Arizona Republic puts Snooze to shame

 I still continue to peek at the Dallas Morning News for adhole count. On vacation, out to my sis then SoCal, I looked at the Republic in Phoenix.

First, they appear to have cut a couple of days a week of print run???

Second, the "midweek" Dec. 23 issue at her family's place? More than 40 pages at an adhole of almost 40 percent counting obits as paid adhole. That's contra the typical Thursday Snooze running 32-34 pages, at least in exurban issues, at an adhole of under 20 percent and at times under 15 percent.

Texas Observer sells its soul to Google

 Even as Google, along with Facebook, face new rounds of antitrust scrutiny, including a joint restraint of trade one, the Texas Observer, is getting 11 months of funding from Google as part of its GNI Innovation Challenge.

So, the plutocratic, snoopocratic Google is paying the Observer to hire reporters to "embed" in communities of color? That's the same Google that muzzled, then fired, Black AI researcher Timnit Gebru.

Once again, Bernard and Audre Rapoport, or at least him, are surely turning in their graves.

Surely Google is looking for some sort of data-mining as part of this. Maybe an upgraded version of Google Analytics, with special add-ons reporting direct to Google, embedded in the website, for ad targeting purposes.

Good New Republic piece on CNHI

The mag notes that vulture capitalists like Alden may be worse than pension funds, but that pension funds themselves, notably the Retirement Systems of Alabama, are bad enough. Here's the details, but, it missed several points.

Basically, Rachel Cohen missed some of the problems specific to CNHI — AND, how long it's run amok like this.

First, like some other chains, it prolly should have declared bankruptcy and done a "rinse" several yrs ago, but as owned by a state pension system, it CAN'T.

Second, being owned by a state pension system leads CNHI to lock in overvaluation of its assets in its newspapers. Because, if it sells one for market value, what's that due to the valuation of all others, and hence, to pension funding? Tanks it, of course. So, while you'll see CNHI close or consolidate papers, that's why you'll almost never see them sell them. Nobody will pay their asking price.

Third, and ergo, so, instead of either a "rinse" bankruptcy, or sale of member papers (OR the company as a whole!!!) #CNHI continues to use the quarterly furloughs it started in the Great Recession. Really, it's an El Cheapo version of what Advance is doing.

CNHI is arguably WORSE than Craphouse or Dead Fucking Media. (See, I know their names.) That's because it's been doing this for more than 20 years. And I have direct experience. My first paper was a 5-day daily. CNHI bopught it 1 year after I left. 20-plus years ago. It made it a semiweekly, which, to be honest, was probably the right thing..

BUT! It refused to adjust subscriptions. Not even at the equivalent of 50 cents on a dollar (as in extending six months left on a subscription to 9 months, not a full year, even at the claims that they were printing more pages) let alone fully. So many people cancelled subscriptions they closed it within a year after buying. 

If you see a CNHI paper in a place like Texas running ads for Alabama golf courses and wonder why? If they're Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail courses, that's because its parent, RSA, owns them. Running stuff about Mobile tourism? Owns one semi-luxury hotel there, as well as, I believe, at least one of the golf courses being there. So, the golf course ads? House ads. The Visit Mobile ads? Semi-house ads, and don't forget that there is a state tourism board with a vested interest in promoting tourism, which has state employees hoping for pensions. (To be precise, per this PDF of the Golf Trail, they own two courses in the greater Mobile area, of 36 and 54 holes, and four hotels of various amenities levels.)

Meanwhile, RSA said three years ago it was going to sell CNHI. Still hasn't. Nobody will pay its inflated price. 

Question? At some point, does this involve pension system fraud or something?

Substack and "subscription fatigue" and hypocrisy, vs. Patreon and random thoughts

First, I have never understood what the difference is between Substack and, say, Patreon, other than Substack being newer, theoretically cooler for the new James Dean type rebels without a cause journos, more focused on journos than Patreon, and probably using a different payment system.

I even tweeted that a few months ago.

Now, Wired says that maybe we're at a subscription blog/newsletter saturation point. Irony alert: The piece is members-only! The story specifically talks about "subscription fatigue." Or maybe that's "hypocrisy alert."

Past any irony or hypocrisy, Steven Levy says he suspects the likes of Matt Taibbi will eventually rejoin the likes of traditional online journalism. (That still sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, that phrase.)

Interestingly, he does NOT mention Sully, Greenwald or Yglesias. Nor would they lump under the people he thinks will stay on Substack: "ambitious newcomers, disgruntled mid-termers and post-buyout veterans."

The trio above, AND Taibbi, are a mix of categories two and three — disgruntled veterans. And, privileged disgruntled veterans with a large audience.

Final farewell thoughts to the eastern front

The "eastern front" in this and several previous blog posts is a play on "Southern Newspapers," former owners of the Sulphur Springs News-Telegram, where I was until early 2019.

Another thing I don't miss?

Six-month instead of annual evaluations. Please.

Taylorism in play.

That said, since Southern no longer owns this paper, and I wasn't with Moser long enough to know if he does evaluations at all, things would be different now. Possibly worse on the advertising side, though John Henry is certainly no Dennis Phillips. Maybe better on the editorial side, though credit to JS locally for pushing for a lot of latitude on the op-ed pages.

==

That's not the only analism that runs through the company.

A drumbeating for "must be vertical" on front-page layout?

They obviously don't look at papers outside the company, or else don't care. Nor do they look at the fact that smartphones and tablets will adjust webpage layout from portrait to landscape if you turn them 90 degrees.

What it really is, I know, is a cheap attempt to make a newspaper look like a website.

Well, we don't read newspapers like websites. And, a lot of research has shown that.

Gainesville paper gives state Rep. free campaign ads

 I'm speaking, as in the past, about the Gainesville, Texas, paper.

State Rep. Drew Springer was just re-elected, and as is tradition in a banana republic state with a legislature that meets just every other year, Drew, along with other Legiscritters, filed a bunch of bills on the first day of filing, a week after the election.

The Gainesville (formerly daily) Register saw fit to put that on the front page.

At a weekly, in a smaller community, I MIGHT have put that BELOW THE FOLD on the front page. 

In a normal election year.

I NEVER would have stripped that across the top on all six columns as the lead story.

Not in a normal year and certainly not this year.

This year being different as in Springer is in a runoff special election for a state senate seat. And, just about every one of the bills he filed was a pander against claims by his opponent, Shelley Luther, that he's not a "real conservative."

In short, the Register gave him a shitload of free advertising.

Another crappy NM paper bites the dust, sort of

 About two months ago, I blogged about the Los Alamos Monitor going belly-up.

This new post also involves a newspaper where I applied long ago, then got lowballed (as did others) by a publisher engaged in resume bottom feeding.

That would be the Rio Rancho Observer.

Or should I call it the Albuquerque Journal Observer?

JournalismJobs recently had a listing for a new ME at Socorro's El Defensor-Chieftan Chieftain, yet ANOTHER place I applied to about a decade ago. (Initial phone interview, publisher indicating he liked me, then no follow-up on his part.)

I applied via JJ's website, then thought .. do I apply directly by email?

So I hit its website. At lower right, I saw a listing of "Partner sites." One I thought was in Belen, and indeed the News-Bulletin is. Then I saw the Albuquerque Journal.

Then, "RRObserver."

I web-searched, and sure enough, the Observer is owned by Number Nine Media, the Journal's parent.

Which means the cheap-ass publisher of the Observer took the money and ran.

He reminded me of the owner of the Focus Daily News in the Best Southwest suburbs — cheating on his distribution so as to fudge numbers similar to a free throw shopper. And, in the interview, he admitted it.

He said he zoned Rio Rancho into quadrants and did a free throw once a month, on a rotating basis of the four quadrants. And this was with a loophole-laden, but not fishnet-level, ABC at that time. That's before the Audit Bureau of Circulations basically washed its hands of such things entirely. (A perfect strategy for the newspaper of the city of Glengarry Glen Ross, eh?)

Especially now that the Journal is printing-partnering with the Santa Fe New Mexican, it can throw its muscle around about anywhere north of Los Cruces and SE New Mexico, and with Hobbs, Carlsbad and Roswell oil-imploding again, who knows on that?

Anyway, the Observer is not disappeared, but it's surely a shell of its former self.

Greenwald illustrates a Gnu Media problem

Unless you've been dead for 10 days, if you follow media issues, you're aware of Glenn Greenwald's temper-tantrum departure from The Intercept and his decamp to freelance journalism at Substack.

Temper-tantrum it was, and lie-based it also was. Those who know Greenwald should be shocked by neither.

This whole Greenwald claim of "but my contractual rights say no editing" is a lie. The Intercept, per this great NY Mag story, says that was ONLY true of his columns. His news stories were, are and always have been subject to editing, and mentioned previous examples. Details of that in re the proposed Hunter Biden story.

Greenwald’s main editor on the nonpolitical pieces was Peter Maass, a veteran journalist who joined The Intercept shortly after its founding in 2014. In light of the high-profile, controversial nature of Greenwald’s planned column on Hunter Biden, Reed told Greenwald that Maass would edit the column. 

On Tuesday, Maass sent a lengthy memo to Greenwald, outlining what he said were the draft’s strengths and weaknesses and suggesting that he adopt a sharper focus on media criticism rather than litigate questionable evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption based on purported documents from his son Hunter that had been published by the New York Post.

Shock me.

(At The Guardian, he was billed as a columnist, and I don't know if he wrote any straight news stories. I can't remember back to his Salon days.)

But, in any case, Glenn's belief that he was above editing, as well as above the need for editing, illustrates a problem with Gnu Media related to problems I've noted before. (And, to add to that, on YouTube with video or SoundCloud with podcasts, one can claim that anything one is throwing against the wall is a column, and I think that's the basic stance.

As an Old Media person, as managing editor of several weekly and semi-weekly papers, I've edited staff writers. And, contra this gotcha bullshit, even by his standards, from Max Blumenthal, 

The Intercept’s Betsy Reed, who earns $427,419 a year & produces zero journalism of her own, mocks independent journalists who rely on Substack & Patreon to get by. Not everyone has a reclusive billionaire to pay them huge sums to edit stuff no one reads. https://t.co/TdnjrDdinw pic.twitter.com/83FMDhpRgQ

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 30, 2020

expected to be paid more than them. 

My response, which included Max, Reed, and the person who retweeted:

Sully has said he expects to get more on Substack than at New Yorker & what he made there was more than Betsy does.
2nd, in traditional media as well as Gnu Media, editors make more than many of the reporters they supervise.
This is "gotcha" even from you Max. More #twosiderism

— Flim Flam 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 31, 2020

Beyond that, conveniently omitted by Max, the retweeting Aaron Maté and the re-retweeting Mona Holland, is that Reed is not just editor, but editor-in-chief. And had 16 years of various editorial experience at The Nation before that

I've also, when possible, subjected myself to some degree of at least "proofreading-plus" myself. That's both on stories AND columns, on the writing, and on layout. At my current pair of weeklies, my former office manager now ad salesperson and more looks at stories I write, my columns, obits, and a semi-regular column from a school district superintendent. She primarily looks for grammar (actually good on commas and even knows subjunctive usage!) and formatting, but will make occasional editorial suggestions.

I don't always accept them. BUT, I do normally give them due consideration.

I have joked at times that, like Pontius Pilate, "What I have written, I have written," but that's not totally true. And not just in Old Media.

At this and various other blogs in Gnu Media, I sometimes start a post a week or more in advance to give it time to percolate. Now, here, my normal schedule is once a week plus other occasionals, so, I may write in advance by several days anyway. But, at other sites, where I may blog daily, at least on weekdays, this is indeed true. I'll jot out a rough draft of a blog days, weeks, even a full month or so in advance on serious items that I think need blogging but also need an extended thought process.

Per the NY Mag piece, I think that, on some of his news stories, Glenn doesn't like to let things percolate, and he definitely doesn't like parts of the editorial process that force him to percolate.

I'll venture nobody regularly proofreads, edits or fact-checks Blumenthal, either. And, I KNOW that at least one other Gnu Media maven in his general orbit, Jordan Chariton, has refused to correct major errors on claiming many black men's deaths this summer were murders when they were indeed suicides, and at a rate not significantly different than statistical averages.

The newest "AI is taking our media jobs" screeds

A week after The Guardian wrote a shortish piece breathlessly touting new writing AI, specifically a program called GPT-3, The Atlantic takes a deep dive in the shallow end of the pool.

At least Renée DiResta gives us unedited, albeit excerpted, material to read (the Guardian only had edited slices):

In addition to the potential for AI-generated false stories, there’s a simultaneously scary and exciting future where AI-generated false stories are the norm. The rise of the software engineer has given us the power to create new kinds of spaces: virtual reality and augmented reality are now possible, and the “Internet of things” is increasingly entering our homes. This past year, we’ve seen a new type of art: that which is created by algorithms and not humans. In this future, AI-generated content will continue to become more sophisticated, and it will be increasingly difficult to differentiate it from the content that is created by humans. One of the implications of the rise in AI-generated content is that the public will have to contend with the reality that it will be increasingly difficult to differentiate between generated content and human-generated content.

As for the horrors of AI being used for propaganda writing? Well, if Russian trolls can be replaced with AI bots to "flood the zone" even more, or capitalist businesses in America doing the same to We the People, that is troublesome to a degree.

But nowhere near the breathlessness degree.

As for letters to the editor? Ms. DiResta, astroturfing campaigns opened that barn door years if not decades ago, and better-staffed newspapers regularly screwed the pooch.

Moving beyond the media angle, though, which is somewhat what the Guardian does? It claims editing on its AI piece took less than a human piece. That, in turn, makes me wonder what level of dreck its writers, or freelance op-ed submitters, actually turn in.

Other than the narrow world of yet more media-industry job losses, when I look at this, am I worried? No. 

I do worry there, and that many companies like Craphouse and Dead Fucking Media would use stuff like this without much editing.

Twosiderism, the MSM, and Kool-Aid drinking

(Sorry that I had originally published this, and backdate published it, before it was ready.)

 I've used that last phrase elsewhere about people like Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Mark Ames, Jordan Chariton, Yasha Levine, Matt Taibbi, and others.

They're a loose cluster of people who claim to think outside the box of what I call the bipartisan foreign policy establishment here in the U.S.

However, they carry this to an extreme, and that's the twosiderism on their own. Especially on things like China's Uyghur detention camps, they're willing to drink Xi Jinping's bullshit or whatever just because the U.S. foreign policy establishment calls him out for this. (As does most the Western foreign policy establishment.)

Well, beyond two wrongs not making a right, this is not really outside-the-box thinking. Instead, it's creating your own new box.

On things like the New York Post's story about Hunter and Joe Biden, Glenn Greenwald has been a willing member. And, he too is wrong.

Yes, it's Vox, Ezra-land, but Jay Rosen, who is interviewed there by Sean Illing, isn't Ezra Klein.

Rosen just mentions the Post piece in passing as part of a larger issue. And that is that political journalists have for decades more and more treated political reporting as insider baseball. 

There are two other problems he mentions.

One is commercial pressures. Here, the equivalent of the old "if it bleeds it leads" would be "if Trump tweets he leads."

The second? The MSM's long desire for "the view from nowhere" or "equal time." Well, on broadcast media, the Fairness Doctrine hasn't existed since Reagan. Print media has never been bound by any such thing. Electronic media of the Internet era of course isn't.

Rosen does say that leaders in the MSM have adapted a little bit to Trump exploiting the "fairness" issue. Not as much as they need to, but somewhat. The "if Trump tweets he leads"? In their DNA, though.

To the degree they are truly playing inside baseball, the Times etc. deserve a callout. But, where are the stenos calling out the Post slouching more toward Gomorrah? Or the Wall Street Journal making its news pages a harbor of coronavirus conspiracy theories, herd immunity puffery and antimasking?

The Snooze, aka Dallas Morning News, slouches further on its adhole

 I hadn't popped open a Snooze in a while, but I did a week ago.

Their Thursday exurban edition continues to get worse and worse.

COUNTING obits, just over 3 1/2 pages on a 32-page issue, or 14 percent. Err, my math is bad. That would be just over 10 percent, or else I meant 4 1/2 pages.

NO ads in the front section other than a half-page house. NONE.

They should be pulling a page from Advance and not delivering to stores and racks certain days of the week. If you insist on keeping Mondays so people out in the country can read your necessary Dallas Cowgirls coverage, still, Tuesday and Thursday at a minimum are cuttable outside the core area of Dallas, Ellis, Rockwall, Collin, Denton and Hunt counties.

Three weeks later? Thursday, Nov. 4 after the election? 4 1/2 or so on 34 pages.

Not getting the Gainesville Daily Register, part 2

So, in my previous post I talked about the weirdness and inflexibility of print deadlines at the Gainesville Daily Register.

Here are some other things, both as an individual paper and as a CNHI outlet, I don't get about it.

First thing I don't get is its lack of coverage on energy issues. Cooke County is in the top 30 percent of the state's counties in both oil and gas production, and yet, it does basically nothing in terms of industry news other than an occasional press report from the Texas Railroad Commission, with those pressers only having statewide, or on occasion, regional info.

Second is their "wire" coverage.

They regularly run stuff from the Texas Trib. That's fine. But, they've occasional run an AP piece. Occasionally as in once every three-four weeks. Are they paying for an AP account that's not being used? Or is another CNHI paper breaking AP contract by redistributing? (Wouldn't surprise me. Still not sure who is cheaper, Can't Need Huge Investment or Craphouse.) Or are they copying stories off the AP News website?  (Which, it should be noted, does NOT have a "copywrited" note on either the home page or on individual story pages.) I suppose it is possible that AP has added an a la carte offering to its system, but I highly doubt it.

Third is some of their local "advances."

For the unfamiliar, an "advance" is when a small daily, usually on the Friday or weekend edition, having gotten an agenda for the school board, city council, or county commission meeting, summarizes top items of potential action, should people want to attend, or at least know what to watch out for.

A while back, on a commissioners court advance, the header and lede graf was about changing the speed limit on a couple of county roads.

Really?

The story didn't even mention what, for residents in unincorporated areas, IMO was definitely the biggest item — the county possibly enacting a burn ban. (Commissioners didn't, but, nonetheless, IMO, the potential for that was the bigger item.)

I mean, I'm not perfect, and per any laziness being being issue No. 1, I am a bit slothful at times, too.

But, why?

For that matter, given that they run NO national advertising other than that CNHI national ad about that Alabama golf course that must be OWNED by the Alabama pension system, if not CNHI or Raycom directly, as often as it runs, why are they a daily? A Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday triweekly of 12-12-12 on pages would give almost the same number of pages as currently and cut their third-party press bill and delivery driver bill.

Or, if you're going to stay a five-day daily? Especially if you're just charging 50 cents still? Whack it to eight pages. (10 on Fridays in football, including your two football booster pages.) As part of that, stop insisting you must have two full pages of classifieds, since in most cases, after you subtract house ads and massive amounts of black background space around legals, you only have 1 1/4 pages of classifieds. From an insider point of view, it looks gimmicky, cheesy and crappy.

Drop text on top of any classifieds that spill from the first page. Bigger papers than you do this. Also? Get rid of the four pages of TV guide on Wednesdays. Nobody reads that any more, unless they're at the high end even of average newspaper reader range. (You're allowed to keep them if you get an advertiser to sponsor them.)

An eight-pager is quicker to produce, has a smaller print bill and has a smaller mail bill to non-local subscribers who don't do digital only. No brainer all the way around.

And, Mineral Wells is the same population, though Palo Pinto County is smaller than Cooke. And Cee Nothing Hear Infintesimally found enough brains to make it a semiweekly. (I would have gone triweekly, as I suggest for Gainesville.)

The newest cheap-assedness from Wick Communications

 Regular readers here may recall that I've written about Wick, and the cheap-assedness angle, before.

The newest? From JournalismJobs, this "journalism product manager" position.

First, some snootiness that seems kind of typical of Wick.

No, the job title is not a typo. (If you don't know what a typo is, stop reading now.)

Then, the job itself.

Wick Communications is expanding its NABUR initiative, which combines community journalism with reader engagement via our own social media platform. NABUR, or Neighborhood Assisted Bureau Reporting, offers aspects of investigative reporting/feel-good local news combined on a site similar to Nextdoor or Facebook Groups. This project is funded in part by the Google News Initiative.

Basically, that sounds like a rewrite of what gets posted on FB Groups. Groups dedicated to an individual city can be a boon, but they can usually be a rumor-mongering pile of shit, based on personal past experience at multiple newspapers.

Second, "feel good" news is nowhere near investigative reporting.

Third, if it IS your own proprietary social media platform, how many people are members of it?

Fourth, per what I said above, Sierra Vista's site sounds like the rumors, or innuendos, are monged indeed.

Fifth, again, I wouldn't mind going to Montrose, but ... again, I'd want to know why Californication stopped there, assuming its population is still flat, and other things.

Sixth? Like other small former dailies, they're still doing a daily e-edition. Why? In all likelihood, you will never again be a daily print paper. You're wasting staff time and energy. And, if they're really still a five day daily in print, per my original post, why? (They cut from six days a week this spring.)

Unfortunately, their paywall is so hard I can't tell if they're still five days in print, or just five days in e-editions. Nor can I tell how many pages they're pushing.

GRACKLES INVADE NORTH TEXAS

But, it's not QUITE "Children of the Corn."

But ...

STOP THE PRESSES!!!

If this is your lead story, as a pullout, with not one but two photos on the front page, you're at a small daily paper that should either
A. Consider running a Trib partnership story on the front, if you have to
B. Consider an AP story if you have a membership (that issue may be "open" per what I know) or
C. Consider going non-daily.

Knowing the cut-rate chain ownership?
B. May be iffy because of what is in parenthesis in combination with occasional inside content
A. Might turn up corporate noses, but if you do a story below just the grackles lead photo as wild art, why not
C. Will never be done as long as an Alabama dime can be milked.

If you're the shorthanded editor, whether or not you're familiar with the reality of end of summer/start of fall great-tailed grackles in North Texas, I'm sorry for your situation. I'm also sorry per other things.

As for that reality?

Grackles as an "urban invader" will find some swarming spot in any town of more than 5,000 people.

And, no, they don't just swarm at cheap places, or high food-litter places, like Walmart.

When I lived in the Metromess, one of their top swarms was along Oak Lawn, most heavily near the intersection with Turtle Creek Boulevard. In the Best Southwest, they semi-swarmed DeSoto's Town Center area because of the Tom Thumb across the street and the proximity of Ten Mile Creek.

Oh, north Texas newspaper? Those aren't common grackles. They're great-tailed grackles.

And bird experts or semi-experts, whether for small newspapers or Aggie state Extension pages? Stop calling them things like "pests" just because, like ravens, they're smart enough and opportunistic enough to massively expand their urban range.

Finally, said person who wrote this is not only the editor but also the general manager of this daily paper. It's the Gainesville Register. The Peter Principle runs deep. OR it runs cheap at CNHI.

NYT bigfooting media religious coverage

On my primary blog, I recently discussed a New York Times story about President Donald Trump's continued support among the religious right, especially in rural heartland areas.

Here, I'm going to shift that focus more to the New York Times' coverage of religious issues and how it bigfoots other media and shows some arrogance as part of that.

There's an old joke off the Old Gray Lady's masthead of "All the news that's fit to print," that runs: "It's not news until the New York Times prints it."

And, on the Religious Right's willing, individual-believers wedding with Donald Trump, in a piece a month ago, the Old Gray Lady would have you think so on this issue as well.

"Christianity will have power"? Yes, Trump said it. But, many other sites have done reporting on various angles of individual believers, and not just nameplate pastors like Robert Jeffress, lining up for Trump. So, did the Times really roll the ball forward?

Its top editorial staff would have you think so.

First, two of their marketing Tweets and my responses:

Understanding religion requires reading @elizabethjdias, one of the best religion reporters in the business. She spent months on this piece explaining Donald Trump's support among white evangelical Christians and it shows. https://t.co/7VJissul9R

— Marc Lacey (@marclacey) August 9, 2020

Uhh, no. I don't "need" anyone.

Actually, no, I don't need Elizabeth Dias at all for "understanding religion." I'm an atheist with a graduate divinity degree from a seminary far more rigorous than Religious Right bible colleges, the type of person the Religious Right hates.

— Nagasaki 75: Remember the FULL STORY 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) August 9, 2020

There you are, Mr. NYT National Editor Marc Lacey.

Then this:

If you have found yourself baffled by white evangelical support for Trump, this extraordinary piece by @elizabethjdias is for you. This is journalism as translation, requiring literacy in multiple cultures.https://t.co/vxL3VmfNoM

— Jia Lynn Yang (@jialynnyang) August 9, 2020

Sorry, but no translator needed, Ms. Deputy National Editor Yang.

Here you are:

Nope, not baffled. But?! Elizabeth Dias left stuff on the table, like not delving into the "martyr" mentality held by much of the Religious Right. (It's not quite as deep as Jehovah's Witnesses martyr mentality, but it's deep enough.) https://t.co/qrQLFPYHkq

— Nagasaki 75: Remember the FULL STORY 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) August 9, 2020

Just what did Dias leave off the table?

First, why Trump instead of Ted Cruz? That speech was in January 2016, before the Iowa caucus vote. On paper, Dominionist Ted Cruz and his Seven Mountains daddy were the ideal candidates for the Religious Right to back. So, why didn't they? Pew notes that, in polling, the most devout among the evangelicals DID tilt Cruz, even though, overall, the Religious Right tilted Trump. Obvious deduction? Lots of these people may be sincere in their belief claims but don't go to church that often!

Related? One other thing Dias left on the table (well, there's yet more, but this covers the basics):

Cliff Notes "Christianity will have power" part 4
8. One other big issue Elisabeth Dias left on the table is the issue before the Religious Right backing Trump vs. Democrats; it's the 2016 primaries issue of the #ReligiousRight backing Trump vs. other Republicans. 4/x

— Nagasaki 75: Remember the FULL STORY 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) August 9, 2020

Remember, Trump's speech was in Iowa, January 2016, before the Iowa caucuses.

Did she ask any of the people interviewed whether Trump was their first choice or not? Did she ask about the frequency of their attendance? Or, since this was reported over that long of a period, did she hang out a few Sundays to check for herself?

If you're going to have someone with a graduate religious degree from Princeton work on this story for, I presume, several weeks, and you can't answer that? The story comes off as election-year pandering, in my book. True, you would still want the focus on Trump, but if you can't explain why him, not Cruz, then you can't fully explain "why still him" today, can you?

Second is Dias claiming that this is all new:

The Trump era has revealed the complete fusion of evangelical Christianity and conservative politics, even as white evangelical Christianity continues to decline as a share of the national population.

In reality, with data research sites like Pew having written about this for three or four years straight now, the "Rise of the Nones" (which is a broader issue than just the decline of conservative evangelical Xianity, and blogged about me three years ago, as well as last year) is yesterday's news. Indeed, the piece of mine three years ago noted that, by this year, per Pew estimates, "nones" would equal Catholics in the American population.

The problem is not just that the NYT is behind the curve on Nones. It's that a lot of people who might fall into "Nones" territory may not know this if they get much of their religious news from the Times, or from outfits following its lead. This ties to how politicians think their constituents are, overall, even more conservative than is true.  

As for the "complete fusion" issue? Forty years ago, the Religious Right backed for president a man who had expanded abortion access while governor of California, who never went to church and who consulted astrologers. (Ronnie turned Nancy on to that, not the other way around.)

In other words, I don't see anything beyond the idea that the politer, mainline Protestant rural versions of the Religious Right were, in their own way, thinking they'd "own the libs" with Trump as president. Per my take on sociology of religion issues within the Religious Right, that's not new to me, either.

Indeed, I mentioned that in my first tweet in a thread after my responses to the editorial marketers.

Cliff Notes "Christianity will have power"
1. White #ReligiousRight Xns used to be able to bully America as Trump bullied tenants
2. SCOTUS has #FirstAmendment rulings
2A. America changed
3. So, Rel Right became #snowflakes
4. Trump came as bully-saviorhttps://t.co/HG0FV7gHeL

— Nagasaki 75: Remember the FULL STORY 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) August 9, 2020

See, that "bully" part is important. Per "The Rise of the Nones" issues, the Religious Right has been losing power for some time. Rather than sidle up to Hillary Clinton and her conservative DC prayer circle warrior background with The Fellowship, though, because she was pro-choice, and ignoring that Trump long had been so, they backed Trump.

The bullying? Bullying and shaming people into expression of religious belief in small town America, even in blue states (Galloway vs Town of Greece) was and still is a real thing. Remember, most members of the Religious Right hate atheists even more than gays, and may hate non-Christians, especially Mooslims, almost as much.

OK, next:

Cliff Notes "Christianity will have power" part 2
5. #ReligiousRight has long been hypocrites
5A. Being #snowflakes w/ back-of-hand-to-forehead martyrdom was used 2 justify doubling down on hypocrisy
6. Trump's sense of faux martyrdom was flame 2 moths 2/xhttps://t.co/HG0FV7gHeL

— Nagasaki 75: Remember the FULL STORY 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) August 9, 2020

Trump has played the faux-martyr role to a T since HUD sued him and his dad 50 years ago for racism in apartment renting. He knows how to play an audience like a cheap fiddle.

More sociology of religion that was missed.

And, I haven't even touched on the issue of possible political framing being involved with how the story was crafted.

So, for folks at places like CJR who say the New York Times has no competition? That's kind of the problem. For folks like Jay Rosen who have said in the past that papers shouldn't be competing with one another for angles on the same story? In cases like this, yeah, maybe they should.

CJR claims early-days VOA was not propaganda

That claim was made in the pages of Columbia Journalism Review by Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Cold War was fought not with weapons, but with information and ideas. In the struggle, the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, American government-funded news outlets, were on the front lines. They were powerful not because they were propaganda, but because they weren’t.

Now, I "get" that Simon was writing a "Trump bad" piece, and on one particular instance of Trump being bad — his politicizing of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe by his appointee, Matthew Pack.

BUT! Two wrongs don't make a right.

And, the reality is that these agencies WERE propaganda from early on.

On the print side of the early CIA front world, the book "Finks" of a few years ago illustrates that with Paris Match and other mags. In the big picture world, Scott Anderson's new "The Quiet Americans" discusses this in passing.

Per my current featured post, and the one I had featured below that about CJR caving to Zionism, this is FAR from the first time it's had a pretty big boo-boo. And, how much do people shell out for J-school degrees from there? So, I've added a CJR tag for further stupidities on its part.

The Texas Tribune plays Social Darwinist

We all know the media world in general, and newspapers and related print in particular, is undergoing a craptacular new coronavirus implosion, furloughing hundreds, if not thousands, across the country.

And, here we have good old Evan Smith hiring glorified interns, including one "reporting fellow" well enough off to be at Northwestern.

Nonprofit status no cure for what ails Salt Lake City Tribune

Ten months ago, Jay Rosen was raving about the SLC Trib quickly getting approved for nonprofit status. The Texas Tribune was offering to help it (including, surely, with making big bucks off events promotion which has now been dinged by COVID).

At the time, I said "not so fast" with the huzzahs and handsprings.

I noted on the financial side that the SLC Trib had no paywall, just a fauxwall. (It has now started one, reportedly, though I'm not sure how real it is.) I also noted it was still a legacy print paper, with overhead the Texas Trib didn't have. I also noted it's in a two-paper town. (And the Deseret News still has no paywall.) Finally, I noted that foundations who might have help for such transitions will have less help as more papers consider them. (And, in hindsight, they'll have less help available as COVID hits those foundations, too.)

Finally, I noted how the Trib's news coverage (especially on environmental issues) has been impacted by its "sponsors." 

And Poynter now says, indeed, indeed. And, it notes that last issue is the one at point.

SLC Trib ME Jennifer Napier-Pierce resigned a month ago over tussles over the paper's coverage of a Huntman scion's run for governor. The resignation, from what Poynter gleans around the edges, wasn't hugely bitter, but it was an issue, especially since a nonprofit paper can't do political campaign endorsements.

The bigger issue, as it notes? The Trib-News JOA expires the end of this year. And, reading between the lines on Poynter, apparently neither paper has done huge whacks to its print editions as of this time.

So, is the NYT going to give us sponsored verticals next?

A month ago I blogged about the departure of outgoing New York Times CEO Mark Thompson.

Now, via Digiday, I look at his successor, Meredith Kopit Levien.

And, no, the header is not a total joke, given that she introduced to Forbes its "controversial sponsored content unit," called Brandvoice. Given that Forbes also at this time became the first major biz magazine to expand the quantity, though not the quality, of its online "content" with biz-celebrity columns galore, Forbes has kind of sucked ass on the editorial side for some time.

The piece praises Levien for working to uphold the editorial-advertising wall during her time as ad director there. BUT ... it also notes she brought over from Forbes a penchant for native advertising. or advertorial, as I still call it here.

I've no doubt that will expand in the future.

Per the story, I'd expect a lot more of sponsored podcasting in the future, too. It also wouldn't totally surprise me if the NYT launched its own version of programmatic advertising to outsource, not so much to newspapers but to magazines.

Dear formerly daily papers: About those comics

The former daily closest to me did a head-scratcher in last Tuesday's edition of the now-triweekly.

It ran two days worth of comics.

I checked back on previous issues.

No, it hadn't.

Be consistent.

Yes, you were caught in a hole of sorts, being on an odd number of pages because of a special graphics page about the 75th anniversary of World War II officially ending with the Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay

No matter.

At some point, corporate is going to renegotiate those comics deals anyway. Especially if they look at dropping back to semiweekly.

And otherwise, readers have been kind of futzing through skipped comics unless they bother to read the off days on your e-editions. (I still say, outside of seven-day dailies like the Arkansas Democrat looking for statewide coverage, most papers are looking for too much salvation from e-editions.) Start running a double set on rare days, and they're going to want them every day.

RIP Los Alamos Monitor

The sole paid subscription newspaper in the city of Los Alamos and Los Alamos County, New Mexico, is calling it quits.

And, I have a personal connection of sorts to the story of the cheap bastards.

I interviewed there to be managing editor there eight or so years ago, when it was still a five-day daily, usually eight pages on the weekdays and 12 or so on the weekender. I could have done the job, no doubt.

After I, and other candidates, I presume, made it past a first round of interviews? They hired internally. I think that Landmark Community Newspapers, the parent, was "salary scraping" to see what the market would bear and how much they could lowball a staff writer to run the whole thing.

No shock to see the company with 1.7 star average on Glassdoor. Cheap, tech-cheap, and conservative good old boys running the ship are among the complaints. If they really are running old Drupal, that explains why no websites are paywalled. Too damn hard. And, still trying the old "buy this online photo" schtick, to boot.

That said, the Los Alamos Daily Post (daily online, or always online, and weekly in print) may be free (I guess), but its website kicks the Monitor's ass, and going by ads there, has been kicking the Monitor's ass in other ways.

Interestingly, it started up just a year after I interviewed there. Presumably, their hire of not-me and other Landmark decisions may have started an exodus and former staff started the new paper?

Indeed. The publisher of the Post is the person I could have been replacing.

The Gainesville Register can't sell ads?

The Register, formerly the five-day Gainesville Daily Register, but now a triweekly in print that maybe shouldn't be that (and like many others trying the same idea, should ditch the idea of still doing PDF e-editions for all former daily press date), still can't sell ads.

Its three print days a week have each issue selling no more in display ads than each of the five days a week did even before coronavirus' new normal hit.

But, it's even worse on special sections.

My group of weeklies in the area published a 52-page tab for our annual football preview. Almost as many pages as in the past. Ad inches off 10-12 percent, but with more color sales, revenue almost even with last year. Good deal. Adhole was around 50 percent.

The Register? 10-page broadsheet that, once you toss out them running one ad three times and another four times (no, really) had a ONE and ONE HALF page adhole. 15 percent.

Just wow.

Their sports editor has decent to good sports coverage on the words and camera side, as he does in general. Their editor/GM is decent writer or better (other than being amazed by Texas grackles), and if she's dropping pages herself, generally good there.

But they just suck on ads.

And, I expect it to only get worse.

Small-town Texas editors and writers: Get a non-sports life!

A couple of years ago, I was at a photojournalism workshop and conference, and that leads to the header of this post. (And, its value has only increased with the novel coronavirus and the uncertainty of how many high school football games will even be played this year.)

It was specifically about sports photojournalism. And, at non-dailies, the managing editor may be doing it all. And in many cases, may be a sports geek (deliberate use of the word) first, and someone who muddles his way through news or feature stories second. (No political non-correctness intended, per the rest of this post; "he" is the operative word.)

At larger non-dailies and at small dailies, there may be a separate sports writer or editor. That person is still usually a "he."

Anyway, the one presenter was talking about tracking information while shooting photos.

And, this came up.

Not just one, not just two, but at least three attendees said they go to Hudl Saturday mornings and watch complete videos of Friday night's game to make sure their stats are correct.

There is SO MUCH emotional BS to unpack there.

First, UIL, unless the coach of the team you cover asks for your stats, doesn't give a flying fuck about your stats.

Second, the quarterback or tailback or wide receiver (or defensive end if you're so geeked out as to try to track tackles etc. on your own) doesn't care if you're a yard or two different from what his coaches have on numbers.

Third, the people reading your story may not care, and unless they're on either Hudl or MaxPreps (AND MaxPreps has full stats) they don't even know!

Fourth, some of your fellow editors and writers don't give a total flying fuck about our own stats past the final score and who scored what, when, and how.

Fifth, all of the above is, IMO, an ego trip, for the reasons mentioned.

Get a non-sports life.

No, maybe better yet, learn that a non-sports portion of your life can be made larger than it is now.

I know that many publishers say, whether with glee, chagrin or more complex emotions, that sports is the most important part of the community paper to many readers. Well, don't add fuel to that fire by thinking you need to be the omnipotent god of the sports pages. Besides, where down markers are spotted at and many other things is HIGHLY unscientific.

No print New York Times in 20 years? OK, and???

An interesting interview with exiting NYT CEO Mark Thompson. Or rather, compressed interview snippets from another site behind a paywall plus a second interview with neoliberals on steroids, McKinsey. The fact that Thompson thought that was a good place to visit is itself a "tell."

The reality, of course, is that the Times ain't all that, its shit does stink, and its "best news" is best news for the establishment class. That's takeaway No. 2 after the McKinsey butt-kissing.

No. 3? Thompson, though thinking editorial page editor James Bennet did need to leave over his handling of the Tom Cotton guest op-ed, applauded his hiring of the likes of all-purpose wingnut Bret Stephens and hardcore Zionist and Palestinian hater Bari Weiss.

So, Nieman, no, I really have no need to read the full, linked stuff at CNBC and pay for it, or at McKinsey and need to take a shower later. Pass.

It's stuff like this that led me to blog about how I not only wouldn't pay the current subscription fare, but to ask others if they'd pay the hiked rate.

If you want to be proud of a self-erected Overton Window, too, Mark, fine. Don't expect me to subscribe.

"Pink slime" journalism: both conservatives and liberals do it

Excellent piece by Columbia Journalism Review, following up on a report it did about the Tow Center and other folks. The biggest takeaways from CJR:

1. This problem has grown a lot since the original Tow piece.

2. Per a link to Open Secrets, although this started as a conservative to wingnut-conservative project, liberals are doing it, too. One biggie is the group behind the Shadow vote-tabulation app of infamy from the Iowa Democratic caucus. Another is Pantsuit Nation, obvious Hillbot folks. So, we're talking neoliberals. A third group also gets George Soros PAC money. (Cue wingnut conspiracy theories.)

3. What CJR doesn't mention is that, primarily for capital reasons, leftists aren't. (That said, CJR's general failure to distinguish liberal and leftist is itself an issue.)

4. The original "pink slime" wasn't necessarily partisan as much as it was cheap hypercapitalism.

5. Wanna know who's doing this in Texas? Page 11 of this link. Metric Media and Local News Network are conservative as are Record.

Missing from the CJR account is the problem with this much capitalism sloshing in the system. Missing are accounts of how doing these fake news sites rather than spending this money on ad buys further undercuts community newspapers which both duopoly parties give lip service to helping.

The battle to unionize the Snooze, aka the Dallas Morning News

Over at the Texas Observer, Gus Bova peeks at the battle to unionize the Snooze. This is the same A.H. Belo of the infamous ad "welcoming" JFK to Dallas, of a current editorial page editor being a former Shrub Bush flunky and all sorts of wingnuttia in between, with the occasional non-wingnut columnist claiming to be a librul. And I haven't even mentioned homophobe Rod Dreher's time there.

What prompted the drive and put it into gear, he notes, was a round of layoffs last year with FIFTEEN MINUTES NOTICE. That was then followed this year, during the early COVID days, by cutting pay up to 17 percent, but without an hours cut. With the pay cut less than 20 percent, employees couldn't file for partial unemployment bennies. Without the hours cut, they couldn't find other PT work so easily.

As for its antiunion history? Bova details the decades of that, as well. And, not just at the Snooze, but at other former Belo properties.

And, that's a key here. The Snooze and related Dallas properties is all Belo has. No other papers. No teevee. Just the Snooze and other Dallas paper products, plus the marketing division that it finally separated.

Bova gets a thing or two wrong, though. I wouldn't have considered the Snooze Texas' leading paper over much of its history. And going back more than 29 years, I wouldn't even consider it DALLAS' best paper. And, the closure of the Dallas Times Herald, which WAS No. 1, reinforces all the other bad behavior Bova paints. (Beyond that, the Snooze didn't start winning most of its awards until after the Times Herald was folded.)

At D Mag, Eric Celeste and Jim Schutze (nutbar alert!) weigh in as well. No, seriously, it's nutbar on Schutze's part, who says he "ratted out" a similar attempt at the Dallas Observer shortly before he was let go.

Really.

Celeste is generally sympathetic.

Schutze? Sympathetic to the degree it gives him a new tool for kicking the Snooze in the nads, and that's it.

Bye-bye to Big Jim Chionsini

I was following some rabbit trails online after getting a LinkedIn notice about a friend there (and acquaintance IRL) having a work anniversary, when I wondered why she'd left her previous paper.

I then found myself refreshed that, as I couldn't remember the name of "Colorado County Citizen," there's also a "Banner Pass"in Columbus, Texas. And, on the front page of their latest e-edition, I noticed a header near the bottom of the page. And thought I recognized the mug.

"Citizen owner passes away, 74."

Yes, Big Jim, per a tribute note at Granite's website.

First, my condolence to daughter Brandi.

Second, does she take over Granite and reunite them with her Fenice papers, split about three years ago? Could be interesting.

Third, I think of an utterance of his that I heard, among other places, from the mouth of thrown-off central Texas publisher Dennis Phillips: "You can do anything with one more ad," or words to that effect.

I did learn things in my time with Granite. That includes things about newspapers as a business. Many of them aren't unique to Granite, from what I've learned since then.

Basically, folks, if you have a small town community newspaper, and it's not owned by some big chain, whether publicly traded or not, it's still owned by quasi-corporate folks.

First, for tax and other reasons, each paper in the "family newspapers" chain is separately incorporated. I presume, per an analogy I've used before, that even though every State Farm or similar insurance chain office is "separately owned and operated," nonetheless, the ownership is structured so the newspaper owners, or the corporate suites in Bloomington, Illinois, have final control and say-so.

Second, because of that, if you're the local newspaper publisher, the shit flows downhill when there's problems. And, note, we're talking about the 2020 newspaper world. At the same time, the rosy smell of success doesn't often linger in the home office without being claimed by HQ.

Third, what the hell are all the fees you're billed for on your monthly statement? And, are they all really justified? As far as things like ad-building services for smaller companies, uh, no, probably not. But, the thing is, some of that stuff, you get charged whether you use it or not.

Fourth? In today's world, the individual newspaper will suffer first, HQ second.

Not understanding the Gainesville Daily Register, part 1

I've been in my current spot in the newspaper world around five or six months. The Register is one of three dailies in the area, along with the Denton Wrecked-Chronic and the Sherman-Denison We Merged Something But Why, that are about equidistant.

When Sherman-Denison merged, and some newspapers were actually still expanding, I didn't get why it didn't make itself a seven-day daily and stake a territory as the only seven-day in the region and muscle out Denton and the Snooze. Of course, today, it's owned by Craphouse. Nuff ced.

The DRC, or DWC in my version, sold its soul to the Snooze, what, a full 20 years ago now? Man, hadn't realized it was that long ago. A few years ago, and probably a few years too late, it realized how badly it had sold its soul and bought it back, or partially so. Just 6K subscribers? WOWZA.

So, I've tackled those before, including, in the last year, the DWC's adhole woes. And the S-D Herald-Craphouse.

So, on to Gainesville.

And, as it turns out, this will be the first of two posts. Both will be about not getting it as an individual paper and not getting it on it being a CNHI outlet.

This goes to its deadlines on putting the paper to bed, apparent inflexibility with such, and the weirdness of such.

The Register publishes Tuesday-Saturday. (Well, they did before the coronavirus made them triweekly. Per Poynter, more than 30 papers across the country have folded due to COVID issues, and that beyond the regular hoofbeats, and almost all these papers are CNHI. It's like they realize that they have no more furloughing room.) They actually put the paper to bed Monday-Friday. Which is fine. Some five-day dailies are morning, and some are still "noonish" / afternoon ones.

But, they put it to bed EARLY.

I kind of wondered when I noticed that, with local basketball, a lot of stuff in print, like Tuesday night basketball games, didn't come out until Thursday.

But I had that confirmed on primary election day.

The lead story in the Wednesday paper? Early results, as in vote by mail and early voting in person.

Paper NOT held for election day results. Those went in Thursday. And, in the top two races in the county, district judge and sheriff, the leader in early voting lost the election. Therefore, you're confusing people by running only early returns, IMO.

"See the website," you may say. What percentage of their print subscribers are website subscribers as well? (The answer is all, but ... as usual with CNHI, a weird issue. Unlike many small papers, the Register — and presumably this is CNHI corporate — does NOT charge the same price for print + digital as for digital only. That said, it doesn't price the print + version that much more; it also does not offer a print-only. As I said, this is CNHI.)

Anyway, the final (with an oopsie of sorts) local returns were in by 10 p.m. IMO, you would run a brief version of that for the top races in print. OTOH, if you're a daily paper that no longer owns your own printing press (why not?) you maybe can't get a late print job done. Or, since I believe they "throw" their papers in-county as well as outside via USPS, they may have to be on a post office loading dock by a certain time.

So, why not go digital only?

Because the print + price isn't that much more, if you're older and want a newspaper in your hands.

The corporate semi-Solons in Alabama probably claim they're offering the best of both worlds.

I'd say no. Their subscription rates don't offer that big of a discount.

Plus, back to this and election news.

If I don't have a subscription and I've used up my five free online stories per month — or five per browser, and Internet tricks, etc. — "see Facebook," you may say!

Exactly. And on the election, if you're posting pictures of printouts of election returns from the county clerk's office, then, with stuff like that, I say ...

"Why subscribe"?

I'll have a part two in the future about some other issues.

Speaking of? Now that it's triweekly, today's issue, WITH the four pages of TV guide that they still continue to print on Thursdays and will be tackled more in the next post? It was a 10-pager WITH those teevee pages. Six without.

Bully for bulldog in Denton, I thought, but it wasn't; Denton Record Chronicle struggles, touts e-editions

Couple of Saturdays ago, when I was at a Wally in Denton, Texas, I saw a bulldog edition of the Denton Record Chronicle.

Page count was at least 28 pages, if I remember correctly. Adhole was 40 percent or better.

Then, I thought, I'd better check. Maybe it's cut to six days a week, or less.

And it had.

Twice a week in print right now.

Will it bounce back at some point?

It could, but ...

BUT ...

Not just for it, but all newspapers that have whacked print schedules?

The "bounceback" is going to have to be an active initiative. At some point, you're going to have to say, "We're just going to have to add back some of those print days."

Maybe you whack pages. Maybe you whack print run and only circulate locally (as in Denton County, no Cooke County, Wise County or elsewhere) on some of the re-adopted print days.

But, the longer you wait, the less likely you are to pick back up many of your print customers.

If I were the DRC?

The weekender, and a Wednesday with store flyers, would be the biggies.

Monday stays dead. Tuesday, a local edition. Friday a local edition and you push heavy for entertainment ads as movie theaters start reopening, etc.

That said, Poynter says e-editions, long an ugly duckling in the papers world, are the hot new thing, citing places like the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which is bigger than the DRC, and enabling it to do a statewide edition.

OTOH, the idea of making multiple e-editions per day based on things like breaking sports news? At big papers, especially, that can involve extra time. Plus, sports has never carried the freight in terms of display ads. So, IMO, editors and publishers still have a ways to go on e-edition smartness. And, as Poynter notes, it's still an open question as to how much of the freight e-edition ads can carry versus what they do in print, even if it's an e-edition only day.

==

Compare this with the Casper Star-Tribune, which I'm guessing has about the same potential circ, that is population reach area, as the DRC, but surely a higher actual circ. It is just now making the decision to contract print days, but it's only dropping from seven to five. 

==

Update: Sometime before spring 2022, the DRC went to just weekly in print.

Seventy years of newspaper bleed-out, documented

This excellent post, with LOTS of detailed graphics, shows how newspapers have been losing ad share for 70 years, though the fall off the cliff didn't happen until the Great Recession, per this chart:

Interesting trends to note. Per the author, there was a slow taper from 1950 to the early 1970s, then a stabilization, but the decline starts again and runs until the Great Recession, when it picks up steam.

Almost all of that goes to the boob tube. Radio and mags stay steady, basically, until that late 2000-oughts period.

Here's a chart showing why that chart above starts in 1950:

Circ per capita peaked in 1950 and it's been all downhill since then. And, the resume of the slide in the first graph? That happened shortly before total circ peaked. You'll note that its decline also accelerated with the ad decline.

This chart combines the two:

So how did papers hang on that long? Benedict Evans says boosting page count to boost total ad sell, which papers that remained standing as more and more big city papers were going to just one daily, or at least losing one of the three or more they might have in really big cities, in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The Net hit hard when it was able to deliver quality as well as quantity on online ads, and undercut newspapers as what he calls a "light industry."

Look through the whole thing.

StartleGram, Snooze, continue to have COVID ad struggles

Last Thursday, I saw both papers on the racks in their Red River Valley exurban editions.

And, boy.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or StartleGram? First, it's been cut from the previous 20 pages down to 16. Hey, that made it 25 percent, or nearly so, on adhole.

As normal, I count obits as part of the adhole. Obits and extended classys with several public notices made up most of that. Display ads were less than three-quarters of a page, or less than 5 percentage points of that adhole.

Over to the Snooze. Normal, or post-COVID normal (can't remember where it was at in February) 30 pages on page count.

ELEVEN percent. The great majority was non-display. Now, it didn't get lucky, unlike the Cowtowners; no big raft of legal notices. But, that was "lucky" in Fort Worth. This is normal.

Still can't believe there are no talks, or rumors of talks, of a full or semi-full JOA.

The Associated Press in Black and White: Causing a controversy by trying to dodge one?

OK, so the AP says that the Stylebook  now says to do what many individual papers have done on a house style for years: Capitalize "Black."

That said, it said it would decide in about a month whether or not to capitalize "white."

CNN didn't wait. It said capitalize both. And I agree.

The issue is complicated by "Hispanic" being capitalized, but in the past, neither "black" nor "white."

As further illustration, last year's entire Stylebook listing on race-related language usage is here.

As for AP's current decision, if it's a legitimate idea to cogitate a month before a decision, do you really need a month? I think not.

So, is this a duck and cover instead? I think so.

The better-yet solution? Lowercase "hispanic." Oh, that neologism "Latinx"? Throw it away. It's a print media bit of virtue signalling. Does anybody really say aloud the word "Latinex"? Thought not. And, no, I'm not alone in saying that.

Update: Kwame Anthony Appiah brings his philosopher's hat to the fray to say "uppercase White." Why? It removes privilege from a White stance, among other things. I get exactly where he is coming from.

Update 2: AP has done just as I expected and is keeping "White" lowercase. Not me. Per CNN, and per Appiah, when I remember, both "Black" and "White" get uppercase. Poynter has more. Per the piece, the AP is engaging in cultural essentialism. The new African diaspora in the US has not necessarily had all of the same experiences. It's that fact, as well as the skin color of his mom, that led some Blacks to ask if Barack Obama was one of them. Within the New World, many Caribbean blacks who have emigrated to the US don't claim to have entirely common cultural experiences with Blacks born in the US. Ask Colin Powell and others.

VP for Standards John Daniszewski also claims "there is less support for capitalizing White." Really? Per the CNN link that said it would capitalize both? Per the feedback you've gotten over the past four weeks? "Less support" is purely relative, not absolute, in this case.

CJR follows AP, or rather preceded it, I think, on a house style. Whatever; it's wrong, too. And, as regular readers here know, it's not the first time I've found it wrong by any means. And, contra a claim by Dallas sports teevee talking head Dale Hansen, it, like most media (self included) doesn't like to admit its mistakes.

Anyway, on this and other blogs, and in all likelihood at any professional sites, this person will capitalize both.

TV, not just papers, is bleeding ad money

This excellent post, with LOTS of detailed graphics, backs up a blog post of mine from last year, when talking to a programmer at an entry-level broadcast network TV station. He said that, especially on news, TV advertising hadn't taken hits.

Wrong.

Now, to be sure, TV's degree of hit hasn't (yet) been as harsh as newspapers. But, in terms of percentage drop? The Net really accelerated about the time the Great Recession hit, and it hit TV as hard as it did radio.

Calling out the NYT on its Overton Window

So, the Old Gray Lady said goodbye to James Bennet as NYT op-ed head last week. He won't be missed. Will his temporary or permanent successor reign in Bret Stephens or Bari Weiss? Probably not. Move Teapot Tommy Friedman out to pasture? Unlikely.

That's the theme of Kenan Malik's commentary at The Guardian.

Shorter, and sharpened, Malik?

The New York Times has erected its own Overton Window for the past three years. He mentions Stephens; dunno why he passed by Weiss, unless ultra-Zionism isn't on his radar screen, or unless he felt  Stephens was good enough as representative of a class. (Mondoweiss notes that Israeli guest op-eds have had Tom Cotton angles toward Palestinians before, like Schmuel Rosner, one of four such in 2018. One of them was by Stephens.)

The column has other points, though. Yeah, Bennet resigned. Riffing on Malik, this isn't the first time he hadn't read a controversial column, though. So, did the NYT push? Shouldn't it require its editorial page editor to personally read all potential guest columns before they run?

That said, Malik only touches on the tip of the problem. The NYT has long had NOBODY representing blue-collar liberalism on its pages. It's NEVER had anybody representing left-liberalism or beyond.

So, not only has it moved its Overton Window rightward with Stephens and Weiss, it created its own Overton Window in the first place.

If people would stop subscribing to the damn thing, since subscriptions, and especially digital ones, are an ever-bigger part of its revenue, maybe it would listen up.

Not likely, but maybe.

A way for the feds to bail out local print media, no strings

Poynter has the simply brilliant details.

Have the feds spend some advertising dollars on local print media. Avoid Ad Council, avoid big TV stations, avoid social media.

Sure, there might be a bit more overhead.

But, as Steve Waldman notes, folks still trust their local paper more than social media. Or than national media.

And, right now, with COVID, such trustworthiness is needed.

The death of the printing press next?

As people in the newspaper biz know, more and more community-type non-daily papers are simply shutting down. More and more small dailies, and even some big ones, have cut back to a non-daily print schedule. Some 30 have outrightly closed, and that doesn't count non-COVID, "regular" declining newspaper industry closures; I know of two this year within 100 miles of me.

So, printing press owners have fewer customers, and the ones remaining have fewer print jobs.

Meaning that printing press owners are themselves hurting.

And getting cutthroat in some of the discounts they'll offer.

A decade ago, it was still a commonplace-type observation that many small newspapers were being bought in part for their printing presses.

Now? What if you bought a press, whether by itself or with the "cover buy" of a group of newspapers, and you've still got outstanding debt on that? Yeah, you feel you have to keep your press running, but ... if you discount enough to take new jobs, you're running harder to stand in place.

IMO, it might be better to not chase new jobs for less money, and if necessary, file for the Paycheck Protection Program. If you qualify, the next step would to see about refinancing that loan, maybe? The next step after that, or maybe before, might be to at least start some discreet feelers for possible sale.

Newspapers, coronavirus, and the dropoff in special ROP, non-ROP and ancillary ad-like revenue

What I am talking about, for the layperson, and for newspaper folks who might "aha" if I used different words, at least on the second half of the second line?

First,  for the layperson, ROP is "display ads." Or what somebody might even call "picture ads" at a non-daily newspaper if, were there office open right now, and you were to say "I want to buy an ad" and the person helping you might respond, "Picture ad or word ad?"

OK, non-ROP is those "word ads."

Classifieds, in other words.

And ROP is picture ads.

Special ROP is special sections inside a newspaper.

Everybody who knows something about newspapers, including the intelligent layperson, knows something about the ROP dropoff. Let's tackle the rest, starting with special ROP.

Right now, spring/summer travel, bridal and in a month, graduations would be among these special sections.

Travel? When it's unclear what will reopen, and things like musical and sports events, in some cases, or entertainment sites like Disneyland, people are saying "not until fall," you simply can't sell ads to a section like that.

Bridal? Special sections there face similar problems. You can't sell ads about honeymoon destinations.

Graduations? Small high schools will do the best they can, so non-daily papers won't hurt so much. But larger daily papers, if they have had grads specials in the past? Not right now.

Now, to classifieds.

They're off for several reasons.

One is that, to the degree newspapers still have a help wanted section, there's not a lot of people hiring right now. This is hitting all papers alike, from big regional dailies down to community weeklies.

Another is hitting from small community dailies on down.

Nobody's holding garage sales right now, in what should be prime season in the southern tier of the U.S. And, at small dailies and nondailies, at this time of the year, ordinarily that might make up a fair chunk of the classys.

There are a few other areas that have also been hit on the classys page, but that's the biggest I can think of.

The ancillary?

Obits, and similar.

Obits are hurting to a degree because public burials aren't happening right now. Because of that, especially at larger papers that charge by the word or by the column inch? I'm venturing a 10 percent drop there. Obits are shortening and some are moving more toward extended death notices.

On the other side of the spectrum, many non-dailies still don't charge for births, engagements and weddings. But some do. Certainly, small dailies do, and so do mid-sized ones. (I'm surprised large dailies haven't started this. Surely there's a few Buffett cigar butts there.)

Kids are still being born. (That may be different nine months from now, of course.)

But, weddings are on hold right now, because ... where do you have them? where is the honeymoon going to be? Etc.

1619 Project: The Pulitzers slouch toward Gomorrah

The only reason I can figure that the 1619 Project won a Pulitzer, despite both scads of historical incorrectness AND crappy editorial oversight at the New York Slimes, as I blogged about earlier, is virtue signaling.

Like Obama winning the Nobel Piss Prize, it seems to be virtue signaling. Hannah Jones, Jake Silverstein et al won because of who they're not.

The real Ida B. Wells, who got a special Pulitzer citation, is eminently deserving. Nikole Hannah Jones, who has the Twitter slugline of Ida Bae Wells? Not so much.

There is a bit of silver lining or two. The award was under commentary, which means OPINION, for Jones' opening essay in the project.

On the third hand, commentary should still be factually based, and this is not, and it still carries the stains of the whole project, because it serves as a framing device.

Alden Capital wants to be saved from itself and from its hypocrisy, schadenfreude and petard-hoisting

Ben Smith, formerly of ButtFeet and now the New York Times, notes that Alden Capital head Heath Freeman wants Facebook and Google to pay it more for the news they buy from it.

There's several problems here, per the second line of the header.

Above all with the Denver Post, anybody who knows anything about the media, about Alden Capital and how the Venn diagrams of "Alden" plus "media ownership" and "Alden" plus "news writing" are nowhere near the same, know that Alden really is producing almost no news. That's because, even though its newspapers are generally profitable, it's cut them to the bone and beyond, even worse than Craphouse (excuse me, New Gannett), and only to milk them because other things owned by Alden suck. So, that's the petard hoisting.

The hypocrisy is, of course, that were Alden to get paid more, it wouldn't reinvest it in its newspapers. See above.

The schadenfreude is the Alden connection to how newspapers got here in the first place.

In the middle 1990s, when the Internet started looming on the horizon, major papers and the AP started wondering how this might affect them. Well, the AP board of directors decided that the "TV model" showed that advertising would be fine and no online subscriptions needed. This, of course, ignored that pay cable channels existed already then and had for at least 15 years before that.

Now, here's the specifics of the schadenfreude.

Dean Singleton was chair of the board of AP at the time.

Deano, as I like to call him, as many know, owned Media News, or Media Snooze, an early "Chainsaw Al" guy. More on that in a moment. Media Snooze, as part of its growth + woes, became part of Digital First Media, or as it's known here, Dead Fucking Media. The whole conglomerate became part of Alden.

There's your schadenfreude.

So, go fuck yourself, Heath.

And, the additional bit of hypocrisy? "Chainsaw Al" Deano criticizing Alden almost exactly a year ago.

Jay Rosen's naive, idealistic cororavirus coverage ideas

Rosen may make a great prof, but as I've noted before, he's not in the trenches, and ideas before coming from him have shown that he doesn't fully get the trenches.

Ditto on his five ideas for coronavirus media coverage.

Idea No. 1 would require upsetting editorial as well as corporate mindsets. It would also probably, if done on a big enough scale, require the DOJ suspending antitrust laws during at least the "new normal." Funny that Rosen doesn't consider any of this.

Flip side? Jay, imagine this thing called the "Associated Press." But yet, larger dailies and daily chains want to do their own stories even though, via the AP and some collaboration with it, what you propose already exists.

Idea No. 1, problem 2? Rosen wanting to call in big philanthropic organizations. Seeing the Texas Trib upfront at its 10-year anniversary, Jay, I can tell you that, maybe that will help, but probably not as much as you think, and not without problems itself.

Idea No. 2? It's called data-driven journalism or similar, and it's being done as we speak. Weekly, if not daily, updates on testing, along with cases and fatalities. Really, Jay?

Idea No. 3? This is at best about semi-iffy news analysis. A lot of independent websites have noted we may NEVER fully go back to the old normal. And if we do get there, nobody has a good idea of when.

Idea No. 4? Some teevee outlets have cut away from Trump pressers in medias res. So, this is to some degree happening there. Print folks? As the likes of Lakoff know, never printing a lie in the first place, rather than printing it and doing news analysis, is the best way to refute it.

BUT ... there's this thing called the Interwebz, Jay. If readers of, say, the librul San Francisco Chronicle want to read the blow-by-blow from Trump's latest Rose Garden speech, they'll go to the AP. (Speaking of, insert paywalls observation here.)

Idea No. 5? It would be nice, but where do you get people to do that???? Actually, Muck Rack may do it for you.

Jay Rosen isn't the biggest idiot among Gnu Media gurus. That would be Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis tied for first, and the two of them have a big lead on the pomposity.

But Rosen and Mathew Ingram would be leaders of the second tier.

More than a decade ago, Rosen opposed paywalls. Dunno his current stance, but I don't think he's ever admitted he was even partially wrong. (All four of these biggies opposed them, for that matter, and AFAIK, none have fessed up to being even partially wrong.)

Of direct relevance to his Item 1? Also more than a decade ago, Rosen proclaimed the end of media atomization. If it were only true, you wouldn't be writing about Idea 1, amirite?

Nearly a decade ago, CJR took Rosen (and even more, Shirky, Jarvis and a few others) to the cleaners, and over other things besides just opposition to paywalls. This too is directly relevant to the new round of drivel from Rosen.

I quote:

The irony, though, is that in the second decade of the twenty-first century—thanks in no small part to FON thinkers, including, sad to say, Rosen—journalism is now enslaved to a new system of production. Publishing is now possible all the time and in limitless amounts, forever and ever, amen. And, given the market system, and the way the world is, that which is possible has quickly become imperative. Suddenly, the “god” of the old twenty-four-hour news cycle looks like lovely Aphrodite compared to the remorseless Ares that is the web “production routine.” And this new enslavement—trust me here—hurts readers far more even than it does the reporters who must do the blogging, tweeting, podcasting, commenting, and word-cloud formation until all hours of the day and night. This is why, IMHO, journalism is great these days at incremental news, not so good at stepping back and grabbing hold of the narrative. In some circles, this is frowned upon. 

And, of course, since then, the push for video and other things has only made this worse. Lots to apologize for there, Rosen.

One of the biggest? Rosen's idea of network-driven news has been imploded by the biggest "network" for fake news, aka Twitter.

Finally, and also pretty directly relevant? A little over two years ago, in fellating Yascha Mounk, Rosen had a boatload of mistakes, starting with calling an op-ed column a news story. He's right about avoiding the he said-she said model of journalism, but that doesn't mean calling opinion columns news stories.

Speaking of he said-she said, I don't think Rosen has really stepped wider than the two traditional American political parties on that issue. The fellating of Mounk would also support that.