Press Reports: Obama Coming to Alaska

The Anchorage Press reports online:

Tuesday night, in a conference room in the Loussac library, Barack Obama State Director Kat Pustay told about 50 Alaskans that Obama would be coming to campaign here sometime before November.

Once he does, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will be the first major party nominee to campaign here since Richard Nixon did in 1960.

Pam of Grassroots Science Visits Anchorage

An example of blogging networks at work. Pam from Grassroots Science is in town. She emailed me before coming and I invited her to lunch yesterday. She had a beautiful day, probably the nicest we've had all summer and we were able to eat on the deck.

And she told me about things she's working on/interested in. She lives in Bethel, is a Biological Anthropologist by degree, and she tries to make science understandable so people can benefit from it.



It was clear there were people in Anchorage she should know, so we went over to ISER (Institute for Social and Economic Research), the Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies, and to ANSEP (Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program).

The ANSEP program is run by Professor Herb Schroeder and has been phenomenally successful in doing what few higher education programs have been able to do - recruit, retain, and graduate Alaska Native students. In Engineering this is even more unusual. Herb has done this by recruiting at high schools around the state, working with the high schools to make sure students get the curriculum they need to do the work, having summer prep programs, dorm space for the students participating so they can lessen the shock of moving from village Alaska to Anchorage and so they can eat some of their traditional food together.

The program got a cover story in the December 2007 issue of PE (The Magazine for Professional Engineers.) Herb said it was the engineering equivalent of being on the cover of Rolling Stone. (The PE song hasn't come out yet.)



We also stopped at the UAA Bookstore where she (and I) picked up a copy of Traditional Food Guide. And I went upstairs to the Apple store and finally got Leopard. But I've been too busy to install it.




The book is really quite amazing, combining Western knowledge about nutrition with Traditional knowledge about the various animals and plants that Alaska Native peoples have eaten for centuries. Here are some examples. Books can be purchased through ANTHC.




So now I know what to do with all the cow parsnips we have around here.





I've picked out some of the more exotic foods for non-Native people.





























She was staying with a friend whose RV is parked downtown at the Ship Creek Landings RV Park, a place I never knew existed. It's at the end of Ingra on First Avenue. It was surprisingly well surrounded by trees to hide it from its industrial surroundings. But it is basically a parking lot.

My way of thinking about transportation has made a serious shift since we got back from Thailand and I found myself hesitating before offering to drive her around. I thought about us taking bikes to do our errands, but eventually I was going to have to get her downtown and come back alone.

Anchorage 2008 Pride Fest Film Festival - Eleven Minutes

There were about eight other people for Eleven Minutes, the feature documentary about Project Runway winner Jay McCarroll's first fashion show. There wasn't time to get bored as the film rushed through the year of preparation for the 11 minute show.



[June 27: I got an email from Rob Tate, one of the directors of Eleven Minutes in which he said that he didn't have the rights to post anything on the Video and directing me to take down the clips I had up. Since I've been in murky waters on this I took it down immediately. He redirected me to a YouTube trailer of this movie. I must say his email was very polite and decent. This does raise some issues of free speech. Book reviewers regularly put short passages of the book into their reviews. TV reviewers also put clips of the movies they review. Without the clips it is difficult to give the reader a sense of the movie. Some film makers from the Anchorage International Film Festival have linked to my comments (and short video clips) on their own websites. So some people do appreciate the coverage and overlook the video issue. I've assumed all along that what I did was pretty low on the priorities of the big film companies and for small film makers it would generally bring more attention to their films. But I will think about what Rob has emailed carefully as we try to work out how technology affects things.]
So why were so few people there? Some guesses.

1. It was too nice a day to go to the movies.
   We stayed for the second show - a series of shorts, some of which I didn't need to see and others (like "Tryout" the Israeli film about a father who has his kid for the weekend and his lover wants to meet the kid; or "Fabulousity", about parents who are about to have a special baby and the advice they get) were outstanding. Since we were the only ones who did stay, we offered to go home and let the projectionist go home early, but he said no. So we had the whole place to ourselves. By the time we got out from it was starting to rain for our bike ride home.
2. It was a Tuesday night.
   You get the theater to yourself.
3. So much else to do.
   So you won't get it all done anyway. Go see some mind stretching movies instead.
4. Tired.
   It's dark. You can sleep there.
5. Don't want to see gay movies.
   Well, none of these were 'gay' movies. They were movies that had a gay theme - some only barely. Gay marriage is a big issue these days still. Here's a chance for people on all sides of the issue to get to know what gay folks are saying, what their lives are like. There was nothing icky in any of these films - well there were some same sex kisses for the very squeamish.
6. Someone might think I'm gay if I go to these movies.
   Come on now. This is 2008. There are gay people who go to these films. But so do lots of straight folks. If this is a worry for you, then you really need to go. Get out of your comfort zone, live dangerously. And so what if they do? Keep 'em guessing.
7. It's too expensive.
   Online it is $6.50 a show, it's $7 at the door. Less than a regular movie discount price.

5pm Wednesday - Out Late - about gays coming out in their 50's, 60's, and 70s.

7pm Wednesday - Ask Not - Asks why the military lowers its standards to meet recruiting goals and takes in convicted felons, but not gays.

9pm Wednesday - Women Shorts - five short films.

For the whole list of films - the festival goes through Friday - go to OutNorth.

Kohring Leaving Court Video

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.

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.

CI [Correctional Institution] Taft
Contact Information

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

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt's Anchorage Speech Part 3

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

Pruitt Presentation - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Pruitt Presentation

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Homescape.com's About button says:

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

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

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

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

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

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.
B.A., Reed College. M.A., N.Y.U.

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.

[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.

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…
Monday June 30, 2008. Because Mr. Kohring needs to have surgery. That should give him adequate time to have the surgery and recuperate.

And you can see and hear Kohring telling all who would listen about what he saw as the judge's outrageous conflict of interest.

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.

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.