016. Interesting that he is shown as disappearing just as the bets on Trump start. Supposedly wealthy Falun Gong practitioners help today, though the NYT piece note that some editorial staff (and former) were upset by the Trump pivot and things connected to it. 

Non-opinion editorial content, especially in the two issues I saw being Christmas week and the week before, seemed to promote old-fashioned small town America and Christmas spirit. Naturally, the Falun Gong cultural-religious DNA of a mashup of Buddhism (karma, the swastika symbol and other things from Buddhism's Indian roots), Daoism (the yin-yang) qigong (the exercises) and feng shui (the energy focuses, which could also be an appeal to Hindu chakras).

Bottom line? A unique version of pink slime self-foisted on top of a new religious movement. Not "news" other than it rerunning wire stories. Features, opinion, and religious propaganda.

Austin Statesman journos on strike

 Gannett New Craphouse (actually it was OLD Craphouse) journos at the Austin Stateless are on strike.  Good luck; in all likelihood you won't get a real win, and certainly not one that's long-term. Take the wage floor. Yes, the folks at the StartleGram got one from McLatchKey, as did Snooze staff from Belo. Know what? That was for full-time new hires only. That means one way around that one, of course. Nor, as far as I know, do such floors have a COLA for inflation. So, 10 years from now? Let alone 20?

Which is worse on single-copy prices?

 Is it CNHI (which currently stands for nothing, or Can't Nothing Help It, or Completely Nugatory Hollowed-out Investment, per its RSA ownership) charging $1.75 for a 14-page weekend edition of the Gainesville Register, one-third of which is syndication material, or it it ...

Cherry (Pit) Road Media, charging $2 for a 12-page midweek (Tuesday, and how long before it becomes nothing more than a semiweekly in print) Sherman Dumpacrap that's less than 15 percent ads?

For context in North Texas, Wise County Messenger and Bowie News, both semiweekly, charge $1 for both issues, and versus Gainesville, the weekender is usually at least 16 pages, basic amounts of syndication materials and one-third ads.

A nothingburger grad section in Mudville?

Er, Gainesville. Six pages broadsheet, 1 3/4 pages of ads, or a bit under 30 percent. Out in the country, on a slightly down year for us, we were still at about 35 percent on 10 pages, and without Gainesville ISD and Gainesville-based (for the most part) ads.

But wait, it gets better.

There was a note on the front page, saying this was supposed to have run in the previous Tuesday's issue (that probably was a day late cuz Memorial Day), an issue that, for whatever reason, I've not yet seen.

So, it was a reprint that went in their June 3-4 weekender.

But? Its date on the folios? May 27. Oops ... guess CNHI's version of Craphouse's pagination hubs screwed that pooch. (I've done that once or twice, but I'm not part of a corporate chain that, despite all the budget cuts, is supposed to be paying for more eyeballs.)

And, wait, that's not all.

A note on the June 3-4 weekender notes production problems, which is why it was reinserted there. And, apparently part of that was not printing one school's graduates. That was 2/3 of a page. But, you can't have partial pages.

So, in reality, that special section was supposed to be 7 pages.

But, of course, as we who came up in the print era of publishing know, you can't have odd numbers of pages.

So, actually, even with the biggest high school in the county, they had an 8-page special with less than 2 full pages of ads, or about 22-23 percent.

Did that get talked about at TPA?

"Public Notices" is now a TPA contest category?

 I didn't notice that on the Better Newspaper Contest entry form but TPA's Winner's Circle has it listed.

Hope it isn't counted toward the Sweepstakes. TPA dropping Special Sections from counting was a real puzzler.

Side note about CNHI's continued decline in circulation at its papers, even as compared to the general slump that most papers have?

Weatherford is in the same level of semiweeklies as Taylor, a level below Nac, and two levels below Lufkin, Granbury/Hood County and Decatur/Wise County.

There is no DeJoy in the NNA with the postal rate increases

 If only Postmaster General Louis DeJoy actually improved service with the higher rates. If only Congress listened to somebody besides him. If only Biden would replace him — remember when he was thought of as a Trump toady?

From the National Newspaper Association:

National Newspaper Association criticizes 
relentless postage rate increases
 

A House Committee that oversees the U.S. Postal Service today received a statement from the National Newspaper Association and others in a broad coalition of mailing and package shipping groups that criticizes the twice-yearly postage increases implemented by USPS. 
 
The Coalition for a 21^st Century Postal Service (C21), a group to which NNA has belonged since C21’s founding, issued a statement for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in response to a May oversight hearing in which only Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was invited to testify.  C21 represents organizations that amass more than $1.6 trillion in annual sales from mailing-related activities, which amounts to about 5% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product.
 
The Postal Service’s Delivering for America plan has driven total increases in Periodicals postage of around 35% since January 2021.  Any good news from the plan has been overshadowed, C21 told Congress, by “relentless, twice-yearly, postage rate increases endangering the Postal Service’s mail business and destructive to small and medium-sized businesses and consumers often considered the backbone of American employment.”

Meanwhile, publishers and other mailers have seen declines in postal productivity, slower mail and rising concerns about the sustainability of universal postal service.
 
Although the USPS plan, known as the DFA, has been in effect since 2021, this year’s hearing was the first attempt at oversight conducted by a Congressional committee.  The C21 coalition noted that the Postal Regulatory Commission, which has little power over USPS operations, had allowed the major rate increases while being able to exercise little influence over productivity declines.  C21 called for Congress to re-examine the regulators’ mission.
 
“NNA has not been alone in expressing anxiety over the future of USPS,” NNA Chair John Galer, publisher of The Journal-News in Hillsboro, Illinois, said. “At the root of the problem is the reluctance of Congress to take responsibility for its role in USPS’s current situation. We have rising rates, declining service and a postal system that is now trying to compete with private package delivery services while it puts its core mail function on the back burner. We have been experiencing the consequences of flaws in the DFA for two years now.  It is time for Congress to get back into the postal reform game.”

 

The Fort Worth StartleGram sinks further on ads

 I was grokking a couple of issues recently at the Denton library.

Monday, May 8? A 22-page paper. Not bad on editorial content for a Monday paper in today's world, I guess.

Ads?

GODAWFUL. Even counting the paucity of obits as paid adhole? It was SEVEN PERCENT!!!!

And, yes, Mondays are slow.

Wednesday, May 10? A 28-page. And, a whopping 15 PERCENT! And, I didn't see any grocery store circulars inside. (That could be for a variety of reasons, I guess.)

Seriously?

On Mondays? If the adhole is even close to that regularly, even on a relatively small paper? Isn't it time to kill the Monday paper? I mean, can that be making money or even close to it?

And, on the paucity of obits? Have they jacked their prices that much?

Good luck, starting journos in the future who reportedly will start at $50K. None of you are being hired.

Yeah, should be a good time at the TPA convention

Lemme see, keynote speakers include, in a publishers' Q&A roundtable:

Lisa Chappell, a CNHI publisher. Really? Representative of a chain as bad as hedge-fund ones, but not even having that excuse, to riff on a New Republic piece from two years ago. What is she going to talk about? "How to commit the appearance if not the actuality of pension fraud"?

Bill Patterson of the Denton Wrecked Chronic. Is he going to talk on the topic of: "Find the NPR station in your town"? Or maybe elaborate, on dead trees being killed for useless print filler, on how his paper is like a CNHI one?

Leonard Woolsey of the Galveston News. His topic might be: "How to sic a reporter on another reporter i the name of PR, not facts."

And, among the sponsors? The Column organization that is allegedly helping TPA member papers by ultimately helping itself.

The pseudoscience-driven marketing #fails of New Mexico mag PLUS copyediting fails

I understand that, as an official state magazine, they're trying to drive tourism to the state. I still don't have to accept pseudoscience used to promote The State Different (riffing on Fanta Se as The City Different, capital of The Land of Disenchantment).

They had two new entries in the "service" of pseudoscience, in their March issue.

First, in the story "Ancient Enigmas," about pueblitos (of which I'd already read plenty by David Roberts), there's:

“We emerged as one people,” says (Timothy C. Begay, cultural specialist with the Navajo Nation Heritage and Historic Preservation Department) of all the tribes that occupied the Four Corners. “We were one culture until Chaco fell. It was one voice, one people, one belief. We have sacred places that we still visit all over this area. If we came across the Bering Strait, why don’t we have sacred places in Canada and Asia?”

OK, I know any traditionalist Indian is going to say that. No need for the author to abet with this:

The story melds with the tribe’s longer-lived sense of its history in the area, a history centuries older than archaeologists can prove. The scientific research points to Athabaskan people (Diné and N’dé, or Apache) traveling across the Bering Strait and working their way down to the Southwest around the 1400s. The Diné say they were here far earlier, emerging near a lake in southwestern Colorado, and that First Man and First Woman settled at Gobernador Knob, a sacred mountain south of Navajo Lake. Begay says his people have always been here, something that future archaeology may yet confirm.

Oy.

Begay is wrong in two ways. First, the Diné have not always been there, and as far as sacred sites, I'm sure your "cousins" in northern Alberta and northeastern British Columbia have them in plenty. He's also wrong in that, no, the Navajos didn't emerge with other peoples. This, to go woke on the woke, is just another installment in Navajo cultural appropriation of Pueblo traditions and religion. 

Then, in the piece "Abiquiu State of Mind," we have the tagline of author Molly Boyle:

Molly Boyle thinks even the truest atheist can have a spiritual encounter in Abiquiu ...

Tied to the end of the third-to-last paragraph of the body copy:

I’ve had metaphysical experiences during fireside suppers in campgrounds that line the Río Chama along Forest Road 151, and while winding through the wooden Stations of the Cross on an alternate path toward the Monastery of Christ in the Desert.

Kind of like the "To the Atheist" chapter in the AA book, eh?

Ms. Boyle may be an atheist in the narrow sense, like countless millions of Theravada Buddhists. But, as it's usually used in the modern West, to imply rejection of metaphyiscal entities? She isn't, if she's claiming to be one, and if she thinks a "spiritual encounter" should include metaphysics, even for atheists, like the AA chapter, she's patronizing as hell.

And, years back, there was Roswell. In reality, from the best we can piece it together, it doesn't appear Mack Brazel ever called it a flying saucer. And, there's no indication the military forced a cover story on him of a weather balloon. That said, the story more than redeemed itself by interviewing Ben Radford.

Having grown up at the edge of the Big Rez, having read a lot about the Anasazi and a fair amount about the Navajo, and having been to Roswell as an adult more than once, including one free trip (no way I'd pay) to the UFO museum, I know this is marketing. And blech marketing when it engages in the perpetuation of pseudoscience.

==

The copyediting fail? I was belatedly looking at my March issue yesterday. It's a standard 8 1/2 x 11 size magazine. Knock off 1/2 inch or so on both sides and that's 7 1/2 inches wide on the horizontal, maybe a bit more..

Who the hell had the bright idea of flowing that as 6-column text, as was done in parts of the feature story on Carlsbad Caverns? And worse, and probably necessitated by that, running rules that look to be a full 1-point wide between the columns. That and gutters knock out another full inch or so in total. So, we've got 6 1-inch and change wide columns. It's distracting reading, but most people will still gush over it.

The special travel guide advertising pages, at 5 columns, no rules, aren't horrible. But, even that's pushing it.

NO way to run a railroad or print a newspaper

 The "this is no way to run a railroad" comes from an old-school executive editor at a newspaper group I was at many moons ago. Unfortunately, he never told that to his boss, the owner and publisher of the group, who should have known better himself, but I digress.

The second half of the saying is courtesy my favorite area CNHI whipping boy.

It had a special section Tuesday for its Medal of Honor weekend.

And, were I about one-third of the advertisers in the section, I'd want my money back.

Either a bunch of ads were PDFed in low resolution, or, if the page-building work was some combination of local and CNHI's nearest printing press in Palestine, stuff wasn't embedded.

In either case, some serious pixelation/bitmapping. You know, the typical stuff, like fonts with jagged straight-line edges, that look pretty bad at 36 point or bigger.

If it were two ads instead of one, understandable. Three, even, halfway understandable.

But, I counted one FULL page ad (color, too), four half-pagers and one quarter-pager that definitely were bad and would have been noticeable to a journalist layperson reader. Some smaller ads were iffy, but probably not noticeable to others. My guess? If this was laid out remotely, it was from last year's similar special section, with unembedded ads.

Do we really need another newspaper "incubator"?

 By that, I mean a "support" company designed either to help start-ups, especially "HUB" start-ups, or else one to keep non-chain small newspapers already in existence from imploding.

We've got several of those already, don't we?

Well, Mike Orren from Pegasus News (old personal acquaintance) thinks we need another. So, News Oasis.

Here's a fuller description on LinkedIn:

As many know, I took a six-month sabbatical from the news biz to focus on family health matters. I also really unplugged in order to get a reset, in what I called my "halftime break."

I mostly stuck to that, but over the last few months, I've been working on a new startup, one that I'm taking out of stealth mode with this post.

News Oasis is a company dedicated to eradicating true news deserts in the U.S. within a decade. To us, that means any community that has no one covering local government and schools. By that definition, there are upwards of 4,000 such communities. We will not compete with any existing news operation that is already filling a gap.

We intend to do this with a hub-and-spoke model. The hub is a centralized, but geographically distributed home office covering editing, design, product and business development. The spokes will be small owned-and-operated community sites pre-funded by local philanthropy and sponsorship. The size of the local staff will be determined by community support.

This is early stage, with a lot going on behind the scenes. We're fundraising; building out product models; and selecting our alpha markets with an eye towards launching late this year or early next.

Sounds interesting, but what makes it different from others?

What does not make it different from others is that it's peddling pagination and other services. It otherwise appears to be for start-ups, or not-yet-started-ups. More on its About page.

As for $$$, can you really fund a start-up on $150K a year and have it launch with that as a turnkey?  The "About" mentions "a couple of reporters" and "incremental costs." Are you paying an ads person straight commission? Even then, there's a cut of ad sales. Office manager? Even in smaller areas, you're near $150K right there. Not discussed? Utilities, building rent and more. Not discussed? News Oasis' cut for pagination, etc. And, if the word pagination is being used, we're talking print, right? Not discussed is paper and ink costs, printing press fees, and postal.

I think $250K is closer to reality than $150.

And, beyond that, given that Orren, a dozen years ago, uncritically slurped up on non-convicted felon Joey Dauben, I'm not sure I'd fully trust his editorial judgment either.

Update, Aug. 28: Nieman Lab writes about grants to newspapers. It notes that, despite grantmakers' stated preferences for nonprofits, more of their money still goes to for-profits. It also notes that conflict of interest issues are rising. And, Dick Tofel notes that more money is going to, well, folks like "field building organizations," which to put it more bluntly, probably include "incubators" like the one created of Orren.

Craphouse (new Gannett) really does suck

 I think most of us knew that already, but at Nieman Lab, Joshua Benton whlps out the numbers on circulation decline for 2018-22.

First, yes, COVID has accelerated problems at struggling big chains. But? Not like this, as Josh compares Craphouse to non-Craphouse medium and large regional dailies.

The real issue is that, even by modern media merger standards, the two companies took on a lot of debt, and bad debt.

That said, per one of the links in Joshua's story, did Gannett and Craphouse really have to merge after Alden's failed takeover? Probably each one could have acquired some smaller company instead. But, both — even though Gatehouse has vulture capital behind it, even if not quite as rapacious as Alden — were likely still worried about being acquired themselves.

Back in 2017, Ken Doctor talked about the "Gatehouse method" and added that he thought there wouldn't be much news left in 2022.

That said, the detritus is even worse.

Trying to find dimes under the couch cushions to service that debt, Craphouse/Gannett is now selling more and more of those merged papers. Here in Tex-ass, the most willing buyer is CherryRoad, which makes Craphouse look almost like a newspaper saint, as I told Josh. 

I wouldn't be surprised if they chase the craptacular southern New Mexico newspapers next. (Nothing I see about CherryRoad says they would also take El Paso.)

In other places, like Lafayette, Louisiana, as Josh notes, other companies are expanding to replace dying husks. In yet others, like Springfield, Missouri, digital-first or digital-only startups are launching.

Salinas should be next, if it isn't already. The Craphouse/new Gannett paper there has ZERO paid editorial staff, per this LA Times piece.

RIP Texas Observer? Not right now, but?

Or so it seemed, as the Texas Democracy Foundation, which runs the Observer, had announced it was going to pull the plug. However, as for now, it's survived the executioner's ax. See below for details.

That said, as I've said at my main blog in the past, editorially, while they've had some great stuff in recent years, more than once, they've made me say that once again, Bernard Rapoport is turning over in his grave.

He might be turning over about non-editorial issues, either.

When you're giving away the store online, you can't afford to not take ads as a purity symbol. Dunno about the true lefties of Counterpunch, but I do know the left-liberals of The Nation take ads. And, because it's relevant to the Observer perhaps spouting purity test language, I'm going to quote from The Nation's advertising policy:

We accept it not to further the views of The Nation but to help pay the costs of publishing. We start, therefore, with the presumption that we will accept advertising even if the views expressed are repugnant to those of the editors. The only limits are those that grow out of our interest in assuring that the advertising does not impede our use of the editorial columns of The Nation to say what we want.

There you go. Period and end of story. 

(Update, March 29, 2024: In fact, The Nation now has a Javascript screen, like many newspapers, saying: We see you have an ad-blocker on. Please disable it to continue reading our articles.)

Well, no, not end of story. Counterpunch paywalls its bigger self-produced stories, and it's to the left of the Observer (which The Nation may not be). Are you going to out-purity it, too?

With that, it should be no surprise, per the Trib's story, that the shuttering itself is also being mismanaged. Kudos to Robert Frump for standing up for doing things right. BS on Laura Hernandez Holmes for her PR shtick; that said, given her Beto connections, she'll make a Peter Principle upward fail.

And, if things were this bad, why were they advertising open position(s) less than a year ago?

Because turmoil?

Boy, that's discussed in the Trib piece. A magazine devoted to racial justice issues, among other things, running off multiple American Indian staffers has got problems. Andrea Grimes has a bit more on that, as part of a much longer piece that chides the mag for looking backward, not forward.

Are they? Bernard's granddaughter Abby is reported as clashing with Tristan Ahtone before resigning herself as board chair.

The Observer's editorial staff is reportedly fighting back. But, from the story there, I don't think this will work. And, it's probably time to pull the plug.

Former (resigned as part of all the turmoil of the last couple years) fundraising head James Canup has started a GoFundMe. But, as i said on Twitter? Unless they either start accepting ads, or paywalling at least some online content (even if that meant I couldn't read it), I'm not pounding sand down a rathole.

That said, enough other people DID pound sand, or else ignored that they were trying to fill in a rathole. In a new story, the Trib says they got over $300K. (They were at just over $200K Tuesday evening.) 

Back to the rathole, though.

The closure announcement was handled badly both for its suddenness and for the "ONE WEEK LEFT" angle as well. Given everything else noted up above, though, that bad handling, while sad, is not surprising in any way.

As for the GoFundMe raising enough to more than double the mag's reserves?

Yes, but.

That's a one-off. 

Why couldn't Canup get these types of donations before he became the "former" head of fundraising? And, can a GoFundMe be set up to allow "exit interview" type comments? As in "here's why I'm donating," or even more, "why didn't I donate before"? If not, why isn't the website set up for polling or other feedback? I mean, I had no idea things were this bad. I'm sure people who are more inside baseball on Texas Politics than me may have known something, and certainly knew the general turmoil but .... (The Trib's update story lists him as "former," still, and also notes Hernandez Holmes is still leaving the board Friday.)

If you don't have these "exit interviews" or website feedback? I'm not a development director, but I know a lot of this will be one-off donations, otherwise.

And, per the top link? You need more than that.

The Trib notes that last year's Molly awards dinner only raked half of what it used to. And, the Emerson Collective of Laurene Powell Jobs cutting off the pipeline in 2021? In terms of both proactive budget cutting and proactive searches for major replacements, what was or was not done? We KNOW that no website paywalls, no pay charges on email newsletters, and no advertising sales were done.

And, the Observer wasn't the only media site where Jobs either cut back on, or else eliminated totally, her benefice. But, if I remember rightly, there were warning signs before that, and in general, indications that she saw her money as incubator or seed money as much as anything.

More seeming evidence of bad management:

Also that month [October 2022], the Observer received what seemed like a lifeline: a $1 million pledge by the Tejemos Foundation, set up by Greg Wooldridge, a retired investor, and Lynne Dobson, a philanthropist and photojournalist whose family started Whataburger. The couple disbursed $400,000 of the gift soon after, and later asked the magazine for documentation of matching funds and other efforts in order to receive the remaining $600,000, some of which would have gone to cover public relations, marketing and other vital business operations that had been long neglected.

Seriously. It's pounding money down a rathole to give them money right now. They probably need a few new board members, too. But, this is probably all going to be too late. 

In the "we're still alive for now" story, the Trib cites Canup:

“The long-standing issues at the Observer, regardless of the personalities who fill the org chart, are structural,” Canup said in an interview before the board reversed its decision. “The board of the Texas Observer has always been informal in its operations. It’s easy for a sense of distrust to develop between the board and the staff, and similarly between the small business and editorial sides of the publication.”

There you go.

And, if it's not? If the GoFundMe staves off destruction for a few months, per everything above, that's not necessarily a good thing.

Further bad management? Hernandez Holmes said significant money had been spent in the past few months without board authorization. Frump "pled guilty," both of these in the update story.

And also there? If she's claiming this:

“My intent in voting for layoffs and hiatus was never about closing down the publication,” she said. “The actions I took as board president were intended to allow space for the Observer to be reconstituted, and reimagined in a more sustainable form, so as to develop a strong business model that could adapt to an ever-evolving media landscape.”

She needs to stay gone. That's either a lie or hugely bad management.

Rapoport notes the one-off issue of the GoFundMe:

“Can those thousands of people sustain support — not just this one big push, but over and over again, because that’s what it’s going to need?” she said. “That’s the million-dollar question.”

I agree.

And, again, nobody's talking about running paid advertising. Nobody's talking about paywalling the website.

Rathole.

==

I very much don't want it to die. But, I want it to REALLY fix itself. It's kind of like the Green Party in that way. It represents, overall, some good ideas (though voter registration and third-party issues is one thing I have NEVER seen the Observer discussed), but it's been run horribly for a decade or more.

Speaking of "Green," the Observer needs to emulate Counterpunch, not The Nation, in that way, and when it writes about specifically political issues, not go down the road of duopoly tribalism. 

==

Update: Shock me that other than a block-quote from Molly Ivins, John Nichols at the advertising-accepting The Nation doesn't mention the Texas Observer shooting itself in the foot with no-ads purity test.

Also shock me that Gabe Arana, in HIS Nation piece referencinng Nichols, ALSO doesn't mention it. And that he gets hypocritical with this:

For those of us at the helm of progressive media, the question now is the same as it has been since Google and Facebook came along and stole all of our advertising money: How do we sustain a fiercely independent press in the age of the Internet?

Dood, if you chose not to sell ads, Facebook and Google stole nothing.

==

Update, March 19, 2024: Did they get their requested $317K by the end of last year, per my one comment? They got enough to stay open, but not a lot more, I will gather. More later.

Meanwhile, editorially? They continue to shoot themselves in the foot at times, at least from this leftist-of-sorts perspective.

And, at the one-year mark, the turmoil and the financial struggles are ongoing.

The Fort Worth StartleGram strike

 An insider writes about the process for the Texas Observer. Interestingly, at other McLatchKey papers, columnists are certified/certifiable as union members. At the StartleGram, not so much. Wondering if Bud Kennedy wrote a column about this.

Getting a shift in semiweekly press days wrong, or half-assed

 I understand if you're a semiweekly and your pub days have to be Tuesday and Friday because that's when the press can fit you in, and bigger semiweeklies, or a daily or two, whether from your own ownership group or elsewhere, have first call.

Wednesday and Saturday are preferred, of course.

So, why would your parent company shift your Friday paper to Saturday, for getting Friday sports in the paper, although I think this still only gives them a Friday daytime press deadline, but not also adjust your Tuesday?

Who knows, with my favorite bad but not owned by a hedge fund chain.

Of course, other factors involved include press deadlines and more.

Simone Carter's back

 She's back at the Dallas Observer as of late January, that is.

No explanation on either her Muck Rack or her Twitter of her 4 1/2 month absence, blogged about here when she left last fall, or her return.

CherryRoad Media gutting more newspapers

 Cherry Road, about whom I've blogged before for its toxic wasteland job on the Sherman Dumpacrap, even twice, and before that, about it in general, is fixing to do the same to the Brownwood Bulletin and the Waxahachie Daily Light.

Per the Texas Press Association Messenger, it's cut print runs at both papers (neither of which I knew it owned) from triweekly to weekly.

"LOVE" this indirect quote comment by Jeremy Gulban, who has the title of publisher of CherryRoad Media (as in, really, only one publisher for ALL the newspapers you own? that's crap right there):

He added the frequency and delivery changes are directly related to economic and digital realities that make the continuiation of a daily paper increasingly difficult.

Puleeze! Triweekly papers have traditionally been considered non-daily, therefore neither of these was a daily before you cut the print runs. You'll even find that officially listed in some states' law codes. With that said, I'll have to see if they're cutting print days at the Dumpacrap, too.

And, while I'm here, TPA staff, next time somebody like this makes a claim like that?  PLEASE feel free to add an editor's note at the end explaining what a daily paper has traditionally been.

While I'm also here, I know the Daily Slight had formerly been owned by ACM, which sold itself off years ago to old Craphouse. Wiki still listed the Bulletin as being owned by Craphouse, aka new Gannett, so must have been sold recently. (If that's not going from frying pan to fire, or from craphouse to crappier house.) But, if you're a newspaper corporation, please show that you care about the future of newspapers by not selling to CherryRoad when you do sell. And, if you're truly family-owned, please resist if you can.