Editor Feedback - ADN Press-Release Post Follow Up

Nut Shell:  Printing verbatim press releases with minimum citation is NOT Anchorage Daily News policy.

My July 4 post on a Department of Transportation press release that was printed in the Anchorage Daily News almost verbatim picked up a few comments including one that linked to a blog post about a columnist fired by the Kansas City Star.

"[A]fter editors discovered he had submitted more than a dozen columns that were nearly verbatim copies of press releases. Now, Penn is suing McClatchy Newspapers Inc., the Star's owner, for defamation. He's seeking $25,000 and punitive damages."

Since McClatchy also owns the Anchorage Daily News, this was becoming a bigger story.  Actually, I had started to write with questions about how the new airport development in the press release related to the proposed landswap between the airport and the Municipality that would give the airport part of the Coastal Trail.  Before posting I saw the press release published as a news item in the ADN, I refocused the post to the issue of handling press releases as news. 

But when I learned, through the comment, about the other McClatchy paper firing a columnist over this, it seemed I should contact the ADN and ask them about their policy on this and any comments they might have about the Kansas City Star columnist.  I emailed editor Pat Dougherty mentioning the post and the comment with the link to the Kansas City Star firing.

Even though I'd emailed him after 5pm, Dougherty responded in detail within a couple of hours.  He pointed out, legitimately, that it would have been nice if I had contacted him before posting.

He wrote that he agreed that

"the attribution in that story should have been higher and more precise. . .

 I also agree that all the composition should have been our own, except
for something used in direct quotes.

If we had done that, I don't think the generic bylining would have
been an issue. After all, in choosing to publish it, we are taking
responsibility for it. That's why we would include a byline. "

He also wrote:

"Prompted by your column, we discussed this issue among editors here
today and agreed that we would have a specific discussion about
appropriate and inappropriate practices with the reporter involved in
this case, followed by a general written reminder to the staff about
our standards and expectations."

He wrote that there are cost factors in using staff time to rewrite and fact check press releases so that they are really ADN created news articles.  One option they considered was an online space for press releases:

". . .we created a spot on our website called "Bulletin Board." The idea was to
post raw press releases that we thought were of interest to at least
some of our readers but that did not meet the threshold for use of
staff time. The fact is there are a lot of lesser tidbits of news we
get that don't justify journalistic handling. Here's an example: press
release says the road to Wonder Lake is open to private cars. It's
unfortunate that the general public may not get that information from
the newspaper if we can't have a reporter spend the time to say
essentially the same thing, to the same level of depth, in different
words. Now if we did make that effort in that example, you are smart
enough to understand what it really represents. The newspaper story
isn't saying the road to Wonder Lake is open -- we don't know that
because we haven't gone to Denali to check the road. What the
newspaper is saying is that someone who works for the park service
says the road is open. Whether the park service says that in a press
release, a phone call or an email is pretty much a distinction without
a difference.

Primarily because of tight staffing with summer vacations etc., the
Bulletin Board effort has languished. If I conclude that the benefit
to our readers is worth the effort, I may revive it. It's just one
more small way in which we newspaper people are having to solve
problems today that we could have solved more easily in the past with
more staff or money."

[I couldn't find anything about the Denali road being open to Wonder Lake, but the Park Service did post last week its "Final Vehicle Management Plan for Denali National Park & Preserve."  Comment period until July 30.]

I like the Bulletin Board idea.  It seems best to just identify items as press releases and print them verbatim.  The idea of rewriting them seems a waste of time, since it's the same unevaluated content the organization submitted, just in different words.  The key is to let the reader know the source and what you did with it.

As Dougherty went on to discuss the Kansas City Star situation,  he elaborated on the problems of working with press releases:

I am skeptical of the claims of the former KC Star person. You
describe him here as a reporter. I thought he was a columnist. [I used the wrong word, Dougherty was right.]  The difference between those two jobs matters hugely. The issue of rewriting press releases, or rewriting anything, should never come up with a columnist, whose job it is to write his own opinions or
observations. If he was a columnist and he was re-writing anything, he
ought to be fired. Period. If he was a reporter, the situation could
have been somewhat less black and white. Lots of low-level news
stories start from press releases. Reporters are constantly under
pressure to determine just how much time a given story is worth, and
to spend just that much time and no more. That can put a reporter
close to the line. Every newspaper editor is well aware of that
pressure and the proximity of that line -- but editors expect a
reporter to know better than to cross it.The pressures at the Star,
I'm sure, are not materially different from those at the ADN or, for
that matter, Channel 2, the Anchorage Press or the Alaska Dispatch.
There may have been some corner-cutting by KC reporters, but I don't
believe that was a condoned practice at the newspaper. I guess we'll
have to wait and see how that case turns out.

As a blogger without a journalism background, I'm continuing to learn.  I've generally not been good about calling people about stories beforehand.   I can see how someone  could call the original post  'gotcha' blogging, which isn't my intent.  Adding Dougherty's response - that this isn't how the ADN wants their reporters doing things - to the original would have made a better post.   Watching ADN reporters - particularly Lisa Demer during the Alaska corruption trials and in Juneau - I know that she's on the phone a lot calling and checking.  That's something I need to do more often.  While interviews are often used in academic research - my background - in the actual writing, one tends to cite written sources mostly.  That's an explanation, not an excuse. 

I also appreciate Dougherty's quick and thorough responses to my emails.  Dougherty also sent a Kansas City Star article on the firing of their columnist which adds more information than the original link that Anonymous left in the comment section.

Penn alleged that using press releases without attribution was a common practice at The Star and even was part of his training.

That sentence was in both links to the KC Star firing, but the next ones, which raised red flags for me, were new.

“The widespread practice in journalism is to treat such press releases as having been voluntarily released by their authors into the flow of news with the intention that the release will be reprinted or published, and preferably with no or minimal editing,” the suit alleged. “As such, attribution as to the authorship of such news releases is typically not expected by the author, nor offered by journalists who receive them.”

If this were true, the widespread practice would be to deceive the public into thinking press releases from various organizations are actually news stories written by the paper's reporters and columnists.  A friend reminded me of the controversy six years ago when television stations played, as news stories, corporate and government made video news releases (VNRs) without attribution.  The FCC ruled TV stations playing VNRs "must clearly disclose to members of their audiences the nature, source and sponsorship of the material."

Dougherty's discussion on how much time it takes reporters to rewrite press releases also brought to mind last weekend's This American Life episode on Journatic,  a company that creates local news stories for newspapers, using outsourced reporters as far away as the Philippines.  Readers have no idea that the stories aren't written by local reporters.  The piece discusses the economic reasons smaller papers are tempted to buy cheap, outsourced, local stories.  Journatic claimed papers got more local coverage that way.  But a Journatic reporter said he found he wasn't as careful about fact checking because of the low pay he gets per article and because he's so far away from the towns he's writing about.

I also asked Dougherty if the ADN had its editorial policy publicly available.  His response was:

We don't have a written ethics policy. We expect good ethics and good
judgment. What we have said in writing is that any issue that raises
ethical questions, in which the right course of action is not clear,
should be brought up with editors. In cases where precedent is not
instructive, the editors will sort out what course of action is
appropriate.

I would note that the Daily News has gone decades without an ethical
scandal. To some degree, that's probably a matter of good luck, but to
a far greater degree it's the result of good judgment by the staff,
from top to bottom.

Presumably, that's why the ADN hires people with degrees in journalism - they learned the skills and the standards in school.  They come with the code of ethics already embedded as  Henry Mintzberg writes about employees who come to organizations already trained:

"Standardization of skills (as well as knowledge), in which different work is coordinated by virtue of the related training the workers have received (as in medical specialists - say a surgeon and an anesthetist in an operating room –responding almost automatically to each other’s standardized procedures)"

Journalists should already know ethics codes such as The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics with its four main headings:

• Seek Truth and Report It
• Minimize Harm
• Act Independently
• Be Accountable

Presumably a newspaper like the ADN can rely on a code like that.  But the New York Times has its own, very detailed Policy on Ethics in Journalism.   Some would argue that the NYT rules are so detailed that they restrict flexibility. 

I remember reading in my first graduate class, that some organizations want to give employees as much flexibility as possible by not having rules.  The effect, the author wrote (I think it was Amatai Etzioni in Modern Organizations), is that the organizations still have unwritten rules in the heads of the managers, and the employees are more constrained in these organizations.  They have to guess what's allowed. They don't know when they will get in trouble for violating the unwritten rules.  That's not the intent of managers who don't have rules, but it's often the effect.   

Blogging is different from mainstream journalism and bloggers are creating their own standards for how to do things.  Some blogs are meant to be more entertainment or personal reflection or even ranting than news.  Here at What Do I Know? I want readers to clearly know what is my original work and what comes from other places, with links to the sources.  I also want my newsy pieces to be fair to the subjects, accurate, and to offer various perspectives that would help the viewer understand what happened.  I also want to use the story to illustrate larger issues and principles, like a case study.  I want this not to be an isolated incident, but to show it as part of a larger pattern of how things work.

Contacting the subject of a story is something I should do more frequently.  That may slow some stories down, but as I think about it, when I've done it in the past, the stories have always been better for it.  I hope though, that even when I don't get in contact with the subject, my work offers reasonable possibilities of what they might have said on their own behalf when that's appropriate. I don't think I did that in this case.

What's a Political Blog?

Julia O'Malley, a reporter at the Anchorage Daily News asked if I'd talk to her about about Sarah Palin and Alaska blogs. So we talked this afternoon briefly. I'm not sure we covered the things that are really interesting to me. For instance:

What is a political blog? I think there are a lot of ways of categorizing them. Here are a few:

1. Partisan political blogs
   These blogs explicitly support a particular political party. They tend to post things that support the candidates of that party and oppose the candidates of other parties. They choose what they post, in part or in whole, on whether it supports their candidates.
   
   
2. Ideological political blogs
   These have a particular political ideology and post things that advance that ideology. There may be overlap with partisan politics, but these blogs need not be tied to a particular political party. Note, the blogger may write from a particular ideological perspective and not even know it. Bloggers may be so totally conditioned by their culture (however narrowly or broadly you want to interpret that) that they assume their world view is the only true world view.
   
   
3. General political blogs
   These blogs take the view that everything is political. They can look at anything and write about the political implications. Here, politics is used in the broadest sense of how power is distributed in society. It looks at knowledge as a form of power, assuming that as people become aware of the side effects of what they do, as they become aware of alternative ways to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, that people then can free themselves from the culturally, economically, religiously, socially conditioned ways of seeing the world that limit their options.
   
   
4. Ostensibly non-political blogs
   These blogs appear to avoid politics altogether. But in a bigger sense, everything affects the distribution of power - including someone's cooperative compliance with unethical orders or someone's simply ignoring the unethical actions of others. Thus, in this sense, everything is political. And blogs that do not address the actions of politicians, government officials, and business leaders are accepting the power status quo. Their lack of protest is taken as a tacit sign of approval. For an excellent discussion of this, see Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless." This is a discussion of ways the Soviet Union and the Communist government of Czechoslovakia gained power by making citizens comply with meaningless regulations. (It's always easier to see these things when the 'enemy' does them than in one's own culture. But once you see it there, you can start seeing it at home.)
   

So, when Julia raised the issue of political blogs, it wasn't easy to answer. I'd like to think that I am definitely not in #1. Mostly this blog is #s 2 and 3. Sometimes #4.

I think most personal blogs mix several of these.

And then there's style:

1. Carefully considered opinion supported with facts, references
2. Loose and unsupported opinion
3. Basically facts with some interpretation

And tone used:

1. Humorous
2. Serious
3. Snarky
4. Respectful

And the media used:

1. Words
2. Pictures
3. Audio
4. Video
   

Again, I think blogs tend to mix all the styles, tones, and media, though most lean more in one direction or another.


Does any of this matter? Why not just say it's political or not? The more you know about something, the more complex it gets. At one level, we could just talk about cars. But, if you want to buy one, you have to get more and more specific - types of cars, models, features, etc.

The same is true about how we think, how we know things. But the categories that we use shape how we understand things and are much more amorphous than categories of cars. We could come up with lots of ways to categorize political blogs. We just need to shuffle until we find categories that closely reflect what's out there and are useful for communication. And we need to always be testing our categories.

Think about how the rest of the world is labeling our governor, and how, based on those labels, people think they understand all about her. So, ultimately, the words we use play a large roll in how we think, what we know, and what we think is possible and impossible, and the decisions we make.

I'm NOT saying complicated is good. The better we understand something, the simpler we can explain it. Yet some things are inherently complicated. But somethings are unnecessarily complicated because:
1. The speaker/writer hasn't thought it through enough and it's still confused
2. The speaker/writer doesn't want others to understand
a. so that the writer looks smarter than everyone else (since the writer understands it)
b. because knowledge is a form of power when you have it and others don't

And when we deal with intangibles like power, interpersonal relations, it is difficult to prove something true or false, so it gets even more complicated.

So that's why we need to understand logic, to use words in their agreed upon meanings (or clarify exactly what we mean by them), and to think through the arguments we hear. A good case for this was in this Leonard Pitts column.

"We need change, all right. Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington. We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington -- throw out the big-government liberals." -- Mitt Romney, Sept. 3, 2008

And then the gorilla run knee socks paint porno on the Cadillac. But school laughed and didn't we sing hats?

Ahem.

Maybe you wonder what the preceding gobbledygook means. I would ask which gobbledygook you mean: mine or Mitt Romney's? If he's allowed to spew nonsense and people act as if he's spoken intelligently, why can't I? If he gets to behave as if words no longer have objective meaning, why can't I?

And you can see how one thing leads to another, so I'll end this in mid....

McClatchy chief executive Pruitt quits 4 family trusts

How long will it take the ADN (McClatchy owns the ADN) to tell its readers about this? Or maybe this isn't important enough to publish? When I Searched the ADN site for Gary Pruitt to make sure I didn't miss something, the last piece on Pruitt I found was dated June 16. This is from the Miami Herald.

Posted on Sat, Sep. 06, 2008

McClatchy Co. (MNI) Chief Executive Gary Pruitt resigned from four family trusts that control about 41 percent of the newspaper company's voting power.

The trusts hold 12.5 million Class B shares, the Sacramento, Calif.-based company said in a regulatory filing Friday. Pruitt holds 1.2 percent of the Class A shares that have one-tenth the voting rights.

The 51-year-old executive's departure as co-trustee could be a sign that the founding McClatchy family plans to review its options for the company, said Ken Doctor, an analyst at media consultant Outsell in Burlingame, Calif.

McClatchy, which owns The Miami Herald, has lost 93 percent of its market value since March 2006, when Pruitt announced the $4.1 billion acquisition of Knight Ridder.

''They've got to be looking at some kind of a financial restructuring,'' said Doctor, who worked at Knight Ridder before McClatchy bought the company.

McClatchy climbed 20 cents, or 5.8 percent, to $3.66 Friday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading and has dropped 71 percent this year.

The family may be looking at a range of options, including a change of leadership, diversifying its holdings or a going- private transaction in which Pruitt may even participate, Doctor said. Pruitt isn't a family member, he added.

''You can't be on both ends of the transaction,'' Doctor said.

McClatchy Watch carries the article above and speculates on what it means. Essentially, he (and the commenters) say the family has watched Gary Pruitt bleed the company dry and only a wholesale removal of all the officers has a chance of success.

What will Alaska look like without a major newspaper? While McClatchy may have done things to speed the decline, the general prognosis for the newspaper industry isn't rosy. Will TV news expand to cover more local stories?

This is not a minor event. What will inherit the mantle of 'journal of record' for the state? We may not agree on the ADN's choice of stories to publish or not publish, however, it is a source that gives us a common set of stories every day, and keeps an eye on local, state, and federal elected officials, as well as businesses. Often people don't appreciate what they have until they lose it. Wait until television, weeklies, and blogs are covering the news to find out what all we take for granted from the ADN.

Correction

A reliable source has told me that ADN reporters are to leave corrections to their editors, and the editors did make the correction today on David Shurtleff's position at the Berkowitz campaign. I was also told that the ADN takes their corrections seriously. The correction was already in the works before I posted yesterday.


But as I mentioned in the earlier post, there are still questions about how corrections are handled - intentionally and unintentionally - for the online stories, which, for most of us, will be the story of record when we've recycled our newspapers.

The online story says:

...Berkowitz spokesman David Shurtleff said in an e-mail...

This is the corrected version, but there's no hint that there was an incorrect version. The best blogs will go back and do it this way:

...Berkowitz campaign manager [spokesman] David Shurtleff said in an e-mail...[[MPB made an excellent suggestion to also include the date of the correction]] [[August 18, 2008]]

to show the original and the corrected version.

Kyle and Sean - Blogging style slipping into their reporting?

I was a little surprised reading Kyle Hopkins and Sean Cockerham's front page piece on Governor Palin yesterday. It was all very properly newsy until we got to the last paragraph of the page which began:

If you've been asleep all week, here's the recap:

Both these reporters work hard and the ADN has them working both as straight news guys on the print version and bloggers online. And I'm sure it's hard to keep those two roles straight. But what about the editor? Or have they decided that chatty is ok on the front page?

And Sean, after reading your article on Ashley Reed, I just called David Shurtleff to congratulate him on his promotion to campaign manager, but he assured me that Joe Hardenbrook still has that job, and that he (David) is still the press guy.

I just got the links to these stories - the Palin story and the Reed story - and I see that in the latter, Shurtleff is now listed as campaign spokesman. So how does it work now? No more corrections? You just go in and change the story? How's that going to affect the newspaper as a source of history if people can just go in and change the story whenever? Hard copy documents may not be as easy to access, but at least the stories don't change while they are on the shelf.

I want you all to understand that this is just a friendly observation. Unlike some of my blogging compatriots, I recognize that the ADN's financial uncertainties are putting a strain on everyone there. I appreciate that they put up a lot of good sources and give links to court documents saving me the trouble of having to look them up myself. These are good guys doing good work under difficult circumstances. But the issue about changing the record IS an important issue.

On this blog, I've set up a rule for myself that if I'm making minor spelling and typo corrections, or cleaning up the language of a sentence without affecting the content, I don't leave tracks that I've made changes. But if I'm making substantive corrections - like correct identification of someone's job title - I strikeout the old language and put the new language in with [brackets]. That let's my readers know that I've gone in and made changes. The ADN has a corrections box, but although they fixed this online, it didn't show up in the corrections in today's paper.

Pebble Mine Goes Digital

Sitemeter is a program that monitors hits to websites. As I was checking last night, I noticed, blinking on the top of the page was an Anti Prop 4 ad. The
Anchorage Daily News just reported

The huge amount of advertising on the proposed law, set for statewide vote on Aug. 26, is creating one of the state's costliest political battles in years.

Preliminary disclosures to the Alaska Public Offices Commission show that supporters and foes of Measure 4 have raised at least $3.6 million so far for their ad campaigns.

And as I went to the ADN site to get the quote I noticed that the same ad is running there. This is one issue that Alaskan voters will need to study.

My initial knee jerk reaction was that we shouldn't trust any company that calls itself "Northern Dynasty." What kind of people call themselves 'dynasty'? But we need to look into what the proposition says. Here's a link to the state election site's version of the Proposition 4.

Oil Companies S(p)end Their Messages Through ADN

The AGIA plan had its mini
state tour with stops in Anchorage, Juneau, Barrow, Fairbanks, Kenai, Matsu, and Ketchikan. Since it doubled as a legislative information session as well and legislators traveled around the state to be present, the costs of presenting the state's findings to the people of Alaska were pretty high. Wesley Loy wrote in the Anchorage Daily News

Nobody has an overall cost estimate for the trip.
Legislators and legislative support staffers say they won't know the full tally until after all the travelers file for payment of their expenses.

The most expensive destination is Barrow, a predominantly Inupiat village of more than 4,000 people about 725 miles north of Anchorage.

As of Tuesday, 37 lawmakers had signed up to go to Barrow for a hearing on July 1. At about $800 for a round-trip ticket, airfare alone for the group will total some $30,000.

[Double click any picture to enlarge it.]





And now the various oil companies and oil support groups are paying to give their side of the story. But while the State provided days and days of information all backed up on the internet, the advertising campaign by the oil companies - at least what is covered in the ADN ads - is long on pictures and feel good text and short on information.
















Only one of the ads offered a website address - www.allalaskapipeline.com was on the Alaska Gasline LNG ads. But if you link to it, you'll see it is just a bunch of oil industry related links. Even the link to gasline map has no map.
So, the most popular links on the AllAlaskaPipeline.com site are for computer notebooks, music downloads, and online dating? This is a serious attempt to educate the public on the gasline issues I see.




























All of you who have heard of Udelhoven raise your hands.











Here's how I figured the costs from the ADN's NAA quick fact sheet.

2 The information and statistics contained in this document are intended to provide a general overview of our products, their market and their readers. These rates only represent an overview of rates and ad units this newspaper accepts. Please contact a sales representative (or refer to the Media Kit) for a complete listing of all category rates, ad units and other specifications. While the data is correct overall, a salesrepresentative should be contacted for further details and/or clarification.

As footnote 2 suggests, there are lots of contingencies for determining the cost of ADN ads. The ones I could calculate directly were: weekday v. Sunday; color or black and white; and size. Well, there are prices for full page ads, but less than full page ads I had to approximate with square inch comparisons. Other contingenices that I had no way to figure were related to discounts for multiple ads. There are other pages with tables and numbers that I can't figure out at all. I'm sure if you're in advertising you've learned the code, but there is not enough information on the web to make sense out of it. And footnote 2 seems to acknowledge that the numbers in the chart are just general numbers.

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt's Anchorage Speech Part 3

There is a part 1 and part 2 to this discussion of Gary Pruitt's April speech at Commonwealth North in Anchorage. The first is an overview. The second covers the models/stories/assumptions that appeared to underlie Pruitt's talk. This one talks about the numbers. They appeared here and there. I've gone through the speech to pull out the sentences that had numbers. Numbers are hard to talk about, so I've prepared this little slide presentation. Then I'll talk about a few of the numbers below.

Pruitt Presentation - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Pruitt Presentation

Slide 2: 50% of adults in US read the news paper. He was trying to show that the newspaper wasn't dead. I'm not sure what this statistic means. Journalism.org has a very thorough discussion of the meaning of such statistics. Here's a clip from State of the of the News Media 2007 .

A third way to look at audience is to add together traditional print audience, unduplicated — exclusive — online audience, and unduplicated audience for the newspapers’ specialty niche publications. The industry has different terms for what that adds up to — total audience, integrated audience, total reach or market footprint. But they mean the same thing.

A major reason the industry likes this metric is that the audience for newspaper online sites and niche publications continues to grow at double-digit rates. Hence the Newspaper Association was able to headline its analysis of results for the six-month period ending September 2006, “Eight Percent Increase in Total Newspaper Audience.”

Is it a valid measure? Certainly it helps the industry’s battered image. It is less clear how well it sells financially.

BTW, on McClatchy's map, I could only count thirty papers total. Maybe I miscounted. It's late.


Slide 3: If his numbers are correct - 90% of original reporting done by newspapers - then the decline of newspapers would be a serious problem. Even if bloggers were to fill in the gap, newspapers pay their reporters, and most bloggers write for free, or minimal Google ad revenues. It's also hard to make sure that all the important stories are covered through blogs. But we could question whether this happens in most newspapers, but so far, newspaper coverage has probably been better than blog coverage.

Slides 4 & 5 are probably the most interesting. 33% of cash profits (not sure why he says 'cash' here) come from non-newspaper sources. BUT print accounts for 80% of revenue.

Internet accounts for 11% of revenues - $200 million. I'm not sure what the other 9% is (that is neither internet nor print).

Slide 5 raises the issue of non-newspaper related internet business. Classified ads revenue, he'd said in the speech, were the first to disappear to the internet. What he's saying in Slide 5 is that they simply went out and bought their way back into the classified ad business by buying big chunks of internet classified ad sites.

Homescape.com's About button says:

Homescape is a division of Classified Ventures, LLC, which is owned by five leading media companies: Belo Corp. (NYSE: BLC), Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), The McClatchy Company (NYSE: MNI), Tribune Company (NYSE: TRB) and The Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO). To execute on its objectives, Classified Ventures has four leading businesses - Apartments.com, Cars.com, HomeGain and Homescape.

I'm assuming Pruitt knows something I don't when he included the NY Times in the list of owners of Homescape. It's also interesting that Homescape owns two of the three other companies that Pruitt named separately.

Slide 6:
There were (2000 Census Data) in 2000 184,412 Anchorage residents 18 years and over. 80% would be 147,530. Does he really mean the Anchorage market, or is he talking about the ADN market beyond the Municipality of Anchorage? It would mean 80% of the readership was from outside of Anchorage. That could be, but it does seem unlikely.

We better operate the leading local internet business in each of our markets and have the leading internet site with the most traffic and the most revenue of all of the local sites. And we do.

Pruitt says the ADN gets 250,000 hits. I wasn't sure if he meant per day or per week or per month. The advertising section says 243,000 readers per month. If that is true, then it appears that the ADN is getting trounced by the AlaskaReport which gets around 400,000 hits a month. (Dennis gave me figures in an email.) Actually the media kit at the ADN gives significantly higher numbers for the online hits. Here it says they get 10 million page hits a month and 994,000 monthly unique users.

Partial Ear Mea Culpa and Other News Media Odds and Ends

Last week I mentioned that the Alaska Ear had used a graphic from the AlaskaReport without permission even though the ADN has sent notices to at least two bloggers that they had to pay $100 or take down ADN photos. Well, today the Ear apologized for mispelling the AlaskaReport link, but nothing about the use of the graphic.

And I remembered an instance where the ADN posted a video I'd taken of John Henry Browne, Vic Kohring's attorney before Vic's money ran out. But in that case, Lisa Demer had asked permission to use it and I said sure. And they linked back here.

Also, while I was working on the second Pruitt post, I didn't find much while seeking info on whether Gary Pruitt had been a journalism major or even worked as a reporter. But Printing and New Media Marketing was much different from most of the official sites that popped up. It's headline: "How Is It That McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt Is Still Employed?" The blogger, Metapriner, had just learned that Gary Pruitt had been named the Chairman of the Newspaper Association of America.

A $100 stake in MNI [McClatchy] purchased on April 23, 2005 would today be worth $12.40. This represents an 87.6% decline in shareholder value. Here is how other newspaper publishers have fared during that same time span:

He then lists the better, if still dismal, records of eight other publishers (the two worst were -77%, the best, the NY Times, was -40%).

From [1996] until 2005 he increased shareholder value almost 600% But the times have changed. The paradigm has shifted. McClatchy needs a new LEADER not a lawyer to lead and inspire in this new media landscape. For him to be the choice for NAA Chairman speaks volumes about how out of touch and lost that organization has become.

So, today I looked at Metablogger's most recent post which led me to this Wall Street Journal article about the Washington Post's experiment with a hyperlocal website

For believers in the power of rigorous local coverage to help save newspapers, the Washington Post's launch of LoudounExtra.com last July was a potentially industry-defining event. It paired a journalistic powerhouse with a dream team of Internet geeks to build a virtual town square for one of Virginia's and the nation's most-affluent and fastest-growing counties...(go to the link for the rest)

and a blog response by the architect of the Post experiment, LoudounExtra.com, Robert Curley.

From the second I was contacted by the Wall Street Journal for the story, I knew exactly what I wanted to say in the interview, which was to point out that I thought the two biggest problems with LoudounExtra.com were poor integration of the site with washingtonpost.com and not enough outreach into the community … ala basically me speaking with every community group that would have me.

And that both of those problems were my fault. Completely.

And, more importantly, I had learned from those problems and wouldn’t make those mistakes in Las Vegas, especially since I planned to make entirely new mistakes in Las Vegas. :) (go to the link for the rest)

Curley's website is probably one I need to check more often:

My name is Rob Curley. I'm an Internet nerd from Kansas who is in love with local news and the evolution of traditional media.

An interest in the evolution of the traditional media is the reason I've been posting a lot on the ADN.

BTW, I never put in a label for the Anchorage Daily News because most of the times I had ADN in a post, it was not about the ADN, but just a citation. But since the ADN has become a more regular topic, I've started to use a label to make those posts easier to find. I went back and updated some old posts, but I'm sure I didn't get them all.

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt's April Speech in Anchorage Part 2

In Part 1 I gave an overview of the speech and promised to post on the parts. I'd hoped to get this up Friday, but it's taken longer than I expected. I quote from CEO Gary Pruitt's speech to Commonwealth North. I don't have a transcript, only the audio. I think that my quotes capture the spirit of what he says, but they aren't necessarily verbatim. I've put numbers in with the quotes (23:00) which should put you a few seconds before the beginning of the citation on the audio.

Synopsis: In this post I identify five stories that I think underlie the assumptions McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt makes in his April speech before Commonwealth North. For each I give some excerpts from the speech, explain the basic idea of the story, and follow this with my own comments. The five stories are:

Story #1: “Newspapers won’t go away, just some companies.”
Story #2: "While newspaper is our core business, we need to diversify. ⅓ of cash profits come from non-Newspaper operations"
Story #3: The invention of the internet is somewhere between the invention of fire and the invention of call waiting.
Story #4: We are running a business here.
Story #5: Newspapers are special; they're critical to community and democracy.



The Models/Stories

The things in the world we can see, hear, touch, etc. we liken to being 'real' , being the basis of fact. But we need models, the stories in our heads, that tell us which of the millions of bits of data we need to attend to and then how to interpret them. Mostly this is done unconsciously. People have different stories in their heads, therefore when they witness the same event, they often remember different things and come to different conclusions. So if you heard Pruitt's speech, you'd probably pick out different parts to write about. And that’s why people watch the same political debate on television and come to totally different conclusions about which candidate to vote for.

In this post, I’m trying to distill the stories, the underlying assumptions, that Gary Pruitt has about the newspaper industry, McClatchy, and the Anchorage Daily News (ADN). Some things he said out loud, other things I've had to deduce from what he said and didn’t say.

[Note once more: I don't have a transcript of the speech. The quotes are notes taken from the audio. I think I've captured it close enough to preserve the meaning, but I haven't gotten every word verbatim.]

Story #1: “Newspapers won’t go away, just some companies.” This is probably the key story underpinning everything he said. Newspapers will survive. He compares this with the dominant story ("conventional wisdom") which says newspapers are dying.

(26:45)In the Anchorage market between the newspaper and the unduplicated reach of the website, the ADN is reaching 8 out of 10 adults. And has a growing audience. It’s never been larger. So the fact that we’re dying in (and?) the conventional wisdom says [sense?] that our audience actually today is bigger than it was yesterday. [Sentence didn't quite make sense to me in the audio] More people want what we produce today than yesterday. That’s not the profile of a dying business. Best predictor of media company is that your audience is growing. We think that's a very positive long term measure for us

But we also recognize that in the short term, the newspaper model is under stress. As the internet takes share and we’re in a recession. So the best measure of how we’re doing currently is ad revenue and that’s terrible. That’s why the conventional wisdom pervades that newspapers are doing poorly.

A supporting story for this is

• “We’re the last mass medium in the market."(25:30)
  While other media are fragmented ( for example, there are more and more television stations so each television station gets a smaller share of the audience) newspapers have gone in the opposite direction and now there is only one newspaper in nearly all markets. So it gets all the newspaper market.

So, why is this good? According to Pruitt:

• The community has a common base of knowledge. Pruitt:
  

(20:20) Audiences have fragmented. And therefore it’s hard to build a common base of knowledge or a sense of cohesive community, because audiences are so fragmented. And that’s really one of the important roles that a newspaper can play. 'Cause no other institution can do that locally. Yes, when there’s a major news story, or nationally, an election, a war etc. Of course there’s a common base where you can talk about it, but locally it’s hard to build that base.

So while it’s important when you read a newspaper and you learn something in that article, it may be more important that, in the ADN’s case, more than 200,000 people are reading that same story and can communicate about it, can talk about it and can work together to try to solve problems or improve Alaska. That’s one of the reasons why it is great for newspapers to be the last mass medium. It’s important for public service but it’s also important as a business position, for business plan. Differentiates us from fragmentation and the other competitors others whose audience is falling more precipitously.

• No competition with other newspapers.

Comments: This "mass media playing cohesive role" idea works when the people who run the paper pick the news that I also think is important. But the major Chinese newspapers play this role in China too. But accepting this as a good role, will it sell newspapers? Did that work in the past because people wanted the same story or because they didn’t have choices? I suspect it was a temporary phenomenon based on the technical limits to national broadcasting before cable and satellites. When more channels were available, people went to their preferred channels.

OK then, if people don’t necessarily want a common ground, will the newspaper monopolies be like the old television monopolies? Because there are no markets, will people have to stay with newspapers? or will they migrate to the internet? Do people really want to hold dead trees (new corpses each day) in their hands so they can read the same story everyone else in town is reading? What happens when a slickly packaged electronic newspaper, say the iRag or the iPape, becomes available? Will people abandon newsprint totally? Or will it linger while the newspaper generation dies off? Or will there be a renewal of newspapers just as there is a renewed interest in vinyl records?

And, are the other media - television, radio, the internet - really only in competition with each other and not the newspaper? Is there really a long term market for that newsprint that is safe because there are no other newspapers competing?


It’s a nice story, but is it true? The evidence Pruitt offers is slim, bordering on wishful thinking. He touts increasing readership, but the increasing numbers of readers he claims (I’ll get to that when I do the numbers section) are in electronic, not hard copy. And they aren't paying anything. I keep thinking about his dismissal of Wired Magazine’s editor. (See Story 3 below) Pruitt wants to believe this, but that doesn’t make it true.

And Pruitt himself starts hedging his bets.

Story #2: "Times are changing and while newspaper is our core business, we need to diversify. Today, nearly ⅓ of cash profits come from non-newspaper operations. We realize that newspaper alone is not enough. (21:45)

We’ll supplement [the newspaper] with direct mail, specialty publications, and reach those who don’t subscribe to the paper, and have internet, and deliver digitally to cell phones, smart phones, pda's.(25:30)

Comment: Hmmm. Is newsprint just symbolic? Just like cars are rated in horsepower, McClatchy has to keep a vestige of the newspaper?


Story #3: The invention of the internet is somewhere between the invention of fire and the invention of call waiting.
The internet is the interloper that started stealing newspapers’ revenue by offering a better way to do classified ads. It can also tell the news as it’s breaking. And (we all assume) it has unlimited free pages. So, just how important is the internet and how will it affect newspapers? Pruitt asks

Was the internet like Gutenberg? Or just an important new medium like television?(22:45)

Pruitt talks about inviting the editor of Wired Magazine to answer this question for his editors and publishers.

(23:00) We thought he’d be on the side of Gutenberg. I way underestimated this guy. He said, no, not Gutenberg. The internet is the most important development for human kind since the invention of fire. .. Well, if you're the editor of Wired magazine, then the internet is like fire to you. ..The same week, I read a column, written by a guy who is now one of our columnists, Dave Berry. He said it was the most important communications innovation since call waiting. .. We determined our strategy should be somewhere in the middle.

Comments:
A. “well, if you’re the CEO of a newspaper company” then newspapers are going to survive. Should we discount what Pruitt says the way he discounted the editor of Wired Magazine?

B. I assume this part of the speech was just for laughs, but I’m not sure. Dave Barry is a humorist. Surely, Pruitt doesn’t take the call waiting comment seriously. So what is his actual conclusion of the importance of the internet for newspapers? If not fire, what? Back to Gutenberg’s printing press? If he really means in the middle between call waiting and fire, where is that? What about the automobile? Is the newspaper the horse drawn buggy? Is the newspaper the Pony Express? The rotary phone? The typewriter? Or is it the acoustic guitar, still here despite electricity? Or glass despite the introduction of plastic?

This is a good question, but Pruitt's answer - in the middle - doesn’t mean anything. Whatever it means, he then goes on to take action on it:

(24:15) We better operate the leading local internet business in each of our markets and have the leading internet site with the most traffic and the most revenue of all of the local sites. And we do

I'm not certain this is true in Anchorage. But I'll get into this when I talk about numbers in a day or two.

Story #4: We are running a business here. Pruitt said this in various ways. He used the term "Legacy Costs," a sweet turn of phrase, which I understood to mean, those luxuries that we inherited from the old days, but that we can't afford anymore now that we're corporate and we were aren't making piles of money.

(28:00)So we’re going to have to get through this structural transition and recession, and you do that by looking at your cost structure and thinking well if we were a news company starting today, how would we be structured, not burdened by the legacy costs of the golden era, when you had a virtual monopoly? Trying not to fall victim to the same sort of difficult transition that the airline industry is going through.

(41:15) What if we started a news company today, what would it look like? What would we focus on? So you need to think about what is the core competency and core experience of the newspaper and its website? You need to think about the reader and the advertiser. And what experiences he or she is having as a reader or advertiser and make sure those are positive experiences. Maybe we can’t do everything we used to do because of the competition and media mix. And so you have to focus on what you do that’s most important. The very technology that challenges us on the revenue side - internet, digital technology - also allows us to operate more efficiently. . . Not every job needs to be staffed locally. Things can be done remotely, computer systems can be centralized. Other companies are specializing in doing businesses we had to do before and increasingly what you have is a transforming business based on technology not just on the revenue side, but on the cost side. What it means is that newspapers become smaller, more specialized organizations focusing especially on news and ... selling advertising.

Comments:
No question about it, McClatchy is a large, publicly owned corporation that has to answer to Wall Street. Many of the family owned newspapers that didn't sell out to bigger corporations bit the dust. A few questions:
A. Can a corporate, bottom line oriented paper stand up to advertisers who disagree with editorials? Or will they cause a paper to block a story that is critical of a big advertiser who might remove their ads?

Or perhaps this is where being a monopoly pays off. Pruitt told a story about not endorsing the wife of the largest advertiser at the Fresno Bee when she ran for local office. And right now it appears that (in part) the ADN's editorial support of AGIA (Alaska Gasline Incentive Act) has spurred full page ads to counter the editorials. Maybe this monopoly stuff works.

The real question is what will the corporate heads think is core, is disposable? McClatchy is still an independent newspaper corporation. But most of the big newspapers are parts of larger corporations that aren't run by people with journalism training. (It appears that Pruitt "became a publisher after helping the company [as an attorney] go public" and, from what I can find online, that his training in journalism was on the job as an attorney and in other upper level positions.)

B. Pruitt also said

90% of original reporting is done by newspapers, not television or radio. In most markets, the newspaper newsroom is larger than all the other media.

Will that still be true if "not every job needs to be staffed locally?" To be fair, perhaps, he meant that many of the administrative and technical jobs could be done distance, not reporting jobs. But the ADN announced this week it will cut a 11.9% percent of its news staff while cutting about 9% overall. Will expensive investigative journalism that is critical to the newspaper's partnership with democracy, as Pruitt phrased it [See Story #5], be cut for easier stories about bear encounters and lost hikers?



Story #5: Newspapers are special; they're critical to community and democracy.

(56:30) Newspapers do some things very well. . . Once a day, it will stop the world and inform you. And you’ll get professionally edited and selected stories about what’s most important for you locally and internationally, and hopefully some entertaining news as well. And that’s a very valuable thing in life. It organizes it well for you. It’s convenient, it's portable. There is content there that isn't online. It is a different product and some people like that. Bill Gates likes that. Once a day he wants to stop and read that news. He also goes online for news.

[Sunday, 10:20am - Speaking of professionally edited, I just looked at the article on the Mayor's Marathon on the front page of today's sports section:

Jerry Ross felt his race unfolding nearly flawlessly. Granted, hard miles lied ahead, but his pace was perfect.

Ouch.]

(28:45)From the early days of this country, newspapers have been indispensable in creating self government in the US. I know, this is where you roll your eyes. But I actually believe it. In terms of having sufficient knowledge to participate in society, the founding fathers knew this. Democracy and journalism have been more than neighbors, they’ve been partners all these years in this country.

Comment:
When my blogger friends badmouth the ADN they point to their favorite example when several bloggers, but no ADN reporters, covered the Alaskan Republican Convention (I was out of the country at the time) where the Lt. Governor announced he was challenging our Congressman in the Republican primary. My response to that is that we get to choose our stories, but the ADN has to cover everything, has to be the paper of record for what goes on in Anchorage and Alaska. And it's vitally important to have organizations that PAY people to report. So I think there is something to this. I don't roll my eyes, and I'm sorry he feels the need to be so defensive about it. That isn't a good sign.

But I do take issue with one of Pruitt's comments:

Most blogging going on, while it can be helpful, is opinion writing, not original reporting.

I'm sure this is true. But I suspect that most of what's written in the ADN, if not opinion, is NOT original reporting either. Blogspot lists 9200 bloggers in Alaska. While this number surely includes defunct blogs and falsely identified blogs it's a reasonable starting point since we have Wordpress and other blog platforms as well. If one percent of Alaska bloggers (92 total) wrote two original stories per week, that would be 184 original stories a week. I dare say the ADN doesn't do that.

It is an awesome responsibility to tell a community, "Here, these are the most important things for you to know." Blogging democratizes that process and allows voices that normally wouldn't be heard to help determine what the community should know. But Pruitt would, rightfully, say, who can read 9200 blogs? Or even 92? That is a problem, but one that newsreaders and Google and the blogs themselves are overcoming.

I too have internalized a similar story about the critical linkage between journalism and democracy. It's why I'm spending so much time on this blog commenting on the ADN and on blogging. But democracy and efficiency do NOT go together. Fair processes and in-depth reporting are not cheap. Doing what's right is not as easy as doing what's expedient. Nowhere in Pruitt's speech - except maybe when someone asked about Rupert Murdoch - did he address the inherent conflicts between McClatchy's business needs to be efficient and make money and journalism's traditional roles that he lists in this last citation. He talks about the business needs and he talks about democracy, but not about how they can live together. He glosses over the inherent conflicts and says we can do both, no problem:

(20:45) Great for newspapers to be the last mass medium. Important for public service and also good for business plan.

OK, these are my thoughts on the models or stories or you could even call them assumptions that underlay Pruitt's speech.

Let's review Pruitt's underlying stories, at least the ones that I saw in his speech.

Story #1: “Newspapers won’t go away, just some companies.”
Story #2: "While newspaper is our core business, we need to diversify. ⅓ of cash profits from non-Newspaper operations"
Story #3: The invention of the internet is somewhere between the invention of fire and the invention of call waiting.
Story #4: We are running a business here.
Story #5: Newspapers are special; they're critical to community and democracy.

If we look at these stories grouped together like this, we can start to ask whether any are mutually exclusive or whether, in fact, all of them can live comfortably together. As I look at them I see two groups:

• Stories # 1, 3, and 5 are stories that support the idea that newspapers can and/or should survive
• Stories #2 and 4 are about the importance and requirements of business

Are these two different story lines - Newspapers will and must survive and We are a business - compatible? Or is Pruitt standing on an ice flow in a period of media warming as a crack appears between his feet? One foot on the side of Newspapers Forever and the other foot on the side of the Business Model? And if he doesn't choose one soon, he's going to get wet?

If that is the case, I'm betting on him jumping to the Business Model chunk of ice.

But we also have to ask, "What is this thing he calls "newspaper" that is so essential to democracy?
Is it a medium - paper and print?
Is it content - stories about the community and government?
Is it function - creating self government? selling advertising?
It seemed to me that he glossed over these and said: it's the customer - the reader and the advertiser. So now democracy means the market. I guess that is a form of creating self government.

Of all of these, it seems to me the medium is much less important than the function. But Pruitt does argue that the medium is the function - that as the only mass medium in the market it is the only medium that can engage the whole community in the same stories.

Using the models I've collected over my lifetime, I've abstracted what I thought was the core stories of the speech to try to understand:
a. what's going to happen to my local newspaper
b. what's going to happen to newspapers in general
c. collaterally, what might that mean for bloggers
d. what might this all mean for democracy and what do those who are concerned for the state of democracy in the US need to start doing.

In the next day or two, I'll post on the numbers that he offered in his speech.


Being a blogger has advantages. While I don't have an editor to correct my typos and dumb factual errors, I also don't have an editor who tells me what I should or shouldn't write about.
AND I don't have an artificial deadline.

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt's April Speech in Anchorage Part 1

Gary Pruitt, the CEO of McClatchy, which owns the Anchorage Daily News, gave a speech (there's an audio of the speech at the lin) to Commonwealth North in Anchorage in late April 2008. It started off promising to be a stock speech full of pithy quotes, but then he began to cover a lot of interesting ground. I would guess he spent time putting this speech together and that he's given variations of it more than once. It’s got a lot of things worth discussing. I’ve been mulling it over trying to figure out the best way to do this. Many of the points he raises are worthy of long separate posts of their own. So I'm not going to try to squeeze it all into one post.

Why does this matter?

• The media are a vital part of maintaining a democracy. And as the corporatization of everything takes place, we need to be watchful about what this means. But what happens when this happens to the media itself? The institution that is supposed to do this watching and report to the public? Well, Pruitt gives us some hints hidden in amongst his other points.
  
  
• It also affects how people in Anchorage and in Alaska are going to get news about what is happening in the state. My belief is that an organization dedicated to covering the important news (and we an argue about who defines what is the important news) and pays people to gather and sometimes even investigate “the news” is vital to maintaining an informed citizenry, which is vital to real democracy. Can, will television or radio or the internet be able to take over that function if the newspaper disappears?
  

Overview of this post and follow up posts on this speech
So, in this post I’m going to give you an overview of the talk and the first section - history. Then in other posts I’m going to follow up on different threads.

The speech's five key parts (not necessarily in the order he gives the speech):

1. The history of newspapers in general and McClatchy in particular
2. Models or stories of how things are in the newspaper world
   By this I mean, he talks about the way he thinks things are going and can go. He outlines how “McClatchy” plans (since McClatchy is an organization and not a sentient being, it can’t really think or plan, so this really means how Pruitt plans) to respond to the world it faces. From this we can deduce other possible ways of thinking about the future of newspapers and media, and by extension, democracy.
3. McClatchy and ADN data
   Here he gives us the outcomes, in quantitative terms, of the McClatchy plan. Numbers of readers, dollars, etc.
   
4. Philosophy and values
   This is hard to separate from models, but I’d distinguish the two this way: the Models are attempts to describe and interpret what’s happening in Pruitt’s world. Philosophy is telling us what Pruitt values and how he thinks things should be.
5. Anecdotes and Miscellaneous odds and ends
   Stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into the other categories or overlaps over some or all of them.
   

(I would point out that Pruitt didn't label the parts of his speech this way and that any five people could come up with their own set of key parts. These are my take on the speech, but don't assume that I've captured it perfectly.)

I’ll try to post at least one point per day in the next five days. Then I’ll try to explore some of the paths he leads us by, but doesn’t wander down.

Here’s the easy one, History.

McClatchy was founded in 1857 and has survived while many competitors came and went. People prophesied the demise of the newspaper when other new technologies arose, such as radio and television. And many newspapers did go under.

By 1960 most local markets were down to one newspaper. Anchorage was an exception. There was an exciting, but costly battle between the Daily News and the Times. Once newspapers had a monopoly in their area, they were quite profitable.

Then the internet arrived. It quickly began taking the profitable classifieds - housing, cars, employment.

But, as radio and tv stations proliferated and their markets became increasingly fragmented, the local daily newspapers died out until there was only one newspaper in each local market. While the newspaper competes with many local television and radio stations and many websites, it tends to be the only daily newspaper in town.

Only when there was one newspapers in a market, did they become quite profitable. Quasi-monopoly. That’s when they started to go public (change from private ownership to selling public shares.) Pruitt said we can meet our journalistic obligations and Wall St. demands.

Now in a transformational stage. Many individual newspapers have, and others will, go under, But the newspaper industry will survive. McClatchy will survive. ADN will survive. By the old measures - current revenues - we don't look good. But by the new metrics - we look good. The transition to having both a print and internet presence is not easy.



By tomorrow I’ll try to get the models, but that really isn’t an easy one.

Meanwhile you can listen to the whole speech here. With questions, it's an hour.

[June 24: There is now a Part 2 and a Part 3 will be up soon. Or you can click on the Gary Pruitt label in the lower right column.]

Anchorage Daily News Photo Policy Appears to Be One-Way

[Note: As I was writing this it came to my attention that McClatchy has announced a 10% employee reduction. (McClatchy owns the Anchorage Daily News.) I was already working on a post on a speech McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt gave in Anchorage in April, but it's not quite ready.]

On May 21, Phil Munger posted on Progressive Alaska this comment to a post from the Anchorage Daily News.

Hi Mr. Munger-
My name is Katherine Gill and I work at the Daily News. It was brought to my attention that you posted a photo of Bill Roth's on your blog. We have a copyright fee of $100 to post photos on a website. Please contact me at kgill@adn.com if you would like to proceed with paying the fee, or please remove the photo from your website.

Thank you,
Katherine Gill

Phil went on to mention that Theresa at My Fairbanks Life had gotten a similar order from the ADN about a photo she'd used. Phil did some huffing and puffing about free speech, and a bunch of us told Phil to calm down, that the ADN had copyrights and he had to respect that.

So it is very curious to find that the ADN doesn't seem to respect other people's copyrights. The Alaska Ear published this story in yesterday's paper.


This is also on the ADN Website.

Dennis tells me that he was not asked nor did he give permission for the ADN to use the picture. Furthermore, the ADN has his link wrong - AlaskaReportS.com instead of Alaskareport.com.

Dennis has this posted at the bottom of his blog:

Dennis Zaki Blog - AlaskaReport © 2008 All Rights Reserved.

Now, I understand that people can make mistakes now and then. I mistype often, but Dennis says this is not the first time.

ADN consistantly uses my cartoons yet always manages to foul up the link to my website. And they NEVER put a hotlink up there, unlike to other websites. I've written to them, but it keeps happening... Sean references my site a lot by saying, 'a website'.

So ADN, can you please explain what appears to be a double standard where you feel it's ok for you to use Dennis' copyrighted material, but you don't want other people to use yours? Perhaps there is more to this story that you can share with us.

In the same column, the Ear writes about the Baranof Hotel offering sure reservations and discounted rates in contradiction to what Representatives said in the ADN story about some Representatives sleeping in their offices. Readers of this blog know that I had that story last Monday and on Tuesday I posted the emails the Ear refers to.

I want to make it clear that the Ear got the information independently. When I asked the Baranof manager why he didn't have room for the legislators, he told me about the offer. He hadn't seen the story, but after I brought it to his attention, he called the ADN to fill them in on the other side of the story. They sent him to Sheila Toomey who writes the Ear.

Is there any hope for the Anchorage Daily News?

[I didn't hit the post button when I finished this last night. Is this even worth writing about? Well, yes, I think McCoy's (see NAMES at the bottom if they get confusing) comments are significant, but I'm not really sure what the significance is. My instant gut reaction when she said them was "oh geez, the ADN is doomed." My logical side says, "You need to have a totally tech savvy person doing this, not some nice, smart, tech 'immigrant' [in her words]" But something kept me from hitting the post button. She's so nice, she's so enthusiastic, and she has gotten a bunch of blogs up onto the ADN website. Is her personality and their obligation to have a position for her after her fellowship year blinding them from doing what they really need to do? Or maybe they can't find (translation: won't pay what it takes to get) a real tech guru with journalism smarts too.

I've posted on this topic and Kathleen before when she made a brief announcement at a previous AAUG meeting about starting to post community blogs and inviting bloggers to sign up. This was then followed up by an in-depth analysis of the contract the ADN wanted bloggers to sign - a contract I felt was totally out of touch with the reality of the blogosphere. I did try to say hello Wednesday night, but there were lots of other people around her. I did want to know how the contract issue got resolved though.

And I think there is one more big reason I'm hesitant to click on the post button. I think Kathleen's candor is fantastic. I applaud her honesty about herself and about her newspaper and the industry. But I can just see her being called into the office, "YOU SAID WHAT? IN PUBLIC? ARE YOU CRAZY?" I don't really want to be responsible for that. The media often are beat up by politicians for what they report. Their response is we are only reporting the news, don't attack the messenger. To the ADN and McClatchy big shots, remember those words. Kathleen McCoy isn't the problem, she's just the messenger.

OK, now that I've said this and you have no idea what I'm talking about yet, I feel a little more comfortable hitting the post button]

I went to the Alaska Apple User Group (AAUG) last night[Wednesday]. There were two longish presentations. The first was by Kathleen McCoy and her husband Peter Porco on her fellowship year for journalists at Stanford. It was depressing. [I like reading my hard copy newspaper in the morning and I want the ADN to find a way to survive in both the print and web worlds.] I wasn't going to post about it.

But then I got home and got Brendan's [see NAMES at bottom]email with the links to this week's Anchorage Press and a story about Howard Weaver on the future of newspapers. Weaver was the editor of the ADN and has moved up the McClatchy corporate ladder and is now Vice President for News and he's upbeat about his papers doing just fine on the web. The Weaver piece the Press covers takes on the doomsday arguments made against newspapers and offers his reasons for believing the McClatchy newspapers will adjust and thrive. I like people who take on the prevailing opinion, but he's hardly an objective observer and what I heard from Kathleen certainly contradicts the image he was painting of McClatchy doing this right.

So why was the first presentation depressing? In a nutshell, because Kathleen McCoy is billed as the person at the ADN in charge of community blogging [I stopped writing at this point and looked at the ADN website newsroom contacts page to get her exact title, but I couldn't find Kathleen McCoy on it at all. Nor could I find her on the contacts page which listed the eight men and one woman (Jane Lee) on the "Senior Management Team."]

In any case, Kathleen McCoy's talk was interesting, but depressing. She and her husband were both very enthusiastic about having the year off at Stanford and enjoying the chance to do whatever she wanted - sit in, or take, or not, any class at Stanford. And she got a week of tech training for journalists at UC Berkeley. Here are things that she said that really struck me:

A Talking about the newspaper field, she said:
So you have print journalists who are saying, "what do you mean I have to take a video camera" or "this blogging stuff ..." and then you have other people who are jumping in whole hog, and just training themselves. The truth is we're getting no training in the field. I was lucky to get this Berkeley thing that gave me some training.

B
When I was at Stanford I saw all these kids making movies and blogging and having Wikis and doing all kinds of stuff and I realized no one was training them either. They were just doing it. I do believe that it is in their DNA and I do believe that they are the digital natives and I'm the digital immigrant.

C
I came back to the Daily News and I was put on the Web, with no training about the Web and I'd learn one little thing I could do on the web, eventually I learned that if you could get into the back door of the web, our website, you can just see all the things and how they are built and I could learn how to build them myself so eventually I've become more useful...

McCoy sounds like a bright person who genuinely wants to make all this work. She has jumped in and gotten the community blogging page full of blogs on different topics. She has some tech training and brings to that the values and ethics of MSM journalism. Maybe she knows just enough and can keep the techies straight on those parts of traditional journalism that are important to keep.

And the ADN has an impressive web presence. Matt Browner Hamlin,, the national blogger brought to Alaska to be the Begich campaign’s Online Communications Director, told me he thought it was one of the best newspaper websites - particularly because it has good web presence in all areas, not just one or two.

But if the web is the future - or at least a major part of the future - of the newspaper industry, why would you put someone with no web experience on the web? If her DNA comment (I'm assuming she's talking metaphorically here) is accurate, why not get a tech native to work on this job? After years of paying some of the lowest professional salaries of all industries, is it that the newspapers just can't mentally cross the salary bridge to pay what good techies get paid?

Why are staff getting no web training? (Did Kathleen exaggerate here or overlook some training opportunities the paper offers?)

I could be wrong on this. Kathleen's total candor is refreshing. Her ego is barely visible. And she brings to this web endeavor (there are other web people at the newspaper) traditional journalistic values and ethics, that perhaps you can't find in the tech natives. But if I owned an airplane, I'd hire a natural pilot who feels totally comfortable flying, not someone who's going to learn on the job.

Do McCoy's comments from the trenches belie Weaver's optimistic view from headquarters?

I hope he's right that the ADN will adapt and succeed in the new digital age. I hope I'm wrong.


Oh yeah, the second big presentation of the evening was by Scott Slone and Kevin Kastner of HDTV Alaska. They make and post Alaska adventure videos. They're the tech natives making up this new world as they go. They too are struggling with the issue of how to earn a profit online.


NAMES
I'm not happy with how I'm using names here and on other posts. Some people I feel like I'm on a first name basis with, others not. And so sometimes I use a first name in one place and a last name in another. But I know that is confusing to the reader, but I haven't resolved how I want to do this. In here:
Kathleen McCoy - ADN community blogging person and speaker at AAUG meeting
Brendan Joel Kelley - writer and editor at Anchorage Press
Howard Weaver - former ADN editor and now McClatchy VP for News
MSM - main stream media

Baranof Offer Follow Up - Offer Renewed for July Session

Yesterday I mentioned that the while legislators are camping out in their offices to save money, the Baranof Hotel had offered bargain rates to stay at the hotel during the session. I would note that Representative Myers who was named in the ADN article saying that hotel rooms were more expensive than the per diem, was NOT on the email from legislative staff to legislators.

I've also blocked out names as I was requested to do.

From: XXXXXXXXXXX
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 5:53 PM
To: [23 Senators and Representatives - Kevn Myers was NOT on the list]
Cc: XXXXXXXXX
Subject: Special Session Housing - Baranof Rooms



Dear Members – My office is currently looking for housing for nine members during the upcoming June 3 special session. We also did not hear back from 14 members as to whether they were squared away (Names of the 14.) My office is advertising for furnished apartments or homes or house sitting opportunities during the special session. We will be contacting those nine Legislators with any results.



I received a call today from the Baranof to let members know they will accommodate you during the special session. There is a May 4 deadline if you are interested in staying at the Baranof. Please contact Steve Hamilton at the below number and also let us know if you are taken care of housing wise. Thank you. Pam p.s. please be advised that your daily per diem during this time will be $218 a day (the federal government breakout of the $218 = $129 lodging, $71 meals, $18 incidentals)



From: Hamilton, Steve (HAL)
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 4:55 PM
To: XXXXXXXXX
Subject: Legislature



It was good to talk to you this morning.



I want to put in writing to you, that I will ensure housing here at the Baranof Hotel for special session, in case you hear that there is no room here in Juneau for them.

My nightly rate for them is $119 and will include cooking facilities. [Actually this was lowered to $109 I was told.]

To guarantee space I will need to hear from them by May 4th.



If you have any questions, let me know.



Steve Hamilton
General Manager
Westmark Baranof Hotel
127 N Franklin St
Juneau, Alaska 99801
907 463 XXXX
www.westmarkhotels.com

Another email was sent out today offering the $109 rate for the July special session.

From: Hamilton, Steve (HAL)
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 9:45 AM
To: 'XXXXXXXXXXX
Subject: Special Session



June 10, 2008



Dear Legislators,



As I offered to you and your staff for this recent June Special Session, I, once again, would like to extend an invitation for you to stay with us here at the Baranof Hotel for the July Special Session.



If you would contact me personally, I will make sure that you have housing available to you. I am offering a rate of $109 per night, which is below our regular summer $149 nightly rate. And I want to make sure that the rate is well within your $129 night per diem. On a first come, first serve basis, I will upgrade you to an efficiency unit with cooking facilities. Larger suites will be available for a nominal extra fee.



As always, I look forward to having you with us here in Juneau.

If there is ever anything that you need, do not hesitate to contact me.



Steve Hamilton
General Manager
Westmark Baranof Hotel
127 N Franklin St
Juneau, Alaska 99801
907 463 xxxx
www.westmarkhotels.com

There is a part of me that thinks that it is laudable that our legislators are trying to save money by living less luxuriously. But I would note, while they don't have housing expenses,there was no indication that they turned in the part of the per diem that covers those expenses. If thats true, their savings don't save the state of Alaska, rather they money goes into the pockets of legislators.

I don't fault the legislators for this. The reimbursement system that allows a standard per diem rather than collecting receipts probably saves more money and certainly time than gathering and checking all the receipts would cost. And legislators have out of pocket costs that they don't get reimbursed for. And legislative pay is not particularly lucrative and for many legislators, the disruption to their normal work can be a significant financial burden.