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.

Anchorage Architecture is Growing Up

When we got back to Anchorage in May, there were a number of new buildings - well, they'd been working on them and now they were more or less finished. And it seems we are finally shedding the old boring Anchorage look. There are a few older buildings with some semblance of style, but for the most part things have been pretty boring. Here are some new buildings on the scene.

The building going up at Northern Lights and C Streets last fall was particularly disturbing. It was obviously going to be big, and it was right out against the street. No set back at all. As you drove south on C Street during the construction it felt like you had to move over a lane so you didn't scrape the construction fence.

But this flower has bloomed. I took these pictures about 11:15 Monday night as we were coming back from South Pacific. They don't capture lightness, the airiness of this building. I'll have to go back and try again.










Here's a condo at 10th and E. It's not quite right, but it has a little more character than most places.



And these apartments? condos? Fireweed and A. They're a little strange, but at least someone is trying to do something besides boxes.





And the new convention center is turning out to be a reasonably handsome building, and it's going to have spectacular views from inside. I wonder if the Muni has secured the view rights, or whether someone will be able to build a 20 story building and block the views one day.

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.

Part 2 is Coming Soon

I meant to have part 2 of my analysis of the Gary Pruitt speech out yesterday. This one is the hard part and I've been working on it. But we're headed out to have some fun with friends who are turning 50 (well one already did) and it isn't quite done. Enjoy the sunshine.

Alaska Blogs Overview and Blogspot new Blog List Widget

[The explanation is on top. For the list of blogs, slide on down to the lower part of the post.]

When I first started blogging I wanted to post about Alaska blogs. I thought I could make a directory of blogs. But as I searched out Alaska blogs, the lists got longer and longer. I found a couple of Alaska Blog sites which got me into the hundreds. When Blogspot Profiles allowed you to see all the people at the same location, say Alaska, I got about 7000 blogs. Today it says 9200 blogs! You can see the hard to navigate list here. Anchorage with nearly half the population of Alaska only has 2500

And that's just blogspot blogs.

It appears that there were various kinds of Alaska blogs:

• Personal blogs of people who happen to live in Alaska.
• Daily diaries of what they did
• More thoughtful essays stemming from what they did or read or heard or know.
• My Alaska Adventure blogs. People who are in Alaska temporarily and are letting the world know about how they are surviving in the far north. Teachers, doctors, travelers. etc. We forget that we are exotic to the rest of the world.
  
• Sports blogs - Bicycle blogs, Ski blogs, Running blogs - tend to focus on training schedules, equipment, races.
• Mommy blogs - This is definitely NOT a put down title. It just means that these blogs are written by women whose profession for now is raising kid(s) and that is one of the topics they write about.
  
• Professional blogs - talking about the law, teaching, medicine, etc.
• Photo blogs - lots of pictures.
• Activist blogs - keeping track of what's happening in a town, neighborhood, community.
• Artist blogs - focus on the art they are working on
• Political blogs - keeping track of what's happening in politics in general or in a particular party
• Special issue blogs - these focus on a particular area of interest, anything from a specific disease to a type of music, to gardening
  

This is just a sampling of some categories that presented themselves as I looked at blogs. Many blogs blend two or more of these categories. And there are lots of other categories I'm sure.

And on June 5, Blogspot added the ability to have an RSS or other feed right in one's blog list which I turned on yesterday. That put the pressure on me to get this post out. But the blog list feature takes up a lot more room. So I think I'll put up the ones I check most frequently and then have a link to this post, which I'll update as blogs peter out and as I discover new ones.

Fairbanks Pedestrian suggested I set up criteria for my blog roll when I despaired about how to deal with who to put on my blog roll.

My criteria are:
1. Do I read it regularly?
2. How often is it updated?
3. Is the information unique and with some larger public purpose?
4. Is it well written?
5. Does it make me think?
6. Is it from the heart?
7. How many people know about this blog?

Actually, the criteria are an afterthought. No one can keep up with even a tiny fraction of blogs. What I have here on my list are the Alaska blogs that I find myself checking on - some daily, some every now and then. There are others that are in my radar - mudflat, for instance - but I haven't been to it enough to be able to write about it.

I also figured that I would put a link to a post that tells a little bit about each of the blogs I have linked on the front page, plus other blogs. After long deliberation it seemed that organizing by location was the simplest.


Anchorage

Celtic Diva This is primo political site in Anchorage. Linda, the Diva, is the official Alaska blogger for the Democratic National Convention. She's thinks before she writes. Regular, prolific blogger.

Radical Catholic Mom I stumbled on this one and kept coming back. She's a devoted, converted Catholic who doesn't take anything for granted. Interesting peek into a world I normally would know little about. I'd put this in the Mommy Blog category, but it shows you not to assume such blogs are only about the kids. Lots of thinking going on here.

極寒日記（Life with CCKids） This is a blog by a woman who was born and raised in Japan and lives in Anchorage with her local boy husband and two kids. I don't go here too often because it's all in Japanese. But from what I can tell, it's a pretty popular blog in Japan. I got to this blog because her husband was a student of mine.

Own the sidewalk A personal blog by a twenty-something (I think) woman who has a boyfriend, but would abandon him if Mark Begich were available.

Mt. View Forum This is an activist blog, by someone who keeps people alerted to the goings on in Mt. View, a less affluent neighborhood in Anchorage.

Bent Alaska This blog focuses on what's happening in Anchorage's [Alaska's] gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender. and queer communities and allied news.

Alaska Pride This is not another gay site. I list the site with a caution. I check in on this site because there is a lot of good, reasonably balanced - more so than many progressive blogs - posts on many local news topics, including candidates for elections. But any blog that has lots of links to white supremacist and anti-semitic (he calls the White Nationalists) sites has to be approached with caution. Many folks need to visit these places to remember that racism and other forms of virulent hate are alive and well in Alaska and the US. Of course non-white Alaskans don't have to visit these sites to know that racism is still with us.

Anchorage Divorce Blog This is a fairly new blog by a local divorce attorney. Each weekly post explains what to expect when you visit a divorce attorney and how the process works. She's a good attorney and this could be a valuable source of information as the weeks go by and more and more information becomes available. (Radical Catholic Mom doesn't need to read this blog.)


Matsu Valley

Stress Management I don't recall how I found this blog. The description says she lives "North of Chicago," but there kept being references that fit well with Anchorage. When I asked about the contradiction, the answer was, "Well, Alaska is north of Chicago." A mother with nine kids, a car that doesn't always work, who is going to school. Always colorful.

Progressive Alaska Phil Munger's first blog was USA v. Vic Kohring. When the trial ended he started Progressive Alaska, to be a site uniting what he identifies as progressive bloggers. Phil's lived in Alaska a long time, done a lot of interesting things - radio, harbor master, music professor, gadfly. [Note, he prefers the Hebrew term "mekhapes pagam," ] Basically a lefty political blog, that strays off into other areas that come up.

Dennis Zaki Blog I met Dennis -as I met Phil - at the political corruption trials last year. Dennis runs AlaskaReport.com and independent news website that gets lots of hits. He covers local events and has a group of bloggers who post on his site. He just started this blog. Look for consistently great photographs of everything. The header photo changes just about daily.

Cabin Fever in Alaska by Artist Judy Vars An artist blog with pictures of her work and others' and accounts of events in the South central Alaska art world.

Fairbanks
My Fairbanks Life Theresa is a writer who lives in Fairbanks with her husband and son. She write exquisite prose. I read it to be inspired by the language she uses. She sees the uncommon in the common. How about, "Before the sun can find a cloud to powder its nose behind,..." That made me reconsider clouds completely. And the sun. Longish, seemingly wandering essays, in which the various loose threads all get pulled together before the end.

Fiery Blazing Handbasket A real Alaska blog. Outhouses, wood piles, the stereotypical Alaska life style that Outsiders want to hear about - at least those who don't think we live in igloos. But that lifestyle out in the boonies, basic as some of the daily tasks are, comes with an insight and intelligence the New York crowd doesn't expect to find in a cabin in the wilderness.

Fairbanks Pedestrian Another very literate and thoughtful Fairbanks blog that specializes in public spaces, community, and how to create infrastructure that supports a more humane way to live.


Alaskans off the road system
(well, you can take a ferry to Seldovia and Kodiak)

Freshwrestler's Reprieve Irregular posts about what's happening in Seldovia from the perspective of a relative new comer. Thoughtful observations

Grassroots Science This blog had a unique and important role - trying to pass on information that would improve health in the YK Delta (Yukon-Kuskokwim). The posts have lagged lately, so go visit and spur her on to do more.

Kodiak Konfidential The mythical Ishmael writes a salty, irreverent blog about the goings on in Kodiak and beyond. Ish is a definite Palin fan, but I don't think it has to do with politics.


Alaskans Living Outside

Alaskan Abroad Dillon doesn't seem to be able to stay in o ne place long. He's currently a DC political reporter for The Oil Daily, but he's worked for China Daily, the Prague Post, and the Fairbanks DailyNews-Miner, to mention a few. When he isn't listing Outside new references to Alaska politics or about oil, he writes about his dog, rugby, and The Czech Republic. Nice photos too.

The Barnyard Devil I started reading this blog when Matt was based in Girdwood where he was with the fire department. He's also a screen writer, and now is in North Carolina where his partner (wife?) is working. He writes long, interesting essays, that are well worth reading. There were great stories about his life in LA working in the the film and theater worlds. Not sure how long we can count him as an Alaskan, but I'll keep him here for now.


If I've made any factual errors in my descriptions please let me know so I can correct them. One thing that I've noticed is that with few exceptions, most of the bloggers I've listed are white. I know there are Alaskan bloggers of other shades and I'd like to see some of their blogs.

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.]

Blooming: Iris, Phlox, Wild Rose, Wild Geranium, Lilac, Lily of the Valley, Mountain Ash, and More

Reason to blog #213*: Keep track of the cycle of time. At first, as I was taking pictures today, I thought, I can't put these up, I did this last year. Then I realized that's ok. It's good to remember that this happened last year, and the year before, and to think about how you've made the world better in between. It was a bit of a shock to discover that some of these flowers I posted exactly one year ago today.


Our first iris just opened today, and not quite fully either.






These plants really look like they should be inside all winter, that they can't possibly survive an Alaskan winter, yet they do quite well. I wrote a Haiku about this and the next flower.


Like birds in our yard
words in my brain come and go
beyond my control.






I couldn't remember the name of this flower last year either.













The pale lavender wild geraniums are pretty common. The white ones are a little harder to find.






Our mountain ash tree provides berries for the bohemian wax wings (be my guests) and bark for the moose (grrrrrr!) in the winter and flowers for me and the bees in the summer.
For a while each summer we have a carpet of pink phlox. If you look closely you can see there are actually two different kind. There are only a few with the red markings. You can see them in the lower right hand corner of the background picture above.

While all our neighbors have spectacular lilacs, we've never been successful until we got one little bunch of flowers last year. I was pleased to see it come back again this year.





Oh yes, I can't forget the spittle bug. My second post, July 9, 2006, was about spittle bugs. Before I had a digital camera. And then again last year on June 23, 2007 I got pictures. They are later this year and not nearly as big or wide spread. Also the aphid larvae were much earlier last year. I'm sparing you the picture of them today.

The Emanual Brothers with Charlie Rose

Phil at Progressive Alaska has criticized Ethan Berkowitz for taking money from Rahm Emanual's PAC, saying things like:

As I've written about here before, the PAC "reads like a "who's who" list of supporters of war with Iran, defenders of the worst aspects of our health care industry, opponents of net neutrality, and enablers of the financial deregulation that allows hedge fund managers to be taxed very little, and who helped engineer the sub-prime mortgage industry meltdown.

This Charlie Rose's June 16, 2008 interview with Rahm and his two brothers doesn't get into the issue of the PAC. Rose says he wants to talk about health care and the Emanual family. Except for a bit at the end, it's not about health care, just the family. Obviously Rose knows these people and isn't probing or challenging on anything close to the issues Phil is concerned with, but the video does give us some background on Rahm and his family. And I found it a lively and interesting show.

Early Dental Appointment

I knew, when I went to bed this morning (it was about 2am) that I had an appointment to get my teeth cleaned today, but all my calendar said was "Dentist." No time. I checked the voice mail, because they usually call the day before. I considered calling to tell them I didn't know what time the appointment was, but I bet on my knowing my sleeping habits and that I would have made it for the afternoon.

So when the phone woke me at 9:08am, I knew it was the dentist's office. I got dressed and grabbed the bike and was there at 9:20. Dianne, my great hygienist, was enjoying the chance to give me a bad time. Well, she always gives me a bad time, but now she had me good. (Note from the picture of the bike racks, Providence Hospital is ready to add another bike rack in the main building garage.)

Me: "I knew I had an appointment, but didn't know when. No one called like usual."
Dianne: "The calls are a courtesy, patients should be responsible. Next thing you know, the patients will expect us to pick them up.(There's always just enough smile in her voice I know she isn't serious.)

This is why I insist on having Dianne. Not only is she a great hygienist, she's honest and funny. I'd been teasing her about it being cheaper to fly to Thailand and get my teeth done than getting it done here. But, given how unprepared I was for today's appointment, I didn't have my pictures with me. So here they are now.

300 Baht is about $10. 500 Baht is about $15. (@32 Baht/$ - so we did rough rounding). So 5000 Baht would be about $150.

South Pacific 50 Years After Film First Came Out

We biked over to the Bear Tooth Monday night for their 50th anniversary of the movie South Pacific. (The picture is getting ready to ride home at about 11:15 pm after the movie. It had an intermission about two hours into the movie.) Not long ago I posted about Out North's production of Hair "forty years later." It's hard to imagine that only ten years separate Hair and South Pacific. Actually a few more, because it was opened on Broadway on April 7, 1949 according to Wikipedia. I grew up listening to Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, but I'd never seen the movie South Pacific.

I was worried it was going to look terribly dated (and the quality of the film - especially when they did special lighting effects - was pretty awful. ) But it was mostly musicals, songs I could sing along with. We have the Broadway album with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza. Mitzi Gaynor and Rossano Brazzi played the main roles in the movie.

And the underlying theme was interracial marriage - listen to the short clip of "You've got to be taught (to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a different shade, you've got to be carefully taught...) There was even one black man among the mostly bare chested sailors dancing and singing on the beach. This was 1949, pretty amazing. Before Brown v. Board of Education and all civil rights movement in the 1960s. (Spike Lee recently criticized Clint Eastwood for not having any black soldiers in his 2006 film Letters from Iwo Jima. And life has many strange connections. It was in a talk at Cannes where he was discussing his new film about the Buffalo Soldiers whom I just learned about Sunday from a real Buffalo Soldier at the Juneteenth Celebration.)

I don't know how these songs would strike young listeners who'd never heard them before, but since the first Broadway revival just won seven Tony's it must be connecting with somebody. I would note that Oscar Hammerstein, who did the music for this and many other great broadway shows, was like an uncle to Stephen Sondheim who created Sweeny Todd and many other musicals.




The Broadway South Pacific website has some beautiful (great internet quality) videos of the cast in the recording studio. Definitely worth a check.

[I keep mentioning the bikes because if a couple of 60 somethings can ride bikes around town, maybe the rest of you will think about it too. We just ask before we leave, "Can we do this by bike?" and if we aren't running really late or don't need to carry something too big or too heavy and it's not raining, we usually say "Yes."]