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.)