Gainesville Register vs Weekly News of Cooke County

The Register is a CNHI paper in Gainesville, the county seat. The Weekly News is a (former?) shopper. It's not all classifieds; it has more local news than the Register. But, it has historically been a non-subscription third-class mailer. That said, I have the "former?" in parentheses because it had gradually been cutting back what ZIP codes were non-subscription within in the county and, as of the first of this year, eliminated Gainesville itself, so it's now a second-class mailer subscription newspaper, or will be, when it changes permits.

At some point, though not until next year, at least if it goes to a second class permit, it will need to file a postal report, and we will see what's on there.

OK, the "versus."

For years, as in, going back a decade, even though a third-class shopper, the Weekly News had and has been running legals from various local governments. And, in the case of Gainesville and Cooke County, the aggrieved party would be the Register. (Indirectly, other newspapers in the county might also be aggrieved parties.)

But, the Register did nothing.

Until about a month ago, it started running information on its classified page that its the official newspaper of both entities.

You know what? 

Since that time, the Weekly News has run a Cooke County Sheriff's Office tax sale legal notice. We'll see what, if anything, the Register does besides run another notice in its paper. (Sidebar: The Register legally was running a legal notice from the city of Sherman, so there's that, too.)

Note for KERA and the Denton Record Chronicle

A similar merger has already been completed in Chicago between Chicago Public Media and the Chicago Sun-Times. The DRC/KERA merger, which I have written about before, was completed last summer.

Nieman Lab notes that more people are reading, more staff have been hired, but ....

But management departures and rocky union negotiations have also marked the transition. And a membership drive last fall noted that membership revenue wasn’t covering the losses that occurred after the Sun-Times’ digital paywall was dropped.

Oops.

The bottom line is the bottom line.

For the DRC, there's also another issue. If you go digital-only? You're no longer a "paper of record" for government legal notices. And, there is another print paper in Denton County. Now, the small weekly Pilot Point Post-Signal would look almost like a caricature if it had city of Denton, Denton County, Denton ISD and other legals, as it would be 50 percent classified ads some weeks.

But, the paper has a history of being aggressive on legal ad chasing.

So, watch out what you wish for, Bill Patterson. And, I've written before about Pilot Point doing just that. I've also noted the Wrecked Chronic looks in print kind of like a CNHI paper.

The NYT can't stand the internal Gaza blowback

 It probably also doesn't like the external media scrutiny from another media powerhouse, in this case, the Wall Street Journal training guns on the Old Gray Lady, but, given how often the Times has done exactly this to places like the Washington Post, turnabout is fair play.

As a lot of us know, a lot of the NYT's reporting on Israel-Gaza is shaky at best. (That's why happens when you hire someone with no previous journalism experience, Anat Schwartz, apparently for hasbara-related reasons, and what she and the team with her report doesn't have solid support even in terms of hasbara as journalism.)

So, besides outside pushback, over this and other things, the Slimes (like the Dallas Snooze, Fort Worth StartleGram, etc.) is also getting blowback internally.

And, in a word, from the top down — the top being Executive Editor Joe Kahn, as Pinch Sulzburger keeps himself out of the picture or else the WSJ doesn't rope him in — the brass hats are pissed:

“The idea that someone dips into that process in the middle, and finds something that they considered might be interesting or damaging to the story under way, and then provides that to people outside, felt to me and my colleagues like a breakdown in the sort of trust and collaboration that’s necessary in the editorial process,” Executive Editor Joe Kahn said in an interview. “I haven’t seen that happen before.”

Beyond that "pisses," there's a stereotypical hypocritical airing of grievances.

“Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about than may have been the case in the past,” he said, adding that the onus is on the Times to instill values like independence in its employees.

Hey Joe, just maybe? Just maybe it's people like you who have that problem.

Seriously, to me, that's exactly what this reads like. You're in the journalism version of a stereotypical ivory tower, a stereotypical part of the "Establishment," you've long been in bed with what I call the Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ on foreign policy (Judith Miller ring a bell?) and now, you're finding out that younger hires aren't so much.

And so no, looking just like the US government in similar situations (remember the Dobbs leak?) rather than looking at how and why you published hasbara, you're looking for leakers. And, of course, this gives Kahn the perfect opportunity to sideline a promised internal investigation as to how this got run in the first place.

And, that all said, the WSJ participates in the hasbara. Re the story at issue, it says it was written by "Jeffrey Gettleman and two freelancers." Anat Schwartz, Ms. Hasbara 2024, isn't even mentioned by name.

A Today Newspapers blast from the past

Today Newspapers was a group of suburban Dallas newspapers, where I worked several years, that closed during the Great Recession. Competition with a five-day daily with crap for editorial content but bullshitting about circ numbers, combined with some stupid ownership and management decisions and the Great Recession itself, did us in.

Well, my first couple of years there, in addition to a news editor for each paper in our group, we also had a sports editor for the whole group who did about half or so of the total sports coverage, in combo with us individually. 

He was Brian Porter. I saw his face on this piece, about him going into the world of, if not full pink slime, then semi-pink slime, journalism at the Rocky Mountain Voice. And, per the Colorado Press Association announcing him as a board of directors member, it is the same guy.

I was led to all of this by a new Substack I follow. A number of members objected to what appeared to be a conflict of interest with Porter running that organization, which is a specific advocacy-based site. But, then, a bigger issue came up. RMV is not a CPA member, and org bylaws say he needs to be, to be its president.

Porter did resign the CPA board presidency. But, if he had more than six months left in his term, would he have? (That said, if it's like TPA, it was probably a one-year deal anyway.)

Brian Freaking Porter. Per the CPA announcement of him joining the board, I see how he got out there — the luck of being with a major newspaper group and wanting to go to that location. I'm envious of the luck; my attempts to get out west, albeit in a place more to my interest than Fort Morgan would be, have all failed.

Dear StartleGram: Do NOT ever again try to make me a part of a story

 Ditto for other papers writing about this contretemps.

Ditto for the StartleGram trying to pull the same trick with other small town newspapers.

"Don't become part of the story" is a baseline tenet of journalism. It means not only don't make yourself part of your own story, but also don't make yourself part of someone else's story.

At the same time, it SHOULD mean not trying to make another journalist a part of your story.

Either Mr. Bach wasn't taught better in J-school, wasn't coached better in Cowtown or previous stops — or else an editor told him to ask. None of the above comes off very well.

Per his bio at the StartleGram (and at the Trib) he should know better.

Knowing the timetable, he apparently called me AFTER he talked to the locals, which appears to have been by personal drop-in, and without a heads-up in advance.

Sidebar: The other side/round two of the story about the contretemps has dropped. Not posting, not linking.

Sidebar two: This is another reason I'm glad my current newspapers have neither website nor social media presence.

(I once mentioned the name of a reporter from another paper in a story. Ironically, she was at the StartleGram. But, that's because the PR mouthpiece for Voluntary Purchasing Groups in Bonham, Texas mentioned her name in a direct quote. She got pissed when she heard it. But? This happens all the time, at least today. PR spox and politicos call out individual reporters by name, not all the time, but not 100 percent infrequently, either.)

==

Part two: There's weird things about the Startlegram's website. Most online media, whether web versions of print newspapers and magazines, or other things, you click on an author's name and it takes you to a mini-bio page with a list of other stories. Not the Startlegram. That's an email address link. Weird.

"Access Twitter" form of "access journalism"

Access journalism is Beltway access, whether to the President, an executive branch Cabinet agency, or in the case of Joan Biskupic, to the Supreme Court. I suppose that with a Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi, there's some sort of access journalism there, too.

Access Twitter is a riff on that, but it's an intra-journalism angle.

I was blocked by Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat two weeks ago. I discovered that when Jeet Heer was quote tweeting over just how bad of hasbara he was spouting:

I remember when the hasbara was better. They're not even trying anymore. https://t.co/nKCvUmi9h5

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) March 2, 2024

And realized I couldn't see just how bad it was.

Obviously, Higgins hadn't blocked Jeet. I don't know if he's yet blocked Mark Ames, who, in my blog post a few weeks ago about the Texas Observer jumping in bed with Bellingcat, had two Ames tweets about Bellingcat, though neither was a quote-tweet of Higgins or other top brass. That said, per the official Bellingcat Twitter account, yeah, as of the start of March, it was radio-silent indeed. Plenty to say about Russia, naturally, with the likes of Fukuyama being advisors. Nothing about the Gaza Genocide. One post in the first half of February about Rafah and .... using tools adapted from Ukraine to track bombing in Rafah. No moral comment at all. A post at the start of February about a Beeb show talking about the "disinformation war" in the Middle East. No use of the word "hasbara" in the tweet. The Beeb podcast itself at least tilt toward he said, she said twosiderism.

And, that's the only two tweets about Israel-Gaza going back to before Christmas 2023. Before that, on Dec. 20, there was a tweet with the gist of the Feb. 13 tweet about Rafah, but before the creation of the Rafah pocket. A Dec. 18 tweet talked about the "environmental damage" Israel was causing in Gaza. No, really.

Before that? A Dec. 12 tweet about "unraveling" the death of Shireen Abu Akleh. Her death had been unraveled well before that, given that she had been killed seven months earlier. The piece itself has a big data cram, lots of videos, analysis, etc., then says, in essence, "it appears," without making a call. This itself looks like hasbara, in that somebody prodded Bellingcat to do "something.

The Texas Observer's near-demise, one year later

Apparently the Texas Observer's attempted recovery from its near death experience one year ago, mainly due to financial mismanagement, but with bits of other mismanagement and other general problems, as I wrote about at the time, isn't going so well.

At the start of this month? Editor-in-chief Gabriel Arana is now "the former," allegedly to help the Observer as it still loses money, and being replaced by fundraising staff apparently paid off what was his salary. Well, his salary and two other editorial staff also canned. They were explicitly canned to free up money for fundraising staff. The first piece hints at unspecified additional reasons for Arana getting the boot. The two other staffers have spoken in support of the Observer. At the time, at least, Arana had radio silence. 

The Observer and its parent, the Texas Democracy Foundation, continue to cause their own problems on the financial side, as I noted a year ago, for the holier-than-thou attitude of refusing to accept ads mixed with the stupider-than-thou refusal to paywall. I have no sympathy. And, if the recent changes are just the surface of an iceberg, re Arana, will other editorial staff be jumping ship? And, will the fundraising staff broach some Trib-like "pay to play"?

Maybe, re just Arana, wrangling over the Bellingcat partnership led him to be canned? The timing is right, for sure. (He's now at The American Prospect in some way, shape or form, per his Twitter bio.)