"Commie" paper's "owners" get sucker-punched, in part by selves

That's my take on what appears to be the definite hiatus and possible death of the Akron Devil Strip, as reported by Laura Hazard Owen at Niemen Lab.

It billed itself as Akron's first "community-owned magazine," hence the "Commie" in scare quotes. More specifically, per a presumed quote from its website by Owen?

It claimed to be the “first community-owned local news cooperative in the United States.”

OK, we'll get to those "owners" being in scare quotes in just a minute.

Whoever runs its Twitter said on Oct. 15: We ain't got money. Oh, and our founder took a self-imposed sabbatical a month ago.

NOW, per Owen, we get to those "owners," who allegedly owned the "means of production," but in reality?

In becoming a co-op in 2019, The Devil Strip said its “vested co-owners” (each of whom had donated at least $330) would be able to “vote on important issues” about the magazine, following “the ‘one person, one share, one vote’ principle.” But those co-owners — there were 94 of them — weren’t told The Devil Strip was in financial trouble, much less consulted on a path forward.

Oops.

I put out a trio of Tweets when reading this. First:

"Get it in writing" is a mandate in both law and journalism and it sounds like the Akron Devil Strip, and its alleged "co-owners," failed on both counts 1/x thread .@akrondevilstrip .@NiemanLab .@laurahazardowen .@mediagazer https://t.co/BRF6hpIdKX

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 19, 2021

Many of the "owners" were whining, per Owen:

In the comments of The Devil Strip’s Facebook page, readers expressed confusion: “What’s the point of a co-op if the people have no say?” one wrote. Another: “What? Not even a chance for us owners to help raise additional funds?” 

“No indication at the annual meeting over the summer of 2021 that there was concern, but no financial recap despite my request before the meeting,” another co-owner recalled.

Gee, if you'd thought of something like my first Tweet, in advance?

The three remaining Devil Strip board members launched a Go Fund Me. (Of course they did.) And, despite many people saying "Fool me once ..." 60 suckers ponied up nearly $5K in the first six hours.

Tweet 2 gets to that and that sabbatical by Chris Horne.

Why would these "alleged co-owners" invest more? That said, if they DO invest more, and without contractual paperwork, alert P.T. Barnum. And who let Chris Horne get to this point in the first place? Did Knight Foundation, Lenfest, etc. have no paperwork-based accountability? 2/x

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 19, 2021

But wait, it gets better, per Owen:

In addition to revenue from its members, The Devil Strip had received a total of $589,652 in philanthropic funding as of the end of 2020, according to its Donors page. Some of the larger contributors to that pool of funds included the Knight Foundation, which gave a total of $225,000 as of the end of 2020, and the Lenfest Foundation on behalf of the Facebook Journalism Project, which gave $100,000. Any 2021 donations are not listed on The Devil Strip’s site.

Gee, I'd like some of that, I said.

.@knightfdn .@lenfestinst Will you send me money to start a co-op newspaper? I'll give you the details later. 3/x

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 19, 2021

So, Knight, Lenfest etc. got suckered by someone who probably has bipolar disorder as part of what's behind him, and at the same time, were apparently suckers themselves with their seed money? Got it.

Meanwhile, who would trust the three remaining members of the board of directors, the ones who organized the Go Fund Me? Presumably, they had a hand in persuading Hodge to escort himself out the door and said nothing. Presumably, they had at least a glimpse of the financial problems and said nothing. (Or else they knew nothing, troubling itself.) They talk about recovering access to emails. Had Hodge locked them out? They say nothing. They promised the 60 new suckers nothing new in terms of legal language, AFAIK.

And, was there a need for it? Sure, the Beacon Journal is Gannett, but there's some sort of weekly, an alt-weekly, I guess, and a monthly lifestyles mag, per Wiki. Well, no, the Journal was a Black paper, not an alt-weekly, Google says, but it may have folded. There's also a non-alt-weekly which looks pretty decent on its website, AND a university paper.

That's a crowded journalism environment to be entering in today's world.

And, speaking of that apparently now shuttered Black paper? In the second menu bar, the black-stripped one, the Devil Strip has a link to "Black-owned businesses in Akron." But, on the "About" page? The staff you're invited to meet are all White. And, judging by them mainly having humanities degrees if not journalism ones? Upper-middle class parents. City-Data says Blacks are 30 percent of Akron itself and 15 percent of Summit County. People of other races or identifying as multiracial are another 12 percent of the city and 10 percent of the county. (There are no Hispanics or Asians on the Devil Strip staff, either.)

The "mag"? Its content at its website? From what I saw, it was written for exactly their own community, not the Akron community.

That would lead to the final question, and one purely rhetorical: What community were you expecting or wanting to "own" this paper? Back at Nieman, Joshua Benton has your number.

Seriously. Sounds like a whole lot of suckerdom out there.

I'm White myself, and have a professional graduate degree, but by money, economic class? My parents were nowhere near upper middle class. And, I don't identify with those people.

Details of how the new Craphouse — Gatehouse — guts papers, with maybe a touch of naivete?

An Atlantic staff writer, Elaine Godfrey, checks in from the scene of the crime, Burlington, Iowa, where she grew up.

The Burlington paper is still a daily since the new Gannett, aka the old Craphouse, started running it. But, in things I saw when Craphouse started paginating a paper as big as the Dallas Morning Snooze, it doesn't look so good. Bigger fonts? Check. Not even flowing the jump to fill all the space on the jump page? Don't know if that's the case in Burlington, but likely.

Being owned, not just paginated, by Craphouse?

If your paper's late (it's printed in Peoria, Illinois) you're given the number for a call center. In the Philippines.

Op-ed stuff is state and national. None regional to eastern Iowa. Local columnists mainly gone. Godfrey doesn't guess at the likely cause ... regional paginating means combo editorial pages. (Burlington is paginated down in Austin, and other pre-merger Craphouse papers from Iowa also certainly are, and possibly many post-merger "old" Gannett ones, too.

And, filling the void? As at an exurban Pittsburgh paper, Facebook groups. Largely inaccurate and rumor-driven.

OTOH, per the demographics of Burlington and Des Moines County, I had originally written that if that paper is still six-day daily, it should be cut to five-day and maybe to tri-weekly, with a well-paywalled website. Did the previous owners do that? No, Craphouse did a year-plus after buying it. County's under 40K; city under 25K; both shedding population for decades. Problem is from Craphouse's POV, any national ads or inserts it runs are harder to get for a non-daily paper. But, it should still cut to a tri-weekly. Some of this makes me wonder how proactive on web issues the Harris chain, the previous owners, were. Or were not. And, Harris owned enough decent sized dailies (started in Hutchison, Kansas) it had the money to do more earlier.

Related? Godfrey talks about being trolled by friends for a "puritanical tween" revelation in the article. What if that, re things like Burlington's demographic decline and her not discussing it, is actually part of nostalgic naivete of some soft?

Plus, the current version's website is light to nonexistent on paywalling. (I clicked around the website on different stories under four different verticals, all of them local stories, at least 10 times, and hit no paywall warnings.) If the pre-Craphouse version was that way, that also explains part of the problem. I've seen this failure for years. It STILL is, at some places, despite the ongoing decline in print ads, the ongoing price decline in digital, and computer digital dimes now being gutted by mobile digital nickels.

Also, in the past half dozen years or so, smaller family-owned chains have also been consolidating printing operations.

So, it's easy to blame all of this on Craphouse. And, a large part of it is. But, not all of it. Sorry, Elaine. And, while not justifying smaller family owned chains cutting back as well, it's part of the reality.

So, if you write another story about newspapers, Elaine, either don't focus on your own (while learning more about today's industry in general) or else take off the rose-colored glasses.

Small town Texas editors and reporters, get a non-football life, year 2!

I wrote about everything in the header, minus "year 2," a year ago.

If you click the link, you'll see the details of what prompted me. TLDR version? Small town Texas newspaper editors whose god is football, not school board meetings, thinking they need to make sure their own stats at games are more accurate than the team's.

Get a life.

Even more, get a life, since a staff assistant, even at small schools, now has an iPad tracking EVERY SINGLE PLAY with software that will produce a box score page complete with FULL stats. You'll ALSO get a complete drive-by-drive page, as good as college and pro games on ESPN.

Get a life!

Trump freak flag socks not flying this year at Texas small-town football

 

Last year, at Friday night football, one Friday, at a small Texas school, I saw what you see pictured at left.

Apparently, reality has set in this year. The same student is enrolled at the same school this year, out for football again, but in the last game I saw, injured or otherwise wearing a jersey shirt but not fully suited up. In that game, he was wearing shorts, as in the photo last year, but was wearing normal socks.

I am curious if other small-town newspaper reporters and editors have seen these.

On a related, semi-journalistic note? I had two Trump 2020 flags flying from balconies at two units in my apartment complex a year ago. Both stayed up until February or early March this year, when one came down. The other finally did in, I think, April. 

That said, the one that came down first has occasionally popped up again for a couple of days at a time. I'm not sure why.

Good-bye to Media Myth Alert

I liked W. Joseph Campbell when I first added him to my blogroll here and elsewhere.

But, he's become tiresome. Then worse.

The tiresome? Self-alleged, self-proclaimed media corrector Campbell loves falling back on a couple of tropes, namely, how the media get it wrong that Uncle Walter Cronkite forced LBJ out of Vietnam and how the media get it wrong about the media, not John Sirica, the Supreme Court and Congress, forcing Nixon to resign.

I'm sure there's plenty of other media myths. Campbell rarely touches them, though he has discussed early era Yellow Journalism reality and myth.

That's bad enough.

The worse?

Some of his recent posts seem to have one foot in wingnut world, or at a minimum, one foot in fellow traveler world.

His post about Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, in which he chides USA Today for calling Afghanistan Biden's Katrina, with Campbell then saying it's much worse, is the last straw.

Campbell can't be bothered to mention that Trump negotiated the withdrawal, Trump met with the Taliban for these negotiations, Trump set the withdrawal date, then Trump accelerated the originally planned pace of US troops withdrawing.

Unions at Texas papers: an update

Newsrooms at the Dallas Snooze, Fort Worth Startlegram and Austin Stateless all opted sometime back to join the News Guild and fight for unionization. Surprisingly to a degree on first read, by its past history, but really, not, negotiations are going best at the one-pony Snooze, versus Craphouse/New Gannett in Austin and McClatchy/hedge fund in Cowtown, reports Gus Bova.

The Snooze may figure, with the former Belo owning only it and its limping offspring like Al Dia, that it's got nothing to win by pissing off remaining staff as it continues to work to become 21st century digital first after multiple past failures on that front.

McClatchy, for all its good stuff on not following other major chains on all foreign policy reporting, appears to have been a bit red-ass on labor stuff even before the hedge takeover. Craphouse (Gatehouse), the real driver of "New Gannett," is notorious as a crappy workplace, so no surprise there.

Waiting for CJR and Jay Rosen to do some self-reporting

 Columbia Journalism Review is often a very good overseer over what's what in today's media world.

But, it's not perfect, as I've blogged about more than once. That includes earlier this year noting that it went down a post-truth rabbit hole over COVID, had claimed last year that early-days Voice of America did NOT engage in propaganda, had language non-maven Merrill Perlman commit a paired doozy of etymological-related errors and ... that's not all.

In 2019, I accused it of pulling its punches on Zionism issues. Long ago, I issued a shark-jumping accusation about its bromance for I Fucking Love Science. 

Some of those aren't too bad, but some are. The VOA and Zionism ones in particular are serious.

And, it's getting dinged again, and will further in the future if it doesn't write about its own journalism school's massive grifting at the master's level, and that's per the journalism school's own website, via part of a Slate story on master's-degree grifting in general. Slate, in turn, referenced a Wall Street Journal piece on MFA programs in general.

First, the first degree offered? Laughable, and laughable for even more reasons than Slate lists.

NO master's degree in journalism should be an MS rather than an MA. Journalism ain't a science. Period and end of story.

OK, now, the stuff that Slate did list, starting with that More Shitty degree.

NO "master's degree" should be a nine and one-half month project. Period. But, as Slate notes, there's little regulation for what lipstick you can paint on something and call it a master's degree.

Third, $80K for tuition and "fees" which probably aren't itemized is laughable even with NYC costs of living.

BUT! Per the WSJ piece, if you're running low on money, university president Lee Bollinger will hire you as a dog walker. No, really!

But, it's not just Columbia.

Across town, at NYU, home of media critic Rosen, the WSJ piece notes a master's in publishing had enrolled students with an average debt of $116K and income of $42K. The piece was July 8 and as of 10 days later, bupkis on Rosen's Twitter feed.

And, Rosen, I've kicked you in the past, too, most recently over naivete on ideas for COVID coverage. Long before that, I kicked his ass for kissing Yascha Mounk's tuchis. And, long ago, we had Rosen the paywall hater.

In reality? Rosen and CJR ain't biting the hand that feeds them while impoverishing students. (CJR and the individuals involved in the past have never offered the slightest apology.)