Take a pass on Wick Communications

A couple of blog posts ago, I asked, rhetorically, "How do you run a daily paper without an AP wire?"

As I interviewed at said paper, and as it hasn't hired me, I'm going to "decloak" that previous blog post and let you read in detail who I was talking about.

Obviously, the parent company is Wick Communications. Below, most the rest of that old post, paper locations revealed.

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I'm not talking a five-day daily, where that wouldn't be that hard.

I'm talking six- and seven-day dailies, where it would be, unless you tighten page count, drop a day of the week or both.

I recently interviewed to be managing editor of the Montrose Press. Wick's stable includes one seven-day daily, one that ... sounds like was a seven-day and now it's now six-day and is being delivered by USPS, interestingly and five or six other six-day dailies, all 3,000 circ or above.

Demographic background? Montrose, Colorado is about 19K. County is 42K. Montrose was "discovered" and presumably "Californicated" in the 2000-2005 period. City pop jumped from 13K to 19K. Froze after the Great Recession, and interestingly, has stayed frozen since; the Californication was a one-off.

Note: I'm going to drop some new updates in here based on a close direct comp with the Gainesville (Texas) Daily (until COVID, in print) Register. Gainesville is 16K in a county of 40K.

Page run? 12-14 a day, I was told, on weekdays. Dunno about the weekender. Since, interestingly, it's a 6 day AM, not PM, there isn't a weekender, to be technical. It's Tuesday-Sunday.

Gainesville, pre-COVID, was a five-day daily in print. Usually 8 pages Tuesday and Wednesday; 12 on Thursday, IIRC, because it still (WHY?) ran weekly TV guide in print. Then 10 Friday and 12, IIRC, weekender.

So, Montrose, with no Colorado equivalent of something as wide as the Texas Tribune? Even though it was more of a regional center than Gainesville (which is only 30 miles from Denton)? Two pages a day too many, arguably, even WITH the wire. Definitely needed to cut two without it, and pre-COVID, cut a day of the week, probably.

Company policy is to can the AP wire. Not as in "someday," but "we're doing it." Related to that is the usual "digital first" etc. blather. Which is what it is.

First, they don't have a separate online-only subscription. I know a lot of smaller dailies do a forced combo buy of print plus digital but if you're really digital first, that itself is bullshit. (That said, assuming they use Blox as their website content platform, I don't know how easy it is to set Blox up to do that. On the other hand, given that Blox comes from Lee Enterprises, owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, surely it's doable.)

So, do you cut a day a week? Same sked but cut two pages a day? IMO, yes, that second option at a minimum. Filling 12-14 pages in a county of less than 50K without a wire and typical smaller six-day editorial staff? Uhhhhhh ...

See above. Tuesday-"weekend" five-day daily. Say, 10 pages on Tuesday, 12 on Wednesday with it being shopper flier day. Back to 10 on Thursday. Then 12 on Friday with weekend sports previews and 12 or 14 on weekend.

There are ways around this. One can either cut two pages a day, or one day a week. I speak from personal knowledge.

My current six-day baby is in a town 3/4 the size and a county 4/5 the size of the one at which I interviewed. At my previous semiweekly, the nearest daily was a small seven-day in a town and county both half again as big as Montrose.

My current six-day runs 10 pages on weekdays. On average, 1/2-3/4 a page a day of news, maybe a bit more, and 1/4-1/2 of sports is wire. That seven-day, to my best memory, usually ran 12 on Mondays, 14-16 the next four and Saturdays. It ran one full page or bit more a day of news wire and probably 1/2-3/4 day of sports wire.

So, yes, unless one wants to use cheapie brief sites like State Point, or canned product-placement copy from a place like NAPS, or third, hope your state extension office has plenty of non-ag consumer news, etc., cutting two pages a day is ... a no-brainer.

It's even more a no-brainer with the Trump paper tariffs, which also offer said company the perfect excuse to cut either two pages a day or one day a week, whichever is deemed better.

"Dear Readers: Due to the ongoing Trump tariffs, and their threat to the profitability of this newspaper, we have had to make some painful decisions.

"One of them is cutting two pages of the paper each day.

"In order to keep the same amount of local content as before, we are getting rid of our Associated Press service. Given that we are a community newspaper, and we only ran selected items from the Associated Press in the past, and will look for other sources for state of Colorado and Four Corners news outside the AP, we think this is the best way to provide the best community news content to you our readers."

Now, that said, if your state press association doesn't have at least a weekly roundup column, while national wire might not be a biggie, some state news, especially in-depth state lege coverage while it's in session, to me is de rigeur. That's even more the case if you're running a seven-day daily and there's a bigger seven-day daily next county over. That's true of Montrose and the Colorado press association, or Wick's core in Arizona. (more on that below.)

On the other hand, in a location like Montrose, dumping the wire might not be the smartest. Are the Californicators going to be as interested in a paper without state wire? Or regional Western news? If they can read a header and first 100 words of local news on your website, you may lose them. I don't know. (Remember, no wire means no wire on web as well as print.)

See note above about no Colorado equivalent to the Texas Tribune.

Anyway, with papers bigger than Montrose either narrowing their web on the pages, cutting pages or cutting staff because of the newsprint tariffs (which Congressional bills going nowhere won't stop if they're going nowhere), keeping the same page count without a wire is simply stupid.

That said, the parent company doesn't seem brilliant.

Wick's flagship is Sierra Vista, Arizona, home of Fort Huachuca. It has a six-day daily at Lake Havasu, but that's far away. Much closer, it has weeklies and a semiweekly in SE Arizona; it and a presumably LARGE weekly in a town of 15K are in what should be a hub relationship with Sierra Vista; specifically, Nogales is the semi-weekly in a town of over 20,000 and Douglas is a large weekly.

But, a much bigger seven-day daily, Tucson's Arizona Daily Star, is 75 miles away. If I were it, I might roll the dice and start trying to poach subscribers at the edge Sierra Vista radius. If I really wanted to roll the dice, I might figure that Cochise County is big enough for me to open a bureau (one-person) there. (Douglas is also there; Nogales is due south of Tucson in Santa Cruz County and actually as close to Tucson as to Sierra Vista in miles, and shorter in drive time.) I might add an ad person full-time in Sierra Vista, too. Maybe even a regional sectional 1x or 2x a week. Douglas should be a semiweekly, IMO, and old jokes aside, why Nogales isn't a triweekly, if not a five-day daily, no idea. Santa Cruz County is almost 50K. If the Arizona Daily Star pushed hard enough, it could probably blow up that whole house of cards.

With Sierra Vista a military town, cutting sports wire as well as news wire? My guess would be that's going to definitely hurt print circulation.

(I also saw nothing about Spanish-language papers in Wick's stable; that SHOULD be a no-brainer. Get one reporter who can write some Spanish and translate English and have them do a semi-weekly that combines material from all three of those papers. If Nogales and/or Douglas are deemed too heavily Hispanic and/or too poor to expand English-language papers, to me, that seems a no-brainer that probably should have been done long ago. If someone else has a Hispanic paper in either locale, or Sierra Vista, Wick should have bought it long ago.)

And, that gets to one way you can get rid of the wire more easily — clustering. Not necessarily immediately next door, but increased clustering within a state. That lets you do a state-level version of Gannett's state-by-state daily news roundup. Wick is actually in position to do this in Arizona. With one or two buys in either North or South Dakota, or both, it could do it in one or both of those states, especially since it has the South Dakota capital paper in Pierre.

But ... I doubt Wick is that forward thinking, even though it's in a position to do so in one place.

And, not to be too immodest, but ... I could be a great newspaper company consultant. Companies would just have to pay me to tell them at times that I think they've been stupid, then challenge them to tell me why I'm wrong.

Also, at least one paper in the chain doesn't include special sections for subscribers. No, really ...

All subscriptions may include up to six premium issues per year. For each premium issue, your account balance will be charged an additional fee of $2 in the billing period when the section publishes. This will result in shortening the length of your billing period. …  These (listed but deleted by me) months will have the effect of reducing the length of delivery service otherwise covered by your payment. Months are subject to change without notice. You may choose to opt-out of receiving premium issue content by calling xxxxxxxx

OK now. (I can't remember which paper that is; I think it's one of their North Dakota dailies.)

Nickel and dime time.

It's not unethical, in that it's printed up front. But 3,000 subscribers x $2 x four quarters a year? $25,000 or so out of what should be, oh, $1.25 million gross revenue easy? Three percent is not nothing, but it's not a lot.  Throw in the progress issue and the city/county guide issue free to subscribers and save your bookkeeper and circ staff some hassle if nothing else.

Otherwise, on the double no-brainer vs. reality? Let's just say I've visited Glassdoor as well. The answers I got, as mentioned in the italicized paragraph, didn't surprise me.

To go into detail? I am leery of a company that has less than, say a 3.3 rating out of 5 stars on Glassdoor. Knowing newspaper struggles, I would be OK taking that down to 3.0 for papers.

Wick as a corporation didn't even hit that.

This might be a good point to refer you back to my MSM bingo, community newspapers division, blog post.

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Sidebar —

That said, I wouldn't write this much about the Montrose Press if I didn't know something about Montrose. I do; Montrose wouldn't be a bad place to live. I also know something about Mountain/Intermountain West towns being discovered, even being full-blown Californicated.

Taos is a good, or bad, example of that. On a small city scale, arguably Fanta Se is, too.

That said, in Nuevo Mexico, I also know the other end of the stick. A decade or so, Silver City had the first nibbles of being "discovered" but that's all that happened. It was more rumors than reality and it continues to lose population. Maybe Californicators thought it was too isolated, though it's only 2 hours from Las Cruces. Maybe local civic fathers planted rumors to try to make reality happen.

Last time I was in Montrose was at the tail end of the Californication or whatever. As it was mid-Census, I didn't realize it had grown that much, though I did note the amount of traffic surprised me.

And, now, it's a puzzler. Why did the Californication stop? Was it entirely due to the housing bubble bursting? If so, why hasn't it restarted again, as it has in, say, Bend, Oregon?

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Sidebar 2 —

Said job has been readvertised a month after initially advertised. Maybe others, like me, said "huh" about the dropping the wire but not dropping the pages, or other things?

Magazines are NOT the answer, newspaper owners / publishers

For community sized dailies, and even more nondailies, magazines aren't the answer to continued struggles. They're certainly not "THE answer."

Any county of less than, say, 50,000, from my experience, they should not be considered the answer. They may be a part of a partial answer. Don't expect more.

First, while you may get a few advertisers who say they wouldn't advertise in a regular newspaper, or even newspaper special sections, it won't be that many. Half of your magazine ads will be cannibalizing. Related to that, if a biz advertises in both that magazine and your newspaper, but has separate accounts on its books, it will suddenly hit advertising annual budget redlines quicker than normal, and leave you dry for the rest of the year.

Second, all of this was true even before the Trump paper tariffs.

Magazine slick, or even lower grade semi-slick, is getting even pricier than regular broadsheet. And, speaking of separate accounts, if you the newspaper publisher or owner aren't running separate accounts for the magazine yourself, how do you know you're not even losing money there?

Case in point from latest issue of a magazine within the eastern front.

A 15 percent adhole? And, since all pages are in color, there's no special charge for color ads?

The one after that was better, at more than 20 percent. But the one after THAT was 12 percent or so.

December 2018 issue? Worse. Flat 10 percent.

I'll be dollars to donuts, even with all content from salaried staff or John and Jane Q. Public, there's a 50 percent chance that first one lost money, and certainly the third one.

Let's also not forget that many of these magazines are given away free, even if they have a cover price that's basically purely nominal.

(Oh, and not all papers in the same chain do them monthly; papers twice the size only do bimonthly ones.)

"We're digital first!" No you're not

This is the most irritating bullshit slogan from today's newspaper world after the ever-ongoing "We're learning to do more with less."

The New York Times may be "digital first." But you, small newspaper chain owners of some five-day and six-day dailies, are not.

You're not digital first if you don't have a separate subscription plan for online only readers, rather than a single forced buy combo of print and Net.

You're not digital first if you cut the AP wire to save money, but then invoke that "more with less" BS by refusing to cut pages even with the Trump paper tariffs.

You're not digital first if most of your online advertising is nothing other than your print section classifieds.

You're not digital first if you haven't done the paperwork to figure out if you're close to digital first on revenue vs overhead.

You're not digital first if you're part of a chain and you don't train your ad salespeople on selling digital ads.

You're not digital first if your graphics person(s) at a daily paper have no real experience or training in building quality digital ads.

You're not digital first just because you post a podcast and video on your website, if you're not getting anybody to sponsor that.

You're not digital first if you see being online as a way to fill print gaps.

Saying "we're digital first" as a self-hypnotic mantra doesn't make it so.

To be successfully digital first takes thought and strategy.

Beyond the advertising and circulation side I mentioned, that includes issues of whether you want to post every story online first, at least in full story format. Even with word-count delimited paywalls, if I can read a header and 50 words of text, that might be enough for me to not need to read more.

How do you run a daily paper without an AP wire?

And, I'm not talking a five-day daily, where that wouldn't be that hard.

I'm talking six- and seven-day dailies, where it would be, unless you tighten page count, drop a day of the week or both.

Had an interview recently to be ME of a six-day. (As of the time of this blog post, I don't know where I stand at on getting close to the finish line, should I want to be there, either.) Keeping this semi-anonymous on the company, it is not a big one, but its stable includes one seven-day daily, one that ... sounds like it's now six-day and is being delivered by USPS, interestingly) and five or six other six-day dailies, all 3,000 circ or above.

And, company policy is to can the AP wire. Not as in "somebody," but "we're doing it." Related to that is the usual "digital first" etc.

But, they don't have a separate online-only subscription. I know a lot of smaller dailies do a forced combo buy of print plus digital but if you're really digital first, that itself is bullshit.

So, do you cut a day a week? Same sked but cut two pages a day? IMO, yes, that second option at a minimum. Filling 12-14 pages in a county of less than 50K without a wire and typical smaller six-day editorial staff? Uhhhhhh ...

There are ways around this. One can either cut two pages a day, or one day a week. I speak from personal knowledge.

My current six-day baby is in a town 3/4 the size and a county 4/5 the size of the one at which I interviewed. At my previous semiweekly, the nearest daily was a small seven-day in a town and county both half again as big as Mystery Paper.

My current six-day runs 10 pages on weekdays. On average, 1/2-3/4 a page a day of news, maybe a bit more, and 1/4-1/2 of sports is wire. That seven-day, to my best memory, usually ran 12 on Mondays, 14-16 the next four and Saturdays. It ran one full page or bit more a day of news wire and probably 1/2-3/4 day of sports wire.

So, yes, unless one wants to use cheapie brief sites like State Point, or canned product-placement copy from a place like NAPS, or third, hope your state extension office has plenty of non-ag consumer news, etc., cutting two pages a day is ... a no-brainer.

BUT ... even though it's a double no-brainer with Trump's ongoing tariffs on Canadian newsprint, the company ain't doing it. And, as ppl in the biz know, staff writers are hourly, not salary, and corporate yells about overtime. So, the managing editor is the shit dumping grounds then. Especially when combined with me inquiring about the adhole percentage and I was given an answer about what their target percentage is, not what they actually do. Now, ad sales are ultimately a publisher and ad manager issue, but ... if it's easier to hit a 40 percent target with the page cutting, and even exceed it, again, it sounds like a no-brainer.

It's an additional no-brainer as the Trump tariffs give you the perfect excuse for whacking both the wire and the two extra pages. Write a customer note like this:

Dear Mystery Paper readers:
Due to the ongoing tariffs against Canadian newsprint paper, which makes up about 80 percent of what we use, we have come to some hard decisions.

The best way for us to address this financially is to reduce our papers by two pages a day. The easiest way to do this without affecting local content is to drop our Associated Press membership.

Voila.

Now, that said, if your state press association doesn't have at least a weekly roundup column, while national wire might not be a biggie, some state news, especially in-depth state lege coverage while it's in session, to me is de rigeur. That's even more the case if you're running a seven-day daily and there's a bigger seven-day daily next county over.

Or, there's a third option, which is unethical, but is probably already being done somewhere, and could be filed under "turnabout is fair play." And, that is stealing AP news off its public website (not its download website for member newspapers). Or stealing if off a bigger newspaper, as long as it's not in your neighborhood, seven-day daily mentioned above.

The particular place in the presenting problem Mystery Paper is also a place in the West that was, briefly at least, "discovered." Presumably Californicated, by timelines.

It added about 50 percent to its population, in the first half of the previous decade, right before a housing problem hit LaLa Land before the rest of the nation.

Since then? Literally, in a dozen or so years, no growth. And average population seven years above the state average.

Are the Californicators going to be as interested in a paper without state wire? Or regional Western news? If they can read a header and first 100 words of local news on your website, you may lose them.

As for that seven-day daily that has a bigger one less than 100 miles away? If I were the bigger one, I might roll the dice and start trying to poach subscribers at the edge of the other paper's radius. If I really wanted to roll the dice, I might figure that other county is big enough for me to open a bureau (one-person) there. Since said smaller seven-day also owns a semiweekly to its west and your south, and only a semiweekly in a town of 20K, where bigger seven-day may already have a bureau ... I might add an ad person full-time in there, too. Maybe even a regional sectional 1x or 2x a week. Said smaller company also sees fit to run just a weekly in a town almost as big as the semiweekly town, same distance to the other side. If bigger seven-day pushed hard enough, it could probably blow up that whole house of cards.

And, that gets to one way you can get rid of the wire more easily — clustering. Not necessarily immediately next door, but increased clustering within a state. That lets you do a state-level version of Gannett's state-by-state daily news roundup.

Anyway, with papers bigger than Mystery Paper either narrowing their web on the pages, cutting pages or cutting staff because of the newsprint tariffs (which Congressional bills going nowhere won't stop if they're going nowhere), keeping the same page count without a wire is simply stupid.

But ... I doubt this company is that forward thinking, even though it's in a position to do so in one place.

Also, at least one paper in the chain doesn't include special sections for subscribers. No, really ...

All subscriptions may include up to six premium issues per year. For each premium issue, your account balance will be charged an additional fee of $2 in the billing period when the section publishes. This will result in shortening the length of your billing period. …  These (listed but deleted by me) months will have the effect of reducing the length of delivery service otherwise covered by your payment. Months are subject to change without notice. You may choose to opt-out of receiving premium issue content by calling xxxxxxxx

OK now.

Nickel and dime time.

It's not unethical, in that it's printed up front. But 3,000 subscribers x $2 x four quarters a year? $25,000 or so out of what should be, oh, $1.25 million gross revenue easy? Three percent is not nothing, but it's not a lot.  Throw in the progress issue and the city/county guide issue free to subscribers and save your bookkeeper and circ staff some hassle if nothing else.

Otherwise, on the double no-brainer vs. reality? Let's just say I've visited Glassdoor as well. The answers I got, as mentioned in the italicized paragraph, didn't surprise me.

This might be a good point to refer you back to my MSM bingo, community newspapers division, blog post.

==

That said, I wouldn't write this much about Mystery Paper if I didn't know something about Mystery Town. I do, and I also know something about Mountain/Intermountain West towns being discovered, even being full-blown Californicated.

Taos is a good, or bad, example of that. On a small city scale, arguably Fanta Se is, too.

That said, in Nuevo Mexico, I also know the other end of the stick. A decade or so, Silver City had the first nibbles of being "discovered" but that's all that happened. It was more rumors than reality and it continues to lose population. Maybe Californicators thought it was too isolated, though it's only 2 hours from Las Cruces. Maybe local civic fathers planted rumors to try to make reality happen.

Anyway, I've been through the mystery city before. Last time I was there was at the tail end of the Californication or whatever. As it was mid-Census, I didn't realize it had grown that much, though I did note the amount of traffic surprised me.

And, now, it's a puzzler. Why did the Californication stop? Was it entirely due to the housing bubble bursting? If so, why hasn't it restarted again, as it has in, say, Bend, Oregon?

Late-stage capitalist newspaper ethics, part 1

If you're going to advertise for a job, then actually fill the job.

Take the Lake Powell Chronicle of Page, Arizona. A decent sized weekly. Six months ago, its editor-publisher left. Position was advertised on Journalism Jobs.

Senior editorial staffer was the sports writer, who said in a column that he barely knew pagination.

Well, six months later, he's the editor, but not the publisher. The paper has no publisher listed, and instead hired some sort of paginator-designer person.

You leave yourself open to scrutiny in other ways. If the budget is that tight, shouldn't you have seen that before advertising for a replacement editor-publisher? If you did, you look deceitful. If you didn't see that before, you look borderline incompetent.

Newspaper bingo, community papers division

A few weeks ago, after Chris Tomlinson and some other staffers at the Houston Chronic joked about it, I did a "newspaper bingo – Texas MSM division" blog post. (I included a bit of radio and TV too.)

Now, in less joking fashion, it's time for what the header says. Here's your bingo card, with explainer below.

(I originally built it with the same color scheme as the Texas MSM bingo. But, when I opened the PDF in Photoshop to j-peg it, I decided to do an inverse as well. I like it enough I'm using the inverse.)

This bingo is inspired by personal reality.

When did it become a "thing" for newspapers to run ads more than the customer desired, then bill them for the extra runs? (Until and unless a customer notices, that is.)

And, in my opinion, to state those magic words, I don't think it's being done by accident. I of course cannot read minds. So it has to remain my opinion, which remains protected by the good old First Amendment.

Look, through laziness or whatever, I can see a classified ad simply staying on a classified page an extra week at a small-town non-daily paper. But, with ad billing software programs, the customer should only be billed for the number of runs purchased. That is of course true assuming the insertion order clearly says "one run," or "1x," or similar.

I know of this happening at one pair of papers. Personal contact with customers. Both classified AND display ads. On the one case, it ran 6x instead of 1x. Been told it might have happened before. Suspect it's happened nearby. Heard that it's not just an issue with one newspaper company.

I can't say anything more, for various reasons.

But, where I know it's happening? I wouldn't do business with that paper, let alone with a sister paper, if you put a gun to my head.

==

If you're a newspaper customer, and this happens, and you suspect that, in your opinion, or ear to the street, it is part of a pattern? Rather than just fighting to get your money back, consider legal alternatives. Even if you do get your money back and you have the time, the money, and a lawyer willing to do discovery.

Or, better yet? Rather than threatening suit, file a criminal complaint for credit/debit card abuse. Under section (b)(1)(A) there, I believe an offense has been committed in such cases, and mental intent does not have to be legally proven. And, here in Texas, per that link, it's a state jail felony. (That said, intent will be in the center of jurors' mind if that goes to a jury trial, and probably in a judge's mind, too. With that said, good luck getting a county or district attorney to file a case.)

Tip 2? Sure, it's fine for a newspaper, like your grocer, to want to be paid in advance. If you're going to pay by credit card, just pay for that ad. You do not have to leave a card number on file.

==

If you're a newspaper publisher, or owner of a group, and don't like the possibility of being tarred with a broad brush?

You have two options.

The first is to call out your newspaper peers. Not by name, of course, even for places where you've heard of this practice being done. But, yes, call them out. Not in an op-ed in your paper, of course. That does nothing. Try the TPA Messenger or whatever state newspaper association trade letter exists in your state, or Publisher's Auxiliary or whatever.

The second is to adopt a public policy at your paper, if you're a publisher, or your group, if you're an owner, if this practice spreads at all. Something like:

"We will give you double your money back for any overbilling for advertising runs you did not authorize."

Then, internally, make repeat violations, even if you can't prove intent, a fireable offense.

And, speaking of the TPA Messenger, one could argue for TPA to be more proactive.

At this time, I suspect it's a tiny minority. But, a minority of 1 is one too many.

MSM Bingo, Texas version

We've got a runoff for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination between the the incompetent (so far) Loopy Lupe Valdez and the insufferable "I personally" Andrew White.

Meanwhile, last week, the Austin Stateless was sold to Gatehouse's parent for pennies on its one-time dollar. This just a year after the Dallas Snooze outsourced its pagination/copy editing to Gatehouse.

What do these two things, and others, have in common? This graphic of mine below.

This is primarily about newspapers, from my expertise. But, one magazine that you should know is included. So is the pack of TV and radio stations, more and more of whom are owned by folks like Sinclair.

Of course, the clear square does mean something. It is certainly understandable by me. But, the ownership class at the media knows that well and continues to exploit it. The bottom, lightest-shaded square in the gray column also means something in the big picture of media things in the Pointy Abandoned Object State™.

The bottom left square also means something, in a reverse-snark way. And, in a real way, non-daily papers, with smaller five- and six-day community dailies at least somewhat on the same side of the fence, face their own worries.

A lot of the other squares, though? Newspapers, not just with ownership, but with upper-level editorial staff, are digging their own graves.

Take the Dallas Snooze, with a clickbait child-level header on a story that wasn't much more than a nothing burger and certainly not "investigative journalism," about city sewage infrastructure, which the Observer first gave a moderate level skewering by Stephen Young, then the full Monty by Jim Schutze.

The actual story? And the Curious Texas project behind it?

This belongs on Quora, not a theoretically serious and theoretically major daily paper. (And, thus, the death of a thousand cuts from the online world goes both ways.)

If the Snooze wants to keep this Curious Texas project, accept questions like this and do stories on them, at a minimum, it would go with non-clickbait headers AND writing. And, they should be no more than, oh, 300 words?

As for Ms. Jennifer Emily?

You're on MuckRack, too? Hope you've raked actual muck.