A new newspaper giant in the making?

 The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story on the dreams of David Hoffmann.

It notes he's the founder of Hoffmann Media. It adds that he owns 8.7 percent of Lee Enterprises, whose flagship is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and which also owns a number of medium and larger dailies/former print dailies. That includes the Waco Tribune and the Bryan-College Station Eagle here in Texas. He also, just disclosed by him, has 5 percent of the Dallas Morning News' parent.

And, he wants to get this all combined.

He's already bought one small regional cluster off Lee, and said he's had some friendly talks with them. He's not yet talked with Belo. I think they'd be hesitant, but who knows?

On Lee, the story continues that he's only No. 2, apparently. An Indian investor last year acquired more than 10 percent, and the company adopted a poison pill in response.

Hoffmann said he thinks the American newspaper industry is undervalued. He also said any acquisition attempts would be non-hostile.

Beyond that, it looks audacious. Hoffmann Media is a bunch of nondaily and small daily papers, as in stuff primarily nondaily in print before COVID.

Besides the Post-Dispatch, Lee's papers include the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, Sioux City, Council Bluffs and Davenport in Iowa, the Omaha Herald and Lincoln Journal Star in Nebraska, Buffalo News, Tulsa World, etc, etc. Unless Hoffmann has a LOT of money elsewhere, or some VERY friendly banksters, how does he pull this off? Per Forbes, he's got a real estate mini-empire, and he's from near St. Louis, so a personal interest in Lee's top newspapers. I think he'd have to do some liquidation of his real estate assets as part of such a move.

Schizophrenia at the Texas Trib: Creating local newsrooms after previous layoffs

 The Trib has announced it will:

(C)reate, partner or merge with local, community-based newrooms that inform residents more deeply about their communities. We’ll start this effort in Waco by creating a new local newsroom, which we anticipate will launch in early 2025, followed by an Austin newsroom. The models for these newsrooms won’t be the same, because the needs of our different communities aren’t the same. In some places, we’ll create new newsrooms. In others, we will build newsrooms based on strategic partnerships with other outlets to leverage existing resources that can provide a broader and stronger news product. If there’s an opportunity to acquire a news outlet in transition and build on its work in support of a community, we will do that.

Interesting.

We know the Austin Stateless under Craphouse sucks. Why don't you just buy it instead?

Waco? The Trib under Lee Enterprises, after Warren Buffett's handoff, is struggling but not totally crap.

That said, this later part:

We are excited that the American Journalism Project has made a $2.75 million investment to support the transformation of our business model, as well as our revenue generation capabilities in both Waco and Austin.

Why isn't the AJP working directly in those cities? How much of a cut does the Trib and its Goddam Sachs backgrounded CEO get?

And, didn't you lay off people just a year ago?

Another fail at the Gainesville Register

 This time, it's the Gainesville (Texas) Register actually having local news of importance, but burying it in print.

The town of 16,000 had a shooting late last week. They had a story about it in the Tuesday, Nov. 5, print edition — and buried it on page 3. On the top spread in front, they ran something about local polling places and the election. That's fine. On a two-column, or wide one-colum, rail at the right? They ran something either from CNHI Texas-wide, or else the Texas Trib, about election security. And ran it all the way down the page. (An oversized football photo from one of the smaller schools in the county, not Gainesville, and a brief blurb about the end of the regular season in high school football coming up filled the four left columns of the rest of the front page).

That's NOT fine. The shooting had the additional angle of being a dispute between two brothers that boiled over. I'm not totally of the "if it bleeds, it leads," but that should have been on the front page.

It's also buried on the website. As of Thursday afternoon, when I was writing this, it was in the "most popular" tab at bottom right. But, not on the top half of the website at all. The only local "article" is raw numbers from local voting and it's not clearly identified as local.

CNHI sucks. It sucks so much it has one editor over this paper, Weatherford and Cleburne (maybe Greenville will fire its current editor eventually and expand this) who made that decision. Yeah, they're stretched thin, but it was still a dumb decision.

Texas Tribune: How to write stereotyped religious journalism

The Texas Tribune recently offered a pointed comparison-contrast to Tim Dunn's political-religious quasi theocratic compound just down the road, by profiling Connection Christian Church in Odessa, Texas. Here's co-pastor Dawn Weaks: 

"Christian Nationalism is an example of this kind of arrogance parading as Christianity,” she said. “There is nothing Jesus-like about that."

That's the bottom line.

All very good so far.

The church, a member of the Disciples of Christ, has a history far beyond the Dunns' independent church. And, that itself is important. That said, the Trib perpetuates some stereotypes. I lived in Hobbs for a little less than two years, and nobody asked me my religion at H-E-B. That said, I didn't introduce myself to others. (I still think it's a stereotype or cliché; I'm sure that even when two strangers introduce themselves, it comes up far less than 100 percent and probably less than 75 percent. Maybe less than 50 percent, which definitely makes it stereotype, not generalization.)

The story is nowhere near perfect. It's got clichés or beyond, not limited to the above.

There's also a BIG contextual failure on this:

This year, Pew Research reported that 80% of Americans believe religion is losing influence in American life. And nearly half of those who say religion is losing influence said it is bad for society.

That means, as I told the Trib and Nic Garcia on Twitter, that MORE than half find such change either a neutral or to the good, counting "no opinion" and "don't know" as "neutral." (The Trib also didn't link to the Pew piece, a big, BIG no-no in today's world.)

In fairness, it later cites this from the same survey:

In the same survey, less than a third, 27%, of white Evangelical Protestants wanted Christianity declared the official national religion.

While that's not the same as "losing influence," it does offer some framing. But, it's a further one-third the story down. In addition? NO URL for the Pew story. THAT's not acceptable.

And, reporter Nic Garcia's not a newbie. These things aren't excusable.

Beyond that, since Texas Christian University IS AFFILIATED with the Disciples of Christ, beyond and before running a disclaimer at the end, why is there no profile of the denomination? Since this is about two pastors from the denomination, where is a mention of, let alone a discussion of, Brite Divinity School?

Metric Media is now pretending to be Catholic Tribune

 Yes, Metric Media, the king of the pink slime hill, and the Timpone Brothers, are hard at it. Actually, these "Catholic" journals, reports Pro Publica, started in 2020. But, per the story, they appear to have really ramped up this year.

Sadly, as PP notes, the Timpones have the backing of nutbar billionaire Peter Uehlein, owner of the Uline box and packaging company with the environmentally unfriendly doorstop catalogues.