The ambulance chasing gets personal, but the story winds up hollow, abetted by bad editing

OK, last month, Pocket gave me this story from The Atlantic: "We Should All be More Afraid of Driving."

Summary? Joshua Sharpe works for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Reports on "police scanner news," to put it bluntly.

That includes car wrecks.

Of which he's had two himself.

The first? Hit a woman standing in the middle of I-75. Here's the intro: 

I thought I saw something in the road.

Meth addict, as it turns out.

Much later, he makes contact with her. The accident allegedly scared her straight, but it's unclear whether that lasted or not.

OK, for a while afterward, Sharpe peeled back on ambulance chasing. We're being blunt, remember. But eventually, he picked it back up again.

Two years later? Second accident:

I thought I saw a car veering toward me. 

It was a bright morning in February 2018. I was driving to work on Clairmont Road when a car suddenly appeared to be merging into my lane from the right, bound to hit me. This time, I did swerve. I wrenched the wheel and turned into oncoming traffic.

Note the parallel in the opening?

That said, as he eventually did after the first accident, he contacts the others involved. (Well, some of them.) The driver of the truck basically half hates him. The passenger fully hates him.

What's missing from the story?

No attempt to contact the swerving driver. No attempt to find out who it was, in fact. (Hold on to that idea.)

So, I DM'ed Sharpe on Twitter after tagging him, then seeing his account was open to messages.

Here's what I asked:

One thing about your Atlantic piece on accidents I just DON'T GET! You said the 2nd accident was caused by a swerving driver, but ... you never talk(ed) to him. Did you never even try? Or was the "thought I saw" not actual, and itself an artifact from PTSD from the first accident? (I've been in one wreck bad enough to have a plate in my left forearm, so I get the background.)

No response yet, for three-plus weeks.

To me, beyond the basic warning of the story, not having this information just leaves it limp to me.

Maybe Sharpe did "hallucinate" a swerving driver? Maybe he's afraid to say that, even though that could be part of his message? Or even, arguably, "should" be, not "could" be. Or per highway traffic engineers, there's the lack of mention just how big today's pickups are. Whether the accident was his fault due to a PTSD episode, or an actual swerving driver's fault, it might have been less severe had he not swerved into a monster F-250.

And, that's why I've posted it here.

The tale is designed to be cautionary, but for whatever reasons, Sharpe pulls multiple punches on that. And, it can't be him having a journalistic concern about "personal involvement," as Sharpe mentioned his having PTSD early on. 

It's also bad editing. This IS Atlantic Monthly, after all. And, it's a journalistic magazine, not a repository of modernist or post-modernist short stories. Either Sharpe really saw a driver swerve (and was unable to identify him or whatever), or he thought he saw a driver swerve due to PTSD. Sharpe's editor should have insisted on Paul Harvey's "the rest of the story" or else rejected it.

Dear TPA: Was there nobody local?

 I recently saw this year's Texas Press Association directory.

I noticed two things when I turned to page 1.

First is that they got a Texas Parks and Wildlife staff photog to do the cover picture. I looked back and see that it's been at least three years now since TPA's been doing that, and abandoning the old cover photo contest among member newspaper staff.

I stopped entering it after whoever the judges were chose a picture of an OK but not great sunset with a silhouetted Prick of Huntsville (you know what I mean, Texans) in the foreground. (I had entered a picture from a recent Big Bend vacation that year.)

Second, I noticed this year's directory was printed by a company headquartered in ...

(drumroll)

(dramatic drumroll)

Ontario, Calfornia!

OMG, the TPA directory has been Californicated!

Wrecking two newspapers

 This is a follow-up to my previous post about Dennis and Theresa Phillips and a sidebar of Jim Moser.

Just saw the latest TPA directory.

I knew Marlin and Rosebud had been bleeding subscribers, but didn't realize it was THAT bad.

One-third of the level of when I was there six years ago.

Yes, all newspapers have lost subscribers, but most small-town papers haven't lost them like THAT.

 Sadly and interestingly, I got a call on my cell a month ago. A lady thought it was still the phone number for the Marlin Democrat. Dunno if she had that from my original time there, or my brief return. I vaguely remember the caller by name, having web-searched the number.

CJR falls into its own post-truth rabbit hole

Michael Schudson, a Columbia journalism prof, no less, and his PhD student, I presume, Jueni Duyen Tran, have an overall good article at Columbia Journalism Review about whether and how much the media should have explicitly called Donald Trump a liar. (Their argument is that because Trump is indeed often detached from reality, "lie/liar" actually shouldn't be used that often.)

But, re Trump and his reaction to the coronavirus, and his many lies and reality field distortions on this, about halfway down the piece we have:

Similarly, in September 2020, as Bob Woodward published his book Rage and along with it recordings of his interviews with Trump, revealing that the president had knowingly downplayed the pandemic throughout the early months of 2020, the L-word was noticeably absent from the Times’ reporting. In several articles, the paper observed that the president “privately understood how deadly the coronavirus really was even as he was telling the public the opposite.” This qualifies as “lying”—even if, as might be argued in this case, there could have been good reason to lie to avoid contributing to a public panic.

WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. 

This is journalistic malpractice, to put it bluntly. Journalism should NEVER co-sign the old Platonic noble lie. And, we have non-Trumpian evidence of that in the past year.

As noted elsewhere, specifically with Fauci, Platonic noble lies almost always get outed. In Fauci's case, it's led wingnuts to quote Fauci against Fauci. 

That said, as per my Merrill Perlman post that's often been the featured post here, this is not the first foul ball from CJR.

Mineral Wells: Another CNHI paper shuts, leaves news desert

 The Mineral Wells Index, in Palo Pinto County, Texas, closed as of the first of the year. It had cut to semiweekly either at the start of, or maybe before the start of, the pandemic. I remember it 20 years ago as a five-day daily.

Even then, CNHI was cheap. No separate publisher for it; it shared one with six-day daily Weatherford, the Democrat, 20 miles east.

Even then, CNHI was also dumb, lazy or both. At the tail end of the old century, as the Fort Worth StartleGram pulled in its horns from circulating west of Abilene (and the Dallas Morning Snooze filled a gap by going all the way out to New Mexico), I thought CNHI had a more localized opportunity to fill in a gap.

Do a Sunday paper for Weatherford-Mineral Wells combined, and treat the Weatherford Saturday paper as a "bulldog" for it. Ditto on the weekend Mineral Wells paper.

With Weatherford College in Weatherford, you could run local sports news in that Sunday edition, for example. And, if CNHI had thought to do its Texas regional reporters, or even borrowing a page from USA Today and Gannett way back then, a weekly "roundup" of stuff. 

But, it didn't.

And, CNHI won't sell papers at market cost today.

Instead, even as the Retirement System of Alabama claims it wants to sell CNHI, and CNHI claims it wants to sell individual papers, it "can't," not at market value. Nor can the RSA cell CNHI at market value.

This would cave the entire value of its pension system, assuming that its value, in terms of the percentage that's invested in CNHI, is based on some stated value written by the RSA 20 years ago. In short, if not actual pension fraud, there's something like the spirit of it going on.

As for Mineral Wells? The old Palo Pinto paper in the county seat closed some time ago, so a county of 25,000 is officially a news desert. Given the degree that CNHI has staff whacks and its quarterly furloughs, no way Weatherford is filling all the vacancy out of its coverage.

No idea if Jim Moser has toyed with expanding Jacksboro's coverage into Mineral Wells or not. All he has to do is print weekly, and grab the Mineral Wells, Mineral Wells ISD, and Palo Pinto County legals away from the Democrat.

Theoretically, you'd get the Mineral Wells Chamber to help on a subscription drive and get, say, 500 people to precommit.

Weekly paper, 10-12 pages, or if you get the ads, eventually, semiweekly at 8 pages per? You can make a profit on that. Run a joint biz card directory with your other papers in that area, Moser.

Peter Principle or something in Sulphur Springs

So, the News-Telegram hired a managing editor in June 2017.

Less newspaper experience than I. Half of it explicitly listed as advertorial writing, on the writing and editing.

Less desktop publishing skill than me, both on speed and on design quality.

And a control freak. (I can be at times, but not like that.)

Other issues.

At a dysfunctional place, where the previous managing editor / general manager had somewhat let things slack off in the past, as well as exhibited intermittent communication skill usage, from what I can tell.

I am out of there now, Southern Newspapers has sold that paper to Moser, and the publisher in Paris who pushed for her to be hired, along with the possible reasons he pushed for her to be hired, is no longer in Paris, in part due to a sexual harassment lawsuit.

Well, enough butt-kissing. I'm past the two-year mark in my current position and moving on down the road. This time, the move worked out well enough, although overworked I am. And I'm not working for the control freak, nor dealing with the mess of a fellow publisher possibly committing illegalities, like last time I moved, back to Marlin and Moser, nor either company that hired and tolerated either person. (That's not to mention Moser selling Marlin to Dennis and Theresa Phillips, who surely will finish destroying it soon. More here. Interestingly enough, last month, I got a call from Marlin; didn't ask who it was from, but someone who thought my cell number was still the one to call. Also interestingly, I told her I hadn't been there in 4-5 years, which was actually too short for the span from when I was really there, but too long for the span of my brief return.)

Oh, after Moser bought the News-Telegram, she was eventually fired. Shock me.

Three years since Dennis Phillips and Jim Moser screwed me over

Three years ago, I "tried to go home again."

I had been at the Marlin Democrat longer than any other paper besides my nearly nine years at Today Newspapers in suburban Dallas.

In the summer of 2016, Brandi Chionsini of Granite Publications sold the Democrat and Rosebud News, with me as editor of the Democrat and publisher of both, to Jim Moser of Moser Community Media.

Well, Jim had his own person in mind as editor and publisher, and it wasn't me. So, enter Hank Hargrave. I landed on my feet as editor of The Light and Champion in Center, Texas, so I didn't die.

Hank stayed about a year, and found commuting from Normangee too much. So, off he went.

That was just about the time that The Light and Champion downsized, the publisher there decided to become a publisher-editor (and falsely claimed I was editorializing in a news story, and I later found out just how wingnut he was), and sent me out the door. (I did, to be fair, get a couple of weeks of severance pay.)

This would have been at the time, or shortly after, Hargrave left Marlin.

Did Moser call me then? No.

Instead, Hearne-Franklin publisher Dennis Phillips, a person no stranger at all to alcohol, and probably not to wacky tobaccy, either, from what I know, was made publisher over Marlin and Rosebud as well.

And, proceeded to commit felonies in advertising sales, per what I've heard. (Credit or debit card abuse is a felony no matter the amount, and charging people with credit or debit cards on file for ads they did not run and did not authorize would fit the definition, Dennis.)

OK, I didn't know any of this coming there. I didn't know that, under the excuse "that text won't fit in that ad size" (sometimes that IS true, sometimes not) he would upsize ads without contacting the customer first.

I didn't know his and Theresa's daughter was the bookkeeper at all four papers, to clean up any messes.

As a result of all of the above, I didn't know that I couldn't trust the financials Jim provided me, courtesy of Dennis. They were tight as is. They were lies in reality.

(This also sets aside that the ad salesperson had been getting paid as contract labor, and that Theresa was allegedly horning in on some accounts she was landing. The former is definitely unethical, possibly illegal; the second is "just" unethical.)

So, presumably, enough people had gotten tired of Dennis that they begged Jim to hire anybody else. So he called me.

OK, a couple of weeks in, he's yelling at me for not producing magic on ad sales. Well, Jim, Dennis had 18 months to crap all over the place, and Rome wasn't built in a day.

Anyway, I sold a few ads myself. One, I gave a deal on a 6-month placement for a business card in the business review.

A day later, Moser's yelling at me about that.

"We sell to the rate card."

Really? I later found a flyer from Dennis that had a "half-off blowout sale" three months earlier in January. So, you're either ignorant of what he did or else lying. Given how long Dennis has worked for you, given that he allegedly had an ownership stake in Hearne that was going to go to Marlin as well, and given that he's likely done such sales before in Hearne ....

Let's not forget that Dennis, Theresa, or darling daughter snitched to you on this, too.

Let's add in that the Marlin office was a shambles and that there was no computer for me the day I got there, and that Dennis "offered" to have me build the paper in Hearne. No chance, Jack. No way I was going to sit under his thumb and eyeballs, and if the term publisher means anything, then it means that at least.

In all of this, I suspect that you, Jim, were either hoping I would get stuck in a lease and have to knuckle under, or something like that, or else that I would eat the lease for my apartment or something and you'd tell the community that you had tried.

Well, because my short-term landlord was one of the people who'd reportedly been credit or debit card abused by Dennis, he got his ownership company to let me out of my lease no harm no foul other than losing the deposit.

So, it was bye-bye. You're going to claim I quit.

I still claim you fired me.

Thank doorknobs I'm not still there, though. Reportedly, Dennis is expanding or has expanded the ownership stake he had in Hearne/ Franklin, Marlin/Rosebud and Cameron/Rockdale. He might even be taking them over. 

I would throw up in my mouth if Dennis Phillips were my company owner. I would then puke that sloppy seconds on him.

A part two is ahead.