When John Henry Browne was Vic Kohring's attorney, Vic Kohring would stop and talk and talk with the reporters waiting outside the security barriers at the Federal Court building. Browne would show up a little later and say with a smile, "I thought I told you not to say anything until I got here." Then the two would continue talking to the press.
But today, Kohring walked out and quietly said, his attorney told him not to talk. Then he walked on. Public defender Curtner had nothing to say either. Things might have been a lot different for Kohring, if Curtner had had Kohring's case from the beginning. You can also see David Shurtleff in one of his last APRN assignments before joining the Berkowitz campaign. I asked if he had a comment on the Berkowitz-Benson race. He said, "Not until Monday."
Other posts on Kohring trial.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
US Marshals Flying Vic Kohring To California Monday
U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
11:00 AM 3:07-CR-00055-JWS Judge Sedwick ANCHORAGE COURTROOM 3
USA vs. VICTOR H. KOHRING
(Joseph Bottini) (Richard Curtner)
(Edward Sullivan)
Session began about 11:06am
Kohring public defender Richard Curtner said that Kohring's surgery requres 6-10 weeks of physical therapy and he is now into week 4.
Also, Kohring has been assigned to the Taft Facility, in Taft, California without going through the Taft Medical designator. They do have medical facilities in Rochester, which has better facilities. Taft is minimum security, but does not have physical therapy.
Trying to get proper answer for Mr. Kohring on the prisons.
2. Mr. Kohring does not have the funds to fly to Taft, and would just like to self-surrender here. Prosecutors said this would not be a problem.
Bottini:
Nothing we see in the doctor's report that suggests he couldn't get adequate treatment at Taft. If he needs further assessment, that can be done fairly expeditiouslyIf at Taft. If he wants to self-surrender here to the Marshal's, we do not have a problem with that.
Judge:
Concur with Botinni. Not to minimize Mr. Kohring's condition, there are many people with far more serious medical and mental conditions who report to prison.
Need to report morning of June 30 to Federal Marshals in Anchorage by 12:00 noon.
11:15 am Done
After the session, Vic came out to just a couple of reporters and said his attorney had instructed him not to say anything. Well that certainly speaks well for the attorney. Too bad he didn't start off with Curtner.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
11:00 AM 3:07-CR-00055-JWS Judge Sedwick ANCHORAGE COURTROOM 3
USA vs. VICTOR H. KOHRING
(Joseph Bottini) (Richard Curtner)
(Edward Sullivan)
Session began about 11:06am
Kohring public defender Richard Curtner said that Kohring's surgery requres 6-10 weeks of physical therapy and he is now into week 4.
Also, Kohring has been assigned to the Taft Facility, in Taft, California without going through the Taft Medical designator. They do have medical facilities in Rochester, which has better facilities. Taft is minimum security, but does not have physical therapy.
Trying to get proper answer for Mr. Kohring on the prisons.
2. Mr. Kohring does not have the funds to fly to Taft, and would just like to self-surrender here. Prosecutors said this would not be a problem.
Bottini:
Nothing we see in the doctor's report that suggests he couldn't get adequate treatment at Taft. If he needs further assessment, that can be done fairly expeditiouslyIf at Taft. If he wants to self-surrender here to the Marshal's, we do not have a problem with that.
Judge:
Concur with Botinni. Not to minimize Mr. Kohring's condition, there are many people with far more serious medical and mental conditions who report to prison.
Need to report morning of June 30 to Federal Marshals in Anchorage by 12:00 noon.
11:15 am Done
After the session, Vic came out to just a couple of reporters and said his attorney had instructed him not to say anything. Well that certainly speaks well for the attorney. Too bad he didn't start off with Curtner.
Approximately 15 percent of the Bureau's inmate population are confined in secure facilities operated primarily by private corrections companies and to a lesser extent by state and local governments, and in privately-operated community corrections centers. Contract facilities help the Bureau manage its population and are especially useful for meeting the needs of low security, specialized populations like sentenced criminal aliens. Staff of the Correctional Programs Division in Central Office provide oversight for privately-operated facilities.
Inmate Mail/Parcels
Use this address when sending correspondence and parcels to inmates confined at this facility. Inmate funds may also be sent directly to this address.
INMATE NAME & REGISTER NUMBER
CI TAFT
CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION
P.O. BOX 7001
TAFT, CA 93268
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
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.
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 .
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:
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.
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.
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.
Monday, June 23, 2008
MSNBC article on Alaska Congressional Race
MSNBC has an online article by L.D. Kirshenbaum on Berkowitz' campaign against incumbent Don Young for Congress.
The Alaska race is the one of the most dramatic examples of a national trend in which incumbent Republicans are fighting to keep formerly safe seats in Congress, particularly because Alaska has only one congressman. On Wednesday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee placed Berkowitz on its list of “Red to Blue” candidates who will receive strategic and financial support leading up to the November election.Although the article mentions that Don Young has a primary challenge
Before squaring off with Berkowitz in November, Young is facing a challenge from within his own party. Sean Parnell, the lieutenant governor, has entered the state’s Aug. 26 primary and has the popular governor’s support. Parnell also has been endorsed by the Club for Growth, which works to promote anti-tax candidates and to defeat what it sees as free-spending incumbents.A search of the article using "Benson" turned up nothing. "Primary" got the above quote. Nothing about LeDoux either. Another example of outside writers ignoring a serious candidate in the Democratic primary. Wouldn't they all be surprised if this person they don't even know exists became the Democratic candidate in August?
I don't think there is anything Alaskans don't already know. All I can find (I'm being called to go for dinner) about the author is:
L.D. Kirshenbaum ’84 is a freelance writer in Seattle.I know about this article because people are coming to my site from it. There's a link to the audio of Berkowitz on the House floor May 2006 that I have posted when the three politicians were indicted last May.
B.A., Reed College. M.A., N.Y.U.
[Later: For a much more thorough and informed overview of the Alaska races see this post by Phil Munger at Progressive Alaska.]
Another Kohring Court Appearance
[Wed. pm: For hearing results go to Kohring Trial label.]
Someone passed this on to me.
Apparently, what this means is that Vic Kohring has filed for a delay in his starting his prison sentence and the judge has agreed to hear this in court.
Here's what I wrote at the sentencing on May 8. This is the judge talking:
Someone passed this on to me.
Full docket text for document 202:
AMENDED JWS ORDER as to Victor H. Kohring re [201] Order; At docket 200 defendant moves to continue the date for his surrender to begin commencement of his sentence. The court will hold a hearing on that motion at 11:00 AM on June 25, 2008, in Anchorage Courtroom 3. The United States may, but is not required to, file a written response prior to the hearing. The hearing will not be under seal. cc: USM, USPO (RMC, COURT STAFF.
Apparently, what this means is that Vic Kohring has filed for a delay in his starting his prison sentence and the judge has agreed to hear this in court.
Here's what I wrote at the sentencing on May 8. This is the judge talking:
Good candidate for self surrender. He won’t be required to surrender any earlier than…And you can see and hear Kohring telling all who would listen about what he saw as the judge's outrageous conflict of interest.
Monday June 30, 2008. Because Mr. Kohring needs to have surgery. That should give him adequate time to have the surgery and recuperate.
Black White + Gray, Museum, Bernie's Bungalow
We biked down to the museum to see Black White + Gray, a movie about Sam Wagstaff, Robert Maplethorpe's patron. It gave a lot insight into how a photographer whose best known images were homo erotic photos became such a celebrated artist in a homophobic nation. Essentially, Wagstaff an extremely handsome, wealthy gay man who had become the major collector of photographs, took Maplethorpe in. According to the film, Wagstaff made photography a recognized art form. Maplethorpe, over 20 years Wagstaff's junior, showed Wagstaff some of the wilder sides of gay New York. Both died of AIDS, Maplethorpe in 1989, Wagstaff in 1987.This April 2007 NY Times review gives more details of the film.
We walked out of the movie past one more of the new buildings in Anchorage - the still very much under construction addition to the museum.
We wandered down the street to Bernie's Bungalow. We hadn't been to Bernie's since it was in the Sears Mall. Bernie talked to us about Thailand a while - he'd been in Chiang Mai for a week while we had been there - and he said it was 11 years since he'd been at the Sears Mall. He's ready for warmer climes and is looking for a buyer.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
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.Curley's website is probably one I need to check more often:
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)
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.
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)
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
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:
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.
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
Story #5: Newspapers are special; they're critical to community and democracy.
[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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
A supporting story for this is(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.
- “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.
- 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.
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 doI'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
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.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
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.
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