Did you know the East Valley Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize?
It’s funny to me how many people I ask who don’t know that. New Times story about it here. Part of the reason is the way the Arizona Republic, in an awesome example of journalistic poutiness, buried the news about the award last May.
Arizona seems to live in a dream world sometimes. The most popular politician in the state runs an organization so compromised a local paper wins a public service Pulitzer for examining just a small part of it—and it does not become part of the public debate.
I mention this only to note that the East Valley Tribune may be being sold, after a year that, despite the Pulitzer, has already seen a wrenching downsizing: 140 staffers let go, publication trimmed first to four days, and now three days, a week.
Freedom Communications, the national chain based in Orange County, is in bankruptcy, and the news at the end of last week is that it is asking the court to let it sell off some assets, among them possibly the EVT and a few smaller local papers—the Sun City Daily News-Sun and Ahwatukee Foothills News.
The EVT’s story about it here.
The more I read the EVT, the more I like it. Hard to argue with this account of the company’s financial problems:
In its bankruptcy filing earlier this month, Freedom listed debts of nearly $1 billion. Much of that was incurred in 2004, when the company bought out some members of the Hoiles family, which has controlled the company since its founding more than 70 years ago. Two outside investor groups financed the buyout.
In recent years, the company has seen a steep decline in advertising revenue and increasing competition from the Internet, as have most newspaper companies across the nation. The situation was made worse by the onset of the latest national recession. As a result, Freedom defaulted on its debt obligations.
Emphasis added. The lesson here is the insane amount of debt Freedom and so many media companies took on in the earlier years of this decade. People get sentimental about daily newspapers, rightly or wrongly, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that most of the daily journalism companies in true financial straits right now got there through bad business decisions unrelated to the current financial downturn or, truth be told, the decline of the industry overall.
More on that little hobby-horse of mine here.
Reporter Nick Martin, one of the staffers laid off earlier this year, writes in more detail about the issue here on his blog Heat City.
p.s. I realize the EVT has a lot of problems to deal with right now, but I feel I have to note it’s another one of the local papers whose web site is mighty glitchy. Here’s what I got when I used the site’s seach engine to find its story on the latest news about its parent company:
Here’s a closeup of the results:
And the links all resolve to weird Google Reader pages.
Search for the same thing through Google News, however, and it comes right up.
Similarly,when I searched for the word “arpaio” to get the link for the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series, I got this:
The search engine should be key-worded so that any search for Arpaio should produce a master page with the series and recent articles nicely laid out.
Now, anyone at the paper would doubtless sigh when asked about this, making the valid point that with 140 recent layoffs, resources were stretched thin.
To which one would still have to reply: So why weren’t these basic web issues done before the operation borrowed a billion dollars to buy out its owners?
6:00 AM
Temples of bigotry
PHXated is lucky enough to own a house in northeast Phoenix. As homeowners know, there’s a lot of worries and anxieties that go along, and an owner can be forgiven for a neurosis or two. (Or three.)
But: What if I said it really bothered me that … Mormons owned houses. That Mormons’ owning houses affects my ownership of my house?
What if I said that Mormons shouldn’t be allowed to own houses?
Well, you’d say I was batshit crazy.
That whether a Mormon owned a house didn’t affect my homeownership a bit.
That I was being intolerant, a little bit crazy, and, frankly, something of a bigot.
We were thinking along these lines while reading some recent local news stories about how the Mormon Church wants some zoning variances to build two new temples in the area, one in Gilbert and one waaay up at 51st Avenue and Pinnacle Peak Road.
The Mormons were in the news last year because of the enormous financial support the church gave to two state ballot measures involving gay marriage. The church was on the anti side, both here in Arizona and in California. It’s been reported that the church spent literally millions of dollars to make sure the anti-gay marriage side won.
The church was successful in both cases, fairly narrowly in California. You could make the argument the church’s money tipped the balance.
We don’t have to point out to you the analogy we were making above. Just as it would be intolerant for us to try to deny a Mormon the right to buy a house, it’s intolerant for Mormons to try to stop gay people from marrying.
Whether a Mormon owns a house doesn’t affect me one whit, just as a couple of gays or lesbians getting hitched doesn’t affect Mormon couples one whit. That’s why it’s crazy, in both cases, to get one’s panties in a knot about it.
And finally, to go on a political campaign to deny other folks the right to buy a house—why, that’s bigoted.
And so is spending millions to dollars to make life more difficult for people who want to love and care for each other under the protection of the law.
A lot of the coverage of this issue, it seems to us, is just a little too polite.
Right now, the Mormons aren’t just building a couple of new temples, which is their right to do. They want the city in both cases to give them zoning variances. In Gilbert, they want to build to a height twice as high as is currently allowed.
In both cases, the cities should not give the Mormons any special rights to build that the current zoning doesn’t allow.
Let them built what they wish, under the laws in effect—but nothing more.
Why should the intolerant get special treatment from government?
Now, here’s the final point I want to make. What if I did get a movement going to deny Mormons the right to own houses. What if I played on people’s prejudices—and got a ban passed?
Then let’s let 100 years go by. A more tolerant age might dawn, and a movement might rise to ease those awful rules against Mormon house ownership.
Some however, would resist the change. They would demonize Mormon house ownership. It’s always been that way, they’d say. Mormons just can’t own houses.
Just because … that’s the way we’ve always done it.
How would Mormons feel? Probably a lot like the way gays and lesbians who want to get married today do.
They’d feel, in a phrase, like victims of a pointless and cruelly destructive prejudice that has no basis in reason or morality.
6:00 AM