Why did the Republic fire one of its bloggers ... and scrub his work from its website without notice?
Nick Martin, at Heat City, says that Bill Richardson, an ex-cop who blogged for the Republic on police matters, has been dropped by the Republic …and had his entire body of work expunged from the paper’s site, with no notice.
Any paper can publish whom it wants, of course. But with the Republic, there’s always something weird going on:
Richardson said one of the paper’s opinion editors, Joanna Allhands, called him Monday to tell him the blog was being yanked because of recent posts he had written about the Tempe Police Department.
[…]
But reached by phone late Tuesday, Allhands flatly denied the move was made because of Richardson’s criticism of Tempe.
“No, that’s not correct,” she said when asked about the allegation. Still, she refused to explain why Richardson’s blog was closed or why his entire archive was deleted from the website.
Seems like either Richardson or Allhands is lying!
And in any case, scrubbing the archive with no notice or explanation is a no-no.
7:06 AM
Laurie Roberts lays out the Ben Quayle/Brock Landers story in all its porny glory
Yesterday, the Arizona Republic finally vouchsafed to its print clientele an overview of Ben Quayle’s sordid past associations with the ultraskanky web site Dirty Scottsdale.
This came after the election he was running in, but whatever.
Today Laurie Roberts, on whom we have a journalistic crush, finally limns the story the way the paper should have from the start:
So, to recap:.
He denied writing for the website, then he admitted writing for the website, saying he posted a handful of “fictional satirical comments.”
He denied that he is Brock Landers but he hasn’t denied writing under the name Brock Landers.
And he couldn’t recall whether he introduced Karamian to a lawyer for purposes of incorporating the website, but then later admitted that he hooked them up.
Now he says he’s “been consistent from the very beginning on this issue.”
7:47 AM
Newsflash: Arizona Republic readers learn about Ben Quayle's porny alter ego
In its campaign wrap-up story today, the Arizona Republic tells its readers that Ben Quayle might not be the ideal GOP candidate to replace John Shadegg.
Why?
Well, turns out the sanctimonious family-values candidate used to write for, and palled around with the founder of, a sleazy web site in Scottsdale.
His nom de skank was Brock Landers, the name of a porn actor in Boogie Nights.
As PHXated has noted here and here, while the story has been a national news staple for the past two week, the Arizona Republic has apparently never mentioned it in its news pages.
(We have yet to find an actual printed story in which this was mentioned; the paper has run a couple of wire stories on the web site. It certainly has not done what you’d expect, which is routinely make reference to an ongoing scandal in a major local political campaign.)
Until today, that is… two days after the election he was running in.
11:14 PM
Scruffy McPoochie, rampant
Scruffy McPoochie, the editor of the Arizona Republic’s daily Living section, ignores the criticism that the paper’s feature section should include stories about people.
Dogs are ‘living’ too, McPoochie growls, and resumes pawing through wire stories, searching out the best dog news from across the nation.
Today’s entry is about dog cancer.
It continues to add to the paper’s luster as the Nation’s Leading Purveyor of Dog Journalism™.
The lede is about a dog who lost its leg to cancer.
This poignant anecdote is made all the more affecting when we learn that the dog in question was a greyhound, which are “bred for the racetrack.”
It’s hard to run with only three legs. That’s the poignant part.
You’re not going to believe this. The owner of the greyhound, Tex, who lost his leg?
[Lisa Stone], the founder of a Scottsdale law firm treats Tex and her two Ridgebacks, Layla and Larry, like her children.
“I’m the crazy dog parent,” she said, offering proof: When Tex was in the hospital after his amputation, she stayed at his bedside for eight to nine hours a day.
And when her first greyhound had his hindquarters amputated due to osteosarcoma, she slept on the living-room floor with him for more than a year because he couldn’t climb the stairs to her bedroom.
In other words, she’s had two greyhounds who’ve had their legs amputated.
What are the odds?
The story also contains this paragraph:
“To collect the DNA, we just need a little slobber, and trust me, with my Labrador, you can get plenty of it,” Trent said.
The dog cancer story joins McPoochie’s other dog journalism triumphs.
Another (!) story about a swanky kennel for dogs.
It’s hard to believe the Republic’s circulation is dropping ten percent a year.
10:59 PM
The curious incident of the Quayle that didn't, uh, chirp in the Arizona Republic
It was one of the more noted political antics of this last primary cycle:
Ben Quayle, the son of a notorious former vice president and now a family values Congressional candidate, was a few years ago a writer for an ultra-skanky nightlife web site, then called DirtyScottsdale and now called TheDirty.com.
As an indication of the national interest in the story, Politico followed it intensely.
… and treated the incident prominently in its wrap-up today as well.
The revelation was compounded by the callow Quayle’s handling of it.
He lied at first, denying any involvement.
Then he reversed himself, admitting he had written for the site, and to this day has kept the story alive by not coming clean entirely, as the latest Politico story makes clear:
At first, Quayle denied ever writing for the site, telling POLITICO “I was not involved in the site.” Then he backtracked and admitted to writing under a pseudonym, though he denies Richie’s accusation that he wrote as Brock Landers, a reference to a fictional porn star in the 1990s film “Boogie Nights.”
(It makes no sense for him to admit to writing for the site but not under the pseudonym.)
Here’s my question:
Did the Arizona Republic ever mention the scandal in the paper?
Online, the paper reprinted the first two Politico stories.
But I never saw, and can’t find online, an actual Republic story that detailed the incident for readers.
Am I wrong?
If I did in fact miss one mention of it in print, it still begs the question of why it wasn’t in every story the paper ran that mentioned Quayle.
With the Republic, you never know.
It could have been a decree from on high.
Or it could just be incompetence.
6:36 PM
The Arizona Republic is looking for young entrepreneurs
The paper’s preparing its annual “"35 Entrepreneurs 35 and Under” feature, to be published in October.
There’s a nomination form here
The applicant must have been born after Oct. 1, 1975 to be eligible. The entrepreneur has to have been involved in starting and running and Arizona-based business that already is showing revenue growth and potential.
Applications must be submitted by Aug. 31.
4:35 PM
The Arizona Republic: The Nation's Leading Purveyor of Dog Journalism™
The Arizona Republic, which writes about local dogs more than humans, has a story today about a dog who died in the heat.
We’re sorry about the dog, but we already knew that it was hot out.
The story was in our zoned section, but we’re betting Scruffy McPoochie, the paper’s canny, canine Living section editor, will grab the thing and reuse it in his section sometime next week.
McPoochie, pictured above, is just one of the folks from whatever species who’ve help make the Arizona Republic the nation’s leading purveyor of dog journalism.
Just a couple of weeks ago, McPoochie ran a story about dog insurance.
It was a wire story, and mostly about people in Chicago, but McPoochie knew that dog journalism isn’t about states. It’s a state of mind.
It was such a great subject that a jealous business-section editor, in an act of journalistic oneupdogship, reassigned it to a Republic staffer, and the paper ran another story on the same lame subject.
The result, as we saw, wasn’t as good as the Chicago one, but whatever.
The paper doesn’t mind doubling down on dog journalism.
McPoochie ran a story about swanky dog hotels a while back …
… and a few weeks later, ran another story about the same damn thing.
Then there was the story about dogs on Twitter.
Which was almost as interesting as the story about dogs on Facebook.
And this is in addition to the paper’s day-to-day coverage of the beat: The church that allows dogs … another story about a dog who died … earthshaking changes at a dog park ….
Sure the paper’s circulation is declining ten percent or more a year.
That’s just among humans.
The local dog population may yet turn out to give the paper a whole new …
… leash on life!
8:08 PM
How AZCentral.com sucks, no. 38 in a series
The Republic has a bunch of stories about Rick Romley’s massive document release today.
It’s almost impossible to find them on AZCentral.com. Robert Robb’s column on Thomas should have been linked from the main story, but it isn’t.
There’s also an editorial. That wasn’t linked either.
In looking for the editorial, I noticed a prominent link to something called the Arizona Repubilc Editorial Board blog.
The subhed for the blog is “Editorials from the Arizona Republic.”
The blog stopped being updated in October 2009.
8:18 AM
Rick Romley: Unleash the documents!
Maricopa County prosecutor Rick Romley released a ton of documents about the crazy investigations Joe Arpaio’s office and Romley’s predecessor, Andrew Thomas, waged against their political enemies.
The pair kept pursuing the investigation, even though each venue they took it to—independent prosecutor, grand jury, and then prosecutor in another county—all rejected the pair’s claims.
The Republic lays out just how pathetic the case was, and how to this day Thomas fudges the truth:
After weeks of meeting, the [grand] jury decided to end the inquiry.
Both Thomas' prosecutor and officials in Romley’s office described an “end the inquiry” as rare.
On Thursday, Thomas said … [h]is office asked the grand jury to end the investigation.
Had the grand jury wanted to exonerate those under investigation, Thomas said, it could have issued a “no bill,” which means there was not enough evidence to indict.
However, one of Thomas' own prosecutors had explained to the jury during orientation that to “end the inquiry” meant “the case is so bad, there’s no further evidence that could be brought to you folks,” according to the transcripts.
“Frankly, I have been doing this a long time, and I have had three in my whole career,” deputy county attorney William Moore had said.
Robert Robb piles on here.
The paper’s editorial page is scathing:
It reflects most harshly on Thomas, who now is running for the Republican nomination for attorney general.
Thomas told The Republic’s Craig Harris on Thursday that Romley “has falsely claimed the grand jury found no evidence of wrongdoing” and that the release “vindicates” his office and proves his claims of county corruption.
Against the stark contrast of the grand jurors' own words, Thomas' arguments seem strikingly self-serving.
Citizens who supposedly could be persuaded by Thomas' prosecutors to indict a ham sandwich instead have eaten his lunch.
Despite it all, Sheriff Arpaio clings tenaciously to these now-thoroughly discredited charges. It is time he paid attention to the people and ended this contemptible inquiry once and for all.
8:11 AM
Republic Watch: The revenge of Scruffy McPoochie, Living section editor
Scruffy McPoochie, the Arizona Republic’s Living section editor, loves stories about dogs.
He’ll print stories about anything if there’s a dog in it.
Dogs on Twitter: “Dogs can tweet, too (sort of).”
Dogs on Facebook: “Busy social network for the furry set.”
There was a story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
And, of course, the hard-bitten McPoochie’s finest moment, just five weeks later:
Another story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Ritzy pet resorts replace kennels of yesterday.”
(Some more examples of the section’s indefatigable appetite for such stuff here. McPoochie also has a thing for Starbucks.)
Even a grizzled vet like McPoochie can still get excited about his job.
Last week his ancient heart must have begun to race when he saw a new dog-related story come over the wires.
The subject? Dog insurance!
Wire stories like that—they come to him free, with no need for making his staff do any work—are kibbles from heaven.
McPoochie’s tail wagged excitedly as he read the expository prose:
Typically, pet owners pay a monthly premium. As their pet needs veterinary services, they pay the bills upfront, then submit them for reimbursement.
Some plans cover what in human terms are considered “well visits,” including vaccinations and checkups. But many cover only costs associated with a pet’s illness.
Not just a dog story—a story that explains how insurance works!
He’s a key part of the Arizona Republic’s secret plan to bore people to death.
Anyway, it was the work of a few minutes to whip up a hedline—“Pet health insurance can ease vet-bill shock”—and toss it into the paper.
McPoochie must have stopped reading there, because the rest of the story doesn’t really fulfill the promise of that hedline.
Consider:
Even with pet insurance, hassle-free coverage is no guarantee. Nicole Abbott found this out the hard way.
When the Chicago attorney learned that her company offered pet insurance as part of its benefits package, she immediately signed up her beloved pugs Bella and Chooch.
At the end of last year, Chooch developed an unusual type of stones in his bladder, requiring $500 worth of testing and a $1,200 surgery.
But the insurance company denied the claim, saying Chooch – who previously had problems with routine bladder stones – had a pre-existing condition.
“I tried everything, and they wound up saying I’d have to appeal to the state agency that oversees insurance,” Abbott said.
“I’d spend hours at that point, so I just said, ‘Forget it. It’s not worth it.’ ”
Shortly after Abbott got Bella, the dog had a seizure and required hundreds of dollars worth of treatment. The pet-insurance company claimed Bella’s seizure came one day shy of her policy going into effect, so the treatment wasn’t covered. Abbott disputed that claim, but again hit a brick wall.
But yesterday could not have been a good day for McPoochie.
He has a new threat to face.
Another editor is, you might say, pissing on his territory.
Consider this story, “Popularity rises for pet health insurance”, published yesterday in the Republic’s business section.
It was the second story in as many days the Arizona Republic has published about dog insurance.
McPoochie could see, however, that his competition was not in his league.
It’s hard to believe, but the paper’s business section published a story not just on the same subject, but demonstrably worse than the wire story McPoochie came up with.
The wire story, from the Chicago Tribune, led with a pretty good anecdote about an adorable Lab who swallowed a teacup.
The Republic’s stirring lede, on its version of the story?
The humanization of pets and the increased costs of veterinary care have sparked a burgeoning industry: pet health care.
Sizzling prose!
And the Republic didn’t bother to do what the Tribune did as a matter of course—find someone who can illustrate the down side of the story.
I mean, the Tribune article was a shitty idea for an article, but it was reported out with integrity.
The Republic story doesn’t give readers the downside, and instead spends a lot of time letting people who sell pet insurance talk about the industry’s rosy future …
Within the next few years, it’s likely the rising cost of veterinary care will increasingly convert pet owners without health-care plans into clients, said Doris Amdur, founder of United Pet Care, a health-care company that offers discount plans.
… and relating stories that don’t make sense, like this one:
Teri Morris secured pet insurance for her dog Bella, 9, about 5 years ago.
Although Bella hasn’t had any major health problems, Morris knows vet bills can get expensive quickly.
Morris' dog Scooby died a year ago, after she spent about $8,000 in vet bills to treat his diabetes, thyroid dysfunction and bladder cancer, she said.
“At least some of that would have been covered if he had been insured,” she said.
Ok, so she had insurance for one dog for five years, but he hasn’t gotten sick. And she had another dog, who died a year ago, but he wasn’t insured? Why didn’t she insure both dogs?
Somewhere, Scruffy McPoochie is laughing.
6:32 AM
AZCentral.com: Your window to all the news from the nation and world!
From AZCentral’s front page this a.m.:
7:28 AM
The mysterious disappearing All-Star Game boycott of Arizona
Yesterday, you’ll remember, the Republic front page was all abuzz with talk at this year’s All-Star Game in Anaheim about boycotting next year’s game, which is currently scheduled for Chase Field in Phoenix.
Funny, today the paper fronts another big story about the All-Star Game coming to Phoenix…
… with nary a word about boycotts or SB 1070.
The same writer, too—Nick Piecoro.
This is what I hate about the Republic. How dishonest it is.
From the outside, it sure does seem like there were some high-level discussions at the paper about the splashiness of the possible boycott story Tuesday.
One might even speculate that some behind-the-scenes power brokers with some financial interest in the game’s being held here gave the paper hell.
And then, obviously, someone ordered up a “redo”—essentially the same story, scrubbed of anything that might offend the town’s sports swells.
It’s almost like rewriting history.
10:27 AM
The Espresso Pundit catches the Republic in a big error
We don’t really get Greg Patterson, who blogs as the Espresso Pundit.
He’s one of those guys who is always mad.
But why?
Let’s see… he was born white and male in a country fabulously accommodating to his type.
There were eight years of national Republican rule, complete with tax cuts, which surely benefitted him more than most…and his buddies have been in control of the AZ legislature since who knows when, delivering him lots more tax cuts.
The courts are turning the country over to the gun nets and corporations, his party got us into two wars that keep the Halliburtons of the world in the chips, and the country’s most popular news channel is an arm of the GOP.
But he’s always upset!
It’s weird.
Anyway, Patterson got the Republic dead to rights on a mistake in a recent editorial, which claimed that the state’s gun laws made restaurants and bars provide storage for gun owners if they don’t allow weapons.
He’s right about the correction, too… what should a paper do when an incorrect fact makes an entire article or editorial invalid?
8:40 AM
Arizona Republic editor Jeffrey Dozbaba dies
From the paper:
Most of his newspaper career was spent at The Republic. He began in 1978 as a copy editor, became sports editor in 1991, assistant manager editor in 1993, and then senior editor, senior director of the newsroom’s Information Center and finally was named a manager editor in March 2008. He retired in June 2009.
“He helped lead The Republic’s local news coverage and his efforts have left a lasting legacy for the Phoenix community,” said Randy Lovely, Republic editor and vice president for news. “He was a hard worker, but he played with equal energy and could also be counted on to lighten the mood and add laughter to the room.”
I don’t know if this is a Republic tradition or not, but the obit is oddly un-nihil nisi bonum:
[I]t was hard to escape some of the ribbing Dozbaba liked to dish out.
“He could insult you like nobody’s business,” Leonard said, “but he always did it with a smile.”
[…]
Former Republic reporter Bob Golfen, who knew him since college, said some of Dozbaba’s ideas, however, could be a bit hard to follow.
“He was a smart guy with great instincts, but he wasn’t always tremendously articulate,” he said.
When reading over a story, Dozbaba might say it was good but that something was missing.
“He seemed to have a deeper understanding of what we needed to do, even if he couldn’t always say it,” Golfen said.
7:43 AM
The Arizona Republic prints another press release from Starbucks!
You hate to keep beating up on the Arizona Republic, but it’s just so … infuriating sometimes.
We’ve noted a while back how the paper devoted two whole pages in one of its zoned sections to a story about a resort opening up a Starbucks store inside.
More recently, the paper’s business section ran a huge front-page feature about how Starbucks was introducing a new cup size.
Last week, not to be outdone, the paper’s pathetic Living section gets into the act, with a big illustrated front-page story about …
… a plastic cup the chain is selling:
The Starbucks Cold Reusable To-Go Cups are back in stores this summer.
Well, sometimes, because double-walled plastic cups, which mimic the clear-plastic cups the company uses for its iced coffees and the like, are highly sought by many Starbucks devotees and get snapped up quickly.
The piece goes on for about 15 more paragraphs.
3:52 PM
The Arizona Republic breaks the towing scams in the Valley wide open!
Towing companies, the story says, confiscate cars they shouldn’t, won’t let people get personal items out of the cars once they are towed, demand fees of $150 or more in cash to reclaim cars … and even arrange kickbacks with property owners.
(That last, for example, creates an incentive for the lot owners not to label the tow zones clearly.)
But wait! you say. The legislature passed a bill outlawing a lot of these practices earlier this year!
What happened?
The push for reform at the state level has gained support from some tow-truck company owners, who blame the abuses on a few bad actors giving their industry a bad name. Still, towing legislation in 2008 and 2009 could not gain approval in the state Senate.
This year, as more cash-strapped motorists complained about being fleeced, the Legislature passed the strongest towing-reform bill in Arizona history.
But Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed it, saying it would cost too much to enforce.
Thanks, Jan!
This was her rationale for vetoing the bill:
“[Law enforcement agencies] would need to reassign officers away from law enforcement duties to private towing oversight functions.”
But that’s an argument against any piece of legislation. It’s a prime argument against SB 1070, in fact, not to mention most drug laws.
It’s even a great argument against laws against murder!
“Why, if we make murder illegal, then cops will be pulled away from other law-enforcement duties!”
What’s the difference? The people facing the brunt of the enforcement of SB 1070 are harmless and poor immigrants.
For the towing bill, it was scumbag local towing companies.
Brewer’s concerns extended only to the businesses.
Now, PHXated doesn’t feel that sorry for the people getting their cars towed. Too many drivers are thoughtless at best and radiate a sense of I’ll-park-my-SUV-wherever-I-want arrogance at worst.
They deserve to be towed.
But if there are towing abuses, there’s a right way to correct them: Charge local towing companies fees that would pay for someone in government to handle complaints and enforcement for their industry.
But that would be a tax on small business!
The result: Another example of Republican political philosophy that, conveniently, protects corporate crooks … and fucks over the populace.
The Republic story on the matter, which ledes the paper today, is long and seemingly in-depth.
But read it closely and you can see there’s very little in the story beside people asserting that there’s a towing problem in town. The two case studies the story offers are entirely one-sided. In both cases the towing company involved isn’t named, much less offered a chance to respond.
10:13 AM
Everything that's wrong with Arizona, encapsulated in a quote from one Barbara McGovern
From a front-page feature in the Republic this a.m.:
Five times a week, Barbara McGovern leaves her east Phoenix home to make the 15-minute drive to Piestewa Peak, the mountain she has loved climbing for a decade.
But, in the coming weeks, as she pulls into a parking space, it will be with a bit of resentment. Because starting Aug. 1, it’s going to cost McGovern and anyone else who parks at one of the Phoenix mountain parks or preserves up to $5 a day.
“I’m kind of flabbergasted,” McGovern said Friday, upon hearing about the new fee system Phoenix Parks and Recreation board members approved Thursday. “It seems like we’re getting taxed right and left. They shouldn’t be charging for this. It’s going to be a financial burden for some people.”
It’s possible McGovern isn’t what she seems to be: a classic Arizona Republican, one of those who’ve been electing, year after year, the destructive and clownish folks in the state legislature and then stand around whining when reality intrudes.
If she isn’t, well, then, she’s that other species of local resident, the Arizonicus boobicus—someone not entirely clear on the concept.
Parks cost money. Either you get taxed for them … or you pay directly for them.
I’m pretty sure that, between the short-sighted local statehouse and the nutty Bush tax cuts, “east Phoenix residents” like her have been treated very solicitously by the IRS over the last decade.
It’s intellectually coherent to say, “Why should we be taxed for parks? Let the people who use them pay for them.”
Or to say, “Parks are a public trust that should be paid out of public funds for the benefits of rich and poor alike.”
But neither? Does McGovern think money for parks grows on trees?
p.s.: Indeed—does the Republic? A nonsensical person like McGovern should not have been quoted that high up in the story. It gives it an imprimatur of coherence it obviously doesn’t deserve.
8:42 AM
2More important dog news from the Arizona Republic!
In recent posts we have noted that the Living section of the Arizona Republic has published a lot of stories about dogs—more than you’d expect from a paper that doesn’t print enough news about people.
We finally came to conclusion that the section was being edited by a dog, and even found a picture of the editor in question, which you can see here.
Reading the Living section and keeping in mind that that’s the fellow in charge helps in understanding some of the editorial choices the paper makes on a given day.
The pieces were in most cases crappy little wire-service stories about pet-related products or ephemera.
There was the one about dogs on Facebook:
“Busy social network for the furry set.”
And one about dogs on Twitter:
“Dogs can tweet, too (sort of).”
There was a story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
And then, mind-blowingly, another story about swanky places to board your dog:
“Ritzy pet resorts replace kennels of yesterday.”
While examining some old files here at PHXated world headquarters we came across a torn-out front page of the Living section from February.
We realized that we’d missed some of the paper’s hard-hitting dog coverage.
We mention it now because it’s quite a story.
It’s about a church (in LA, not Phoenix, because this is just another space-filling wire story), that allows dogs.
This is how it begins, emphasis added:
As the Presbyterian service was about to start, one of the congregants was being disruptive, making a spectacle of himself once again on a Sunday. But that’s what other members of the Los Angeles church have come to expect from Mr. Booby.
At Covenant Presbyterian Church in the city’s Westchester neighborhood, dogs like Mr. Booby are welcome congregants at the Sunday night services, where howling and sudden bouts of scratching may interrupt prayers, and the collection plate holds treats for poodles and golden retrievers alike.
The hedline?
“Howl-lelujah: Church includes dogs”
12:33 PM
The Republic has it wrong: There is a First Friday this week
Despite this AZ Central front page this a.m., there's still a First Friday on Friday, just no shutdown of Roosevelt Street with the accompanying street vendors for the July and August events.
Besides the front-page graphic, the accompanying story muddles the issue too, particularly with the hedline, “Gathering won’t be held July, August as First Friday evolves.”
ArtLink page here:
7:24 AM
PHXations—Saturday, June 26, 2010
Hey Republic… If you’re doing a story about “Silent Sunday” at South Mountain Park—that’s the no cars day on the fourth Sunday of the month—would it kill you to note that when the next fourth Sunday is, so readers don’t have to go check their calendars?
For the record, fourth Sunday is tomorrow, so you can hike in the park without cars roaring by.
12:23 PM
Duke Tully R.I.P.: The comments!
From the post earlier today noting the passing of Duke Tully, the publisher of the Arizona Republic who resigned in disgrace after admitting he’d faked a lifetime of war exploits:
Francine Hardaway:
I was one of Duke Tully’s charmees in the 80s when I had my PR company. He would take me to lunch at Avanti, where he would have two martinis and tell me war stories. I knew nothing about the Air Force, so I had no way to judge truth. I was on a ski vacation with my daughters when the fraud story broke, and we still laugh about it.
Anon:
Perhaps, Francine, you would like to consider that one mistake does not define a person. That one fabrication that was difficult to let go of made him any less honourable, kind, or loving. In between your bouts of laughter, maybe you should reflect on just what gives you the right to judge someone so harshly. I’m sure you’ve never made a regrettable decision in your entire, small-minded life. I hope there are none who hold you in such low regard for a transgression of your own.
APC:
Duke was more than this one event. He was a good man, and came clean before the pressure from political enemies. He’d been dropping hints for some time, since he was wracked with guilt. Even though he was advised to quietly stop telling war stories and distance himself from it, he refused to stay quiet. THAT is the mark of an honorable man. Admitting his mistake and acknowledging fault.
And did he get any help from John McCain, after helping McCain so much? Not so much as a word of sympathy. McCain had gotten what he wanted, and washed his hands with no compassion.
Duke will be missed.
PHXated observes:
We have known Ms. Hardaway for only a short time, but are sure that her transgressions are equally entertaining but less hypocritical.
What the Republic obit didn’t mention was that Tully presided over the Republic when it was fat and self-satisfied—and a far-right defender of the status quo. (Pulliam newspapers were famously rigid and atavistic.)
The lives of all minority groups were attenuated at that time—gays and women, blacks and Hispanics. In the meantime, the small-mindedness of the city fathers (they were all of course men) laid the groundwork for the state today: A backward minor republic with a crappy, undeveloped economy; small-minded citizens; a ruefully mediocre educational system; and a bunch of social metrics identical to those of the Deep South.
We delighteded in his downfall because it was a small but enjoyable payback for those decades of intolerance and neglect.
And it’s also a reminder that our poltroons of the moment—that’s you, Russell Pearce, and you, Joe Arpaio!—may yet have their comeuppance!
1:30 PM
Duke Tully dies
The former publisher of the Arizona Republic died yesterday in Florida.
No worries that the paper would soft-pedal the scandal that drove him out of town; the obit goes into delightful detail:
Darrow “Duke” Tully, the former Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette publisher who faked an elaborate military career and resigned in disgrace, has died of complications from a stroke in Tampa. He was 78.
Tully was publisher of The Republic and Gazette until December 1985, when he resigned after learning that his political enemies were investigating his war record.
Tom Collins, Maricopa County attorney at the time, planned to have a news conference to expose Tully, who claimed to have been an Air Force combat pilot in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
[…]
Longtime friend and employee Bill Shover said Tully’s dual existence was driven by his need to win his father’s approval.
“He was rejected by the Air Force because he had bad vision and flat feet,” said Shover, former director of public affairs for Phoenix Newspapers Inc., which owned The Republic and The Gazette during Tully’s tenure.
Tully’s brother was killed in World War II during a training mission and his father criticized him for not becoming a war hero, Shover recalled.
That’s when Tully turned his sights on newspapers and was told he could curry favor with a small Indiana paper if he pretended to be a veteran.
From there, Tully’s stories about his military exploits escalated.
6:44 AM
4The Arizona Republic continues to be so weird. (An ongoing series)
Yesterday, in its Your Home section, the paper introduced a new gardening columnist, Cathy Babcock.
Babcock is a former director at the Desert Botanical Garden and seems like a nice addition to the section, and all is well and good.
Except … instead of just letting Babcock write something, the editor decided the section needed to herald the hire with an actual interview of Babcock.
The resulting piece is unbylined, even though its written in a chirpy, personal style:
She understands the heat. She understands our soil. And she understands that many of us want to plant an herb garden like the one we saw in Martha Stewart Living, and she can help us pull it off.
The unbylined story is a Republic tic we’ve discussed here and here.
Anyway, that’s all bad enough. The interview that follows is done Q&A style, with bold-faced questions, followed by what you’d think would be Babcock’s replies in normal type beneath then.
Instead, the answers to the questions are just normal article prose.
It’s weird! It reads like Babcock is talking about herself in the third person.
For example:
Are you a life-long gardener?
Babcock got interested in plants during a trip to California with her sister in the late 1980s. Babcock actually went back to school to study horticulture. She worked in accounting and “didn’t want to work in an office anymore.” She studied urban horticulture at Arizona State University, graduating in 1989, and has worked at the garden since.
And you also get just random dumbness like this:
Do you work in an office now?
Sadly, Babcock acknowledges, much of her day now is in an office…
Have you ever seen a newspaper interview done in that format before?
7:49 AM
The Arizona Republic takes a stand!
The Arizona Republic is so randomly put together and edited, despite the good work of a lot of its good writers, that it’s hard to get a bead on it.
Just to surprise us, the paper runs an unassailably documented, incredibly long, and cogently argued editorial about the much bruited-about political issue of “securing the border.”
The bad news is that it ran on the front page as a news story under a tag of “analysis.”
It was written by Dennis Wagner; it’s a great piece that lays waste to the creeps and poltroons stirring up the cheap seats with fear tactics, and it’s the kind of thing the paper should run more of.
Since it is basically an opinion piece, it’s going to attract a lot of flak, but it’s hard to argue with anything Wagner writes:
Anyone with a minimal knowledge or understanding about the nearly 2,000-mile swath of land between Mexico and the United States realizes that requiring a secure border establishes an impossible standard.
…There is no way to conclude success because authorities have no idea how many undocumented immigrants are getting through. Authorities can count only the number of unauthorized intruders captured. Such unavoidable uncertainty prevents any absolute assurances that no one is sneaking over, making declarations of victory impossible.
The story includes this mischievous passage:
Here is another way to consider the problem: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a leader in the anti-immigration movement and acclaimed as America’s toughest sheriff, cannot secure his own jails. Every year, despite armed guards, electronic locks and video monitors, inmates smuggle drugs in from the outside and sometimes even escape.
No one would blame Arpaio. All penal institutions, regardless of security measures, have breaches. Yet imagine if America adopted a position that no new laws could be passed regarding prison reform “until the nation’s jails are secure.”
Lots and lots of facts and figures in the (very long) story, which is here.
7:24 AM
Meet the new editor of the Arizona Republic's Living section!
Back in February, readers of the Arizona Republic’s feature section were given a wire-service story about dogs on Facebook:
“Busy social network for the furry set.”
Then there was the story about … dogs on Twitter:
“Dogs can tweet, too (sort of).”
Then came a hard-hitting story about pet boarding:
“Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
Then a story about a “therapy dog” who, sniff sniff, died:
Most of these stories were wire copy, which means that instead of figuring out a way to get vibrant and essential local news into the section with folks on staff, the editor is just picking shmaltzy fluff out of the free copy the paper has available to it from the various news services it subscribes to.
You might think, after all that, that the Living section had scraped the bottom of the barrel when it came to bland and inoffensive dog news …
… and you’d be right.
Today the section has a front-page story on … Posh pads for pampered pooches!
It’s the second wire service story the section has run on this topic in the past two months.
The hedline and the story are different, but the idea is the same.
This one is called “It’s a dog’s life: Ritzy pet resorts replace kennels of yesterday.”
It’s about an upscale “pet resort.”
In Charlotte, North Carolina.
Why a paper in a industry fighting for its life would just give up in this way is a puzzlement.
… until we discovered who is currently editing the section:
8:31 AM
Everything you wanted to know about Arizona's budget problems ...
… except who was responsible.
From the Republic:
Debt has been a quick but uneasy solution to budget pressures.
As state tax collections lagged and demand for state services grew, lawmakers and Gov. Jan Brewer scrambled for ways to balance the budget. They drained the state’s “rainy-day fund,” cut spending and delayed big-dollar payments to schools. It wasn’t enough.
They anguished for more than a year before sending Brewer’s temporary 1-cent-per-dollar sales-tax increase to the ballot, where voters last month passed it.
Meanwhile, lawmakers borrowed to patch over the holes in the budget….
Arizona’s legislature is of course dominated by the GOP and has been; aside from one elliptical reference to the legislature’s being “conservative,” the story doesn’t dwell on that fact at all.
7:24 AM
The Republic profiles Russell Pearce
The paper ledes today with a long, if not really in-depth, look at the bozo who’s been at the forefront of taking the state back into the stone age.
Here’s how it begins:
Nothing stops Russell Pearce.
Not a heart attack. Not a stroke. Not a bullet in the chest.
And most certainly not the criticism from opponents who have long accused him of putting politics ahead of facts, pushing too hard and cooperating too little.
The story does its best to deal with a few of Pearce’s most obvious vulnerabilities, but as usual with the Republic, the staff there just doesn’t seem up to the task.
For example, the reference to “putting politics ahead of facts” in the third paragraph is an initial taste of an issue the story flits back to, but never deals with head-on:
How Pearce talks incessantly about immigrant-fueled crime, when the facts clearly show that crimes' been declining in the state for a decade.
The reporter, Gary Nelson, interviewed Pearce for the story. There’s a lot of he-said she-said in the story about crime, but he never confronts Pearce with the facts, so Pearce is never forced to deal with his fabrications and fear-mongering.
There’s a lot on Pearce’s background with a wacko Mormon fringe figure, W. Cleon Skousen. (The article describes him with a straight face as a “Mormon political theorist.”)
But we don’t get to hear from Pearce what his vision is about church and state. (And nothing about how the Mormons feel about SB 1070.)
And one more thing: Pearce could have been asked why, if he’s so devoted to the Constitution, he’s promoting a bill about immigrant births that plainly is rendered moot by the 14th Amendment.
5:08 PM
Got tongue?
From the Arizona Republic’s “Things to do this weekend” page:
World Series of Beer Pong qualifier at Sandbar
If playing beer pong is a pastime for you, consider signing up for the World Series of Beer Pong qualifying competition at Sandbar Mexican Grill in Scottsdale. Sign up with a friend and play to your heart’s content against other beer pong enthusiasts. The winning team gets to travel to Las Vegas for the championships. There will be $2 draft beers and shots on special, and ladies who play get to pay half price for entry.
Only the Republic could run a photo even the organizers of a “Beer Pong World Series” might find tasteless.
We just have one question: Is the impressively outstretched tongue part of the Scottsdale gang sign the large-breasted woman is flashing?
Or was it just a sort of personal fillip of her own design?
(h/t Tyler Hurst)
6:23 PM
The Arizona Republic: All the fluff that's fit to recycle
Over at EaterAZ, an item that catches the Arizona Republic writing the same article twice, and even recycling the same phrases and sentences.
Here’s a sample EaterAZ found, from two pieces the paper did on the local food blog Foodies Like Us, with similar phrases in bold:
“Foodies Like Us is a 6,000-strong social-networking group founded in July by friends and former bankers Jay Pizarro and Susie Timm. It celebrates cooking, eating, dining and drinks, uniting Valley residents from all walks of life who love to socialize around the table. The website features restaurant reviews, recipe swaps, food chatter, cooking blogs, market finds and tips. The group also sponsors cooking classes, progressive dinners by trolley, wine tastings and happy hours.“
[EaterAZ commented:] After scratching our head as to why they’re a “dining newcomer,” we began to think that all this sounded too familiar. The picture looked familiar, too. Hey, wait a second. That IS the same picture… And many of the same press-release copied words (in bold) are there as well. Check it out, here’s something AZCentral.com published two months ago on Foodies:
“Leave it up to food lovers to create a virtual table for like-minded fans. Former banking colleagues and friends Susie Timm and Jay Pizarro (above) parlayed their mutual interest in food to create a 6,000-member-and-growing social-networking group that celebrates cooking, eating, dining and drinks. Their mantra: We are a 365-days-a-year food festival. Their Web site is filled with all things food, including restaurant reviews, recipe swaps, food chatter, cooking blogs, market finds and advice for the home mixologist. The Scottsdale-based company also sponsors cooking classes, progressive dinners by trolley, wine tastings and happy hours at top Valley eateries.”
5:26 PM
PHXations—Tuesday, June 1
Brewer, Obama to meet on immigration
President Obama intends to meet with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on Thursday, a White House official told FoxNews.com, after criticism mounted over reports the president wouldn’t be able to meet her while she is in Washington this week.
More on FOXNews.com
Arizonans to vote on medical marijuana:
A statewide measure allowing for medical marijuana clinics to be opened in Arizona has qualified for the November ballot.
The Arizona Medical Marijuana Project said Tuesday the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office confirmed the necessary 153,365 voter signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot. If approved, the Arizona Department Health Services would regulate medical marijuana clinics in state. Patients suffering from conditions or diseases such as Parkinson’s, cancer, multiple sclerosis and HIV/AIDS would be able to buy pot for medical and pain alleviating uses.
A different legislature? One can only dream.
Even if all of the incumbents running for the state Legislature win their bids for re-election on Nov. 2, the Capitol will be a very different place next year.
Twenty-four lawmakers have reached the end of their four consecutive two-year term limit and cannot run for their same seat; another 15 have announced they will not be seeking re-election.
Alas, I’m not holding my breath. In Arizona politics it seems that the more things change, the more they say the same…
Courts rejects Goldwater Institute… again
The U.S. Supreme Court on June 1 refused to block the distribution of so-called “matching funds” to candidates running for office under Arizona’s Clean Elections law.
The court denial of the request filed by the Goldwater Institute and some candidates left the door open for a full appeal of a lower court decision.
That April 21 decision upheld the parts of the law that provide extra taxpayer support for publicly funded candidates who are outspent by privately funded opponents or independent groups.
Let’s give it credit: The Arizona Republic covers dog news as well as any paper in America.
Dogs on Twitter, dogs on Facebook, “Posh pads for pampered pooches” …
Today, the lede story in the Living section story about a doggie named Gabriel who … (sniff) died.
The hedline is “Gabriel gets his wings.”
The web hedline is “Gabriel’s Angels therapy dog left indelible paw prints on children’s hearts.”
The story says that, since he died, Gabriel has gained 1000 new followers on Twitter.
It’s been three years since noble Bandit was left in a Chandler cop car, which the Valley’s media outlets scrambled the jets to cover over a period of what seemed like months.
Arizona’s new one percent sales tax goes into effect today.
As we drive around in our Hummers and SUVs to this Starbucks or that Whole Foods, let’s remember that poor and working people will be buying their kids one percent less food, taking their families out for one percent less fun, and come fall, spending one percent less on back-to-school clothes.
But it’s just one percent. It’s not like these folk weren’t already under enormous pressure living in an economically backwards state whose jobs base, spurred by an unsustainable housing bubble and nothing else, wasn’t already in the toilet.
Oh, wait …
5:34 PM
How many people protested in Arizona yesterday?
The Republic says “more than 5,000” gathered at Tempe’s Diablo Stadium to voice support for the law.
The paper’s main story on the anti-SB 1070 march still says only that “thousands” walked from Steele Indian School Park to the state capitol.
The Capitol Times is sticking with its “tens of thousands ” estimate, and quotes Alfredo Gutierrez, an organizer as estimating it at 50,000.
The EVT says “at least 10,000 to 20,000 protesters braved the 94 degree heat.”
The NYT has a story on the march, too, saying that “thousands” turned out in “withering” heat.
The FOX 10 news site has a story that seems about two days old, saying only that certain numbers of protesters were “expected”.
12 News keeps with “thousands” as well:
8:40 AM
PHXations—Wednesday, May 26
A blogger who calls himself “AZ Writing Coach” offers a critique of a recent Arizona Republic story here.
I don’t agree with everything he says, but I like the granular analysis.
Apropos of nothing, PHXated would like to note that Marcellino, the Italian restaurant on Northern and 12th Street, has moved to downtown Scottsdale, in the Southbridge development in the space once occupied by Digestif.
PHXated is no dining expert, but based on three visits to the Northern location, twice with New Yorkers who know a bit about the field, feels that it’s probably the most under-appreciated great restaurant in town, and wishes proprietors Marcellino and Sima Verzino well.
The news restaurant is at 7114 E. Stetson Dr. in Scottsdale. A short piece on the re-opening from the New Times' Chow Bella blog here.
4:14 PM
Joe vs. the Supes, Con't ...But is it "fever-pitchy"?
Sheriff Joe Arpaio continues to stonewall the county in its quest to look over his financial records, reports the Republic.
Here’s the first two grafs of its story:
Maricopa County sheriff’s officials said Tuesday that financial sanctions imposed by the Board of Supervisors will affect public safety, and the office likely will challenge the moves in court.
Sheriff’s Office attorneys have an 8:30 a.m. telephone conference today with a Superior Court judge on the proposed actions.
The next graf tells us that matter has hit a “fever pitch.”
Two questions. Does all that feel “fever-pitchy” to you?
And if it did, isn’t that the lede, as opposed to the drab one the paper gives us?
The answers are “no” and “yes,” because when you get to the fourth graf, you get to see what the fever-pitchiness is all about:
The board is scheduled to consider a range of additional financial actions against the sheriff at 11:30 a.m. today. The potential sanctions include canceling Sheriff’s Office credit cards, closing its outside bank accounts, restricting non-emergency travel or putting the office’s $269 million budget on line-item. The board had promised the actions would not impact public safety.
Emphasis added.
That’s the lede:
Joe Arpaio is about to have his credit cards taken away.
The Maricopa Board of Supervisors says that if Arpaio continues to refuse to open his books for the board, it will will cut off his office’s credit cards, close some of its bank accounts, and insist on approving every expenditure the sheriff makes.
6:46 AM
Arizona Republic prints the full text of SB 1070
It’s something of a stunt—we all know what the controversial parts of the bill are—but it’s nice to see a paper put some money on the line. (Four pages of newsprint ain’t cheap.).
Full text of the bill here, with helpful annotations by a UofA law prof.
Accompanying story here.
8:32 PM
The Arizona Republic: Reviewing operas, four days later
Richard Nilsen, the paper’s fine fine-arts critic, had a review of The Barber of Seville on the front page of the Living section today.
It was a rave:
[A]s Arizona Opera’s “Barber” began, the audience was prepared to hear a perfectly adequate performance. We awaited our favorite arias and, for about five minutes or so, everything went pro forma.
Then Figaro entered the scene, with his “Largo et factotum,” and it was as if someone plugged it into 220 volts. From that moment on, this became one of the best “Barbers” ever.
But the review said he’d seen the opera Friday. The show ran Saturday and Sunday as well; PHXated saw it Sunday afternoon and there were empty seats. Wouldn’t it be better to get the thing into the paper earlier?
It took some digging, but we found Nilson’s Nilsen’s review posted online Saturday afternoon. (In weird but typically Republic fashion, it was reposted with the rest of the paper at midnight last night as well.)
The problem, we suspect, is that the paper’s Saturday deadlines are too early to accomodate a review of a Friday night performance.
What about Sunday? Well, you may find this hard to believe, but it may be true that the Republic, like many papers, has Sunday deadlines too early for a Friday evening review.
(None of these decisions, you will note, are done for the benefit of readers. They are done to make the printing schedule more convenient for the paper, and by “the printing schedule more convenient” I mean “the whole process cheaper.”)
Anyway, so why didn’t it get printed Monday?
Well the answer to that question is tougher. The section had a very important wire story from the Washington Post to run. It was about how some churches have to “meld cultures” (i.e., with, say, English and Spanish speakers).
Obviously pressing news.
It also had another very important wire story about how American Idol’s ratings are falling. (That was one was from the Post as well.)
Oh yeah, and yet one more wire story, this one from USA Today, about the lessons of the swine flu—which, you will remember, wasn’t really called swine flu, but rather the H1N1 virus, but whatever.
The paper also on Monday had to make room on the front page of its living section for a blurb about saving “40 percent at Basha’s on Shamrock Farms products,” and no, that wasn’t an advertisement, though it sure reads like one.
But wait—why couldn’t the paper run Nilsen’s review inside the section on Monday?
Well, because it had to run a story about fancy doghouses.
This carried the hedline “Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
Presumably because the alternative, “Delightful digs for discriminating doggies,” didn’t fit.
(By the way, you can see here that the “pampered pooches” phrase is an alliterative well the paper has come back to at least five times this year alone.
(Note that this story joins the paper’s recent investigative reports about dogs on Twitter and dogs on Facebook.)
The pampered pooches story was a wire story as well, of course.
Anyway, the moral to this story is the moral to all the others. Newspapers are dying because they don’t care about readers, and they don’t care about their community. If they did, they would lift a finger to get a rave review of one of the city’s premiere arts organizations by one of the paper’s more serious writers into the paper sooner than four days later.
12:54 PM
The state's biggest companies and highest paid CEOs
The former is listed by the Arizona Republic this a.m.
The trouble is that the top fifty companies are dispensed by the paper in no fewer than 25 groups of two, requiring some 24 additional clicks to see them all.
And since this is the miserable web site of the Arizona Republic, you can be assured that each click takes from between six and ten seconds to give you a new page, and that, during that time, the page will, annoyingly, re-situate itself a few times.
It’s an imensely pleasureable reading experience!
You’d think that by hitting print you might get a coherent list to read. Look how this page resolves itself:
Note how that instead of the full list, it just gives you the two entries on that page, and that it doesn’t even do that right. You can also see that the intro paragraph from the beginning of the story is repeated on each printed page.
If, laboriously, you print the whole thing out, you’d have those literary pearls of wisdom 25 times.
Finally, if you look closely on the bottom right-hand corner of the print page, you can see this legend: “Print powered by FormatDynamics”!
In other words, the Republic, like so many other media outfits, is actually paying some other company do to a crummy job formatting its print pages.
Exactly the sort of thing a media company should outsource.
Anyway, if you’re interested in how the state’s execs are doing, The PBJ is on the case tracking executive pay. It’s list of recent dispatches from company reports is here.
7:40 AM
PHXations--Friday, April 23, 2010
New Times Stephen Lemons, probably the best chronicler of the bill’s progress through the legislature, writes an opinion piece for CNN online this a.m.
Lemons notes the statement of some activists who chained themselves to the fence around the state capitol: “Our purpose is to expose Arizona’s apartheid legislation, and to uphold our dignity and human rights.” He continues:
If the use of the word apartheid seems extreme to the uninitiated, all I can say is that you have to know this bill, and this state, to understand that it is, unfortunately, all too correct. Brewer should veto this dangerous, abhorrent and costly measure.
The Arizona Republic slams the bill around in an editorial this a.m. as well but, oddly, never comes out and advocates that the governor not sign it.
Arizona faces sticker shock and buyer’s remorse if Gov. Jan Brewer signs the immigration bill on her desk. […] If the governor signs it, this bill will cost the state in many ways."
If she signs it. If …if …
So she should veto it. Right? Right?
Meanwhile, President Obama this morning called the proposed Arizona law “irresponsible”:
“Our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others,” Obama said at a naturalization ceremony for service members. “That includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona, which threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”
What will Brewer do?
There are signs she is laying the groundwork to veto the bill. Here’s a report from MSNBC.com:
*** Brewer in the spotlight: A TELEMUNDO reporter last night asked Gov. Brewer if she was concerned that the immigration bill would lead to racial profiling in the state. Her response: “I am … am looking at that particular bill. I’ve been meeting with lawyers, and I’ve been looking at it very diligently. And when I make my decision, you will be one of the first to know.” The reporter followed up by asking if she was concerned that Arizona is sending the wrong message to the rest of the country with the bill’s potential for racial profiling. Brewer’s reply: “You know, I think that we should be concerned about racial profiling. Um, it’s illegal.”
6:05 PM
Does the average city employee really cost $100,000 a year?
Boy does the Arizona Republic suck at editing. I mean, it’s hard to believe there is something other than a big ol’ desk of chimpanzees reading copy before it’s printed.
Consider a story today about what the average per-employee cost of city government is.
The story begins like this:
Phoenix Councilman Sal DiCiccio says that the average city employee costs taxpayers about $100,000 in salary and benefits. Councilman Michael Nowakowski says the average worker earns much less. Who’s right?
Both are.
Boy, it sure sounds like we’re going to get two accounts of the issues involved, with the reporter noting that it all comes down to how you massage the figures.
But it turns out … DiCiccio’s basically right. No, not even basically right. The average annual cost per employee is just shy of $98,000, period.
The story goes on for seven more paragraphs, discussing a few ancillary issues, but never challenges the figure.
Nowakowski never returns to make a different case!
Secondly, in the lede, we see a reference to “salary and benefits.” But then we see Nowakowski saying they “earn” much less.
The editor of the story could have asked the reporter to clarify this distinction. The paper could have explained that the “benefits” part of the equation is a lot—forty or fifty percent more than the base salary the employees “earn.”
So the average salary of city employees might be just $65K.
Next, the only real comparison at issue in this debate is what the costs of Phoenix are relative to other major cities. The story discusses utterly irrelevant matters like the average cost of private sector employees ($54K a year)
… with, of course, no attempt to make the case that the two labor forces are in any way comparable.
(You’d assume, in fact, that they would be much different. A big city would be most comparable to a single large corporation doing specialized highly professional and bureaucratic work.
(You gotta figure that the percentage of the work force doing low-paying basic service-industry jobs would be much, much higher in the private sector.)
We all know we have a government that pays people.
It’s an entirely fair question to ask whether Phoenix pays its employees more than other large cities.
But why does a newspaper waste the time of everyone involved by reporting on everything but the one metric that would answer the question at hand?
Doesn’t the Arizona Republic have editors?
8:45 AM
How I got screwed by the Easter bunny
According to the Arizona Republic, Easter is losing its punch:
Today, Easter Sunday remains the holiest day of the year for Christians, but it is far less significant outside church doors.
Given that—and the fact that Apple is based in godless California—you’d think you could have gone down to the Apple store yesterday and help a friend get a new laptop.
(No, not the iPad—you’d have to be crazy to get the first iteration of a new Apple product.)
I’m not a complete idiot, so I checked the store’s website to see time it opened on Sunday. 11 a.m., it said.
But when we got there, the store was dark, and a security guard, oddly, sat in the darkened interior, reading a book. This was undoubtedly made more difficult by the fact he was wearing sunglasses.
To make matters worse, there was a sign on a stand inside the door, saying clearly that the store was open at 11 a.m. on Sunday.
So, we thought—fuck the Apple Store.
We’ll go to Best Buy, which has those odd little sequestered “Apple tables.”
You can see this coming: Best Buy was closed too.
“If I’m not getting a laptop,” announced my friend, “I want ice cream.”
A perfect day for the classic Phoenix ice cream parlor Mary Coyle, yes?
Nope: No answer when we called.
What was particularly galling, in all three cases, is that the stores didn’t even both to use a sign or an answering machine message to say, “Hey, it’s Easter, numbnuts—We’re closed.”
They just assumed that people would know they weren’t open for Easter.
As usual, the Arizona Republic was wrong.
What did we do?
We went to Gallo Blanco and ate flan and postre de chocolate—and cursed the Easter bunny.
9:31 AM
The Arizona Republic continues to be a puzzlement
You’d think a shrinking representative of a dying industry would get its act together and face the future with a coherent plan.
But we’re talking about the Arizona Republic—The Worst Newspaper in the World™.
The front page today is a mystery. The two top stories: A round-up of crazy militiamen in the Midwest and the bombings on the Moscow subway.
Both were day-old news. Neither had anything to do with Arizona. Each was a wire story.
Lower down on the page was real news about something that affects the Valley a lot: The baseball commissioner saying he would help Arizona keep the Chicago Cubs training here. I don’t follow sports, so maybe the reporter, Craig Harris, was playing catchup or something, but it certainly seemed like an original story and that it was a Republic exclusive.
And further down next to it was an actual staff-generated piece played off some national news: How Congress went on vacation without extending jobless benefits.
The story made some attempts to localize the issue. Here’s the lede:
Yet again, thousands of Arizonans are at risk of having their long-term unemployment benefits cut because Congress has not acted on an extension.
And farther down the reporter, Betty Beard, talks to some real live Arizonans who say what you’d expect:
Kris Sullivan, 52, a Phoenix resident and college graduate with sales experience, has been out of work since October 2007. Without an extension, she said the long-term unemployed like herself would be devastated.
The only problem with the story is that it doesn’t tell readers the single most salient issue, which is that the Republicans in the Senate blocked the extension—and which of course just about every other news organization in the country made plain for its readers.
You don’t have to turn it into a GOP-bashing exercise—you could explain that the Republicans said they didn’t want to raise the deficit further.
In fact, you could do that and it would have been a defensible piece, even if it still would have represented half the real story.
(Democrats would say in response that more benefits work as an additional stimulus to the economy, which it needs, and that at any rate the GOP’s concern about the deficit is a fairly new preoccupation for the party after the ruinous Bush years.)
But the question remains: Why did the paper’s editors expend a troubled institution’s resources on writing up a national story that’s demonstrably less informative than just about any wire service account they could have picked up?
3:23 PM
Laurie Roberts continues her campaign against the county probate court
Roberts, the Republic columnist, has been exposing what seems to be a deep and systemic problem in how the local courts handle guardianship cases.
She’s detailed some odd stories (see “PHXated hearts Laurie Roberts”). What seems to be happening is that certain adults for whatever reason come under the guardianship of the courts. The court appoints a network of lawyers and caregivers to watch the person—but it’s all paid for out of the person’s assets. At a certain point, the assets are gone. The lawyers and caregivers melt away, and the subject ends up under taxpayer care.
Today she goes after judge Lindsay Ellis, who studied one such case Roberts had been reporting on — but delivered a blistering defense of the status quo:
In a take-no-prisoners 21-page ruling issued Monday, Ellis described the fees that put Marie Long into the poorhouse as “reasonable, necessary and for the benefit of the ward.” She blamed Marie’s court-appointed attorney Jon Kitchel along with Dan Raynak and Pat Gitre, attorneys for Marie’s sisters, for driving up costs, saying their “venomous” and “hateful” attacks on the trustee, the guardian and their attorneys forced the other side to defend themselves.
With Marie’s money, of course.
The opinion was lauded by Sun Valley Group, which withdrew as Marie’s guardian when her money ran out in November. Says Sun Valley’s CEO, Peter Frenette: “I am grateful for the court’s decision as it finds ‘there is no legitimate dispute about SVG or its performance of its duties as guardian for Long.’ The court confirmed that this has been an unfair attack not just on SVG but also the guardianship process.”
Roberts continues:
I, too, am grateful for the court’s decision as it proves my point all along which is simply this: the court that is supposed to be protecting people like Marie Long is doing no such thing. Instead, the court is allowing a cozy group of lawyers and fiduciaries who are appointed to help vulnerable people help themselves to a nice pile of cash — until the money is gone, at which time the “ward” is dumped onto the taxpayers.
Then the court approves the spending, in this case in a ruling I like to call “Ellis in Wonderland.”
11:20 AM
The Arizona Republic critiques the Oscars
We’re interested in hearing Bill Goodykootz, the Arizona Republic’s smart and hardworking film critic, give his perspective on the Oscars. Here he is, talking about The Hurt Locker showing in general and the moving and historic wins of Christoph Waltz and Mo’Nique in particular:
It […] meant that two actors no one dreamed would be holding Oscars during last year’s show were among the winners. And, in the end, no matter what the show is like, how much producers talk about reinventing the broadcast, how many ways they try to make it different, that’s the only change that really matters.
Hard to argue with that. The Oscars continue to evolve. You can make the argument that the last few years have seen the top nominee slates grow ever-more daring and open-minded, culminating in the last three years, in which the top awards went to, arguably, the most adventurous films of their respective years. (No Country, Slumdog and now Hurt Locker.)
Well, the Republic’s editorial page would disagree.
Yes, the Arizona Republic’s editorial page discussed the Oscars this a.m.
The page was quite peeved. You’re not going to be able to guess about what:
[Y]ou would think one would have shined a light on the fact that poor, heroic Farrah Fawcett was not included in the annual memorial of deceased movie people.
And, while we’re at it: What of Bea Arthur? And Ed McMahon? Despite mostly TV and live theater legacies, all three have film credits.
Bea Arthur and Ed McMahon!
You kind of get the feeling Arizona Republic editorial writers sit around at night and watch a lot of infomercials.
7:22 PM
Just when you thought the Arizona Republic couldn't get any worser!
Today it publishes a feature—complete with massive photo—on the cover of its business section about …
… Starbucks using a new cup size.
A. New. Cup. Size.
That’s what warrants a cover feature at the Arizona Republic.
As usual, the story itself is correspondingly insipid. Here’s the lede:
Phoenix-area coffee junkies who have grown immune to Starbucks’ maximum 24-ounce jolt now can boost their caffeine intake by 30 percent without loading up on extra shots.
The Seattle-based coffeehouse chain is test-marketing a new 31-ounce cup for iced coffees and teas in Phoenix and Tampa to determine whether customers are ready to supersize their caffeine.
For what is essentially ad copy for a corporation, it’s mighty fine prose. A graf later, looking for a little color to brighten up the story, reporter Max Jarman intrepidly finds a customer drinking from one of the new cups.
Turns out he was drinking decaffeinated ice tea.
Jarman doesn’t say what the drinks will cost, nor does he mention the nutritional issues. Extrapolating from info on Starbucks’ own nutrition pages, you can see that a 31-ounce Frappuccino will contain about 600 calories, and more than 100 grams of carbs.
As for the illustration, it’s a big picture of a coffee cup with a big ol’ Starbucks logo on the side. Some drawings to the right of the photo are a great example of the expository journalism a newspaper can provide its audience with, given some planning and just a tiny bit of creativity.
I think anyone looking at the result will immediately apprehend that a 31-ounce cup is bigger than a 24-ounce cup.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday over in the Living section, the paper has continued its fascination with psychics.
The hedline of the story is this:
Psychics see their popularity rising
Medium’s popularity a sign of public’s growing fascination with the other side
I suppose its relevant to mention that the story is about no such thing. It quotes one alleged psychic saying she was busy, but she never says she has more business than normal, and no one else does, either. (Indeed, she’s the only purported psychic quoted.)
The story does more than you’d expect by quoting a psychic debunker, but then, in an almost parodic descent into a rabit hole of journalistic over-objectivity, finds someone to quarrel with the debunker!
But Richard Mann, a professor emeritus of psychology and religion at the University of Michigan, says people have always expressed a connection with the dead….
Worst of all, the story is a wire piece from Detroit. It’s just amazing to think that an editor at the paper decided that of all the wire stories available that day, the crappy one about the psychics was the one to run.
Previously in PHXated:
5:49 PM
The living section at the Arizona Republic just ... gives up
As we’ve noticed previously, on a lot of days, the Arizona Republic living section will lack any locally generated copy. The front page will be a mishmash of wire stories about subjects that have nothing to do with Arizona or Phoenix.
Today there was a crappy little wire story about… dogs on Twitter. Well, that’s what it seemed, anyway, but it turns out it was just a junky toy from Mattel that basically just randomly posted to a Twitter account from a set of canned tweets.
The story seemed a bit samey to me. I poked around a little and found a wire story from two weeks ago about … dogs on Facebook.
3:50 AM
1An odd land deal in Glendale
Another great story by the Republic’s Robert Anglen:
A controversial real-estate investor sold Glendale a piece of land for $6.6 million on the same day he bought it for about $5.5 million.
The land, which the city previously leased for a youth-sports complex and overflow parking near the University of Phoenix Stadium, was bought by the California investor and his wife from a Valley family on Dec. 21 and then sold to Glendale on the same day, according to interviews and property records obtained by The Arizona Republic.
The guy had a sketchy history:
Court records show that while serving as an elected member of the San Diego Board of Port Commissioners, [David Malcolm] was convicted of a felony charge of violating conflict-of-interest laws. He was working as a $20,000-a-month consultant to Duke Energy while helping the company win a contract from the San Diego board. He was sentenced to three years of probation and 120 days of work furlough, ordered to pay $260,000 in restitution and barred from holding elected office.
[…]
Malcolm was also investigated by the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office after he was heard on a tape recording urging someone to blow up a house and collect $1.3 million in insurance money. He said he was play-acting during the discussion.
5:41 PM
Just when you thought the Arizona Republic couldn't get any worse ...
… it shows a commitment to go to the mat and suck even more.
The lede story in the business section today, taking up nearly half of the section’s front page, is about how Heinz ketchup is changing the design of the little packets of ketchup you get in restaurants.
The photo here, which was online, can’t do justice to the massive one in the paper, an exciting action shot of ketchup being squeezed onto a hamburger.
Why in the world would a local newspaper with falling circulation run a wire-service story about a company with no local ties on the front cover of its business section?
2:59 PM
Speed camera nuttiness in the Republic
Many parts of the Arizona Republic are competently written and edited. Other times… you feel like a bunch of drunk lemurs are randomly throwing paragraphs together and putting them into the paper.
Today’s story on speed cameras begins:
New DPS chief criticizes speed cameras
The Department of Public Safety’s newly appointed director this week joined a growing chorus of powerful voices speaking out against the state’s photo-enforcement system.
In interviews this week, Robert Halliday said that the system should be restructured if it’s not scrapped.
You could be forgiven for reading that and thinking … Halliday is opposed to speed cameras.
He doesn’t seem to be.
Halliday’s actual quotes are sort of nonsensical at first, but a few grafs down it’s clear he’s trying to tip-toe through the overheated politicization of the cameras. (The yahoo vote in Arizona think it’s their right to barrel down the 51 in their SUVs at whatever speed they want.)
The "restructuring?
To Halliday, who had a 35-year career with DPS before retiring in 2008, restructuring would include reassessing where units are placed and installing some penalty to keep drivers from ignoring photo-enforcement notices when they arrive in the mail.
“This program costs a lot of money to put into place. You have a lot of revenue that is not being captured,” he said.
That doesn’t sound like a guy who is joining a growing chorus against the cameras.
The story then veers into an anti-camera talking point—that Janet Napolitano claimed they would bring in $90 milllion a year. In fact, they bring in $27 million, but it’s still $27 million in free money, right? That’s not an argument against the cameras in any case.
And as Halliday was explaining, the real issue is that the soft-on-crime anti-camera brigade in the legislature drew up the law in a way to make it easy for scofflaws to outmanuever the cameras.
The story today says that only 30 percent of the fines are being paid. Hmmm … what is 30 percent of $90 million?
Finally, the story buries the lede:
A vote could turn out to be photo enforcement’s saving grace, Halliday said, something that came as a surprise to the new DPS director as he made rounds at the Legislature this week. Halliday thought the public had lost confidence in the program, a notion some lawmakers tried to dispel.
“People are telling me that a good portion of the population believes in photo enforcement and wants to have it,” he said. “I’m being told . . . it’s kind of a 50-50 thing.”
That’s an impression you don’t get from the rabid anti-camera coverage.
To complete the story’s clumsy handing of the issue, it ends with Halliday trying to appease the anti-camera nuts:
On his return [from a trip to California], Halliday said, he saw three California troopers between his fishing spot and the Arizona border. Between the Arizona border and the Valley he saw five fixed and mobile photo-enforcement units, and no DPS officers.
“My preference is to have more patrolmen on the ground,” he said. “I would much rather have people stopping and talking to people.”
But that of course is the point: Arizona is out of money and can’t afford more patrolmen. The speed cameras control speeds and generate money for the state. And even if the state had more money, the patrolmen who are out should be spending their time doing more than passing out speeding tickets.
And in any case the entire discussion is moot because the state is in such dire financial straits that in just about any other urisdiction outside of the deep south it would be inthinkable for legislators even to conpemplate removing a 427 million-a-year income stream when they are facing bankruptcy.
2:29 PM
PHXations—Wednesday, January 27
How the Arizona Republic sucks, no. 434 in a series:
In the Northeast Phoenix zoned section, a story—stretched out, astonishingly, over two pages—about a Starbucks inside the Camelback Inn. A hotel that sells coffee. Stop the presses. It’s not fair to ridicule the reporter who wrote the thing. The real culprit is the craven editor who assigned it, and the other who published it.
AT&T says it’s upgrading its 3G network in Phoenix, PV, and Carefree and Cave Creek, Beth Duckett of the the Republic reports. The story details the new areas, one of which covers a major chunk of downtown—good news for iPhone users.
Readers may have noticed the PHXated’s redesign and reconstruction, these done by Steven Southard. The process disrupted the old RSS feed, but it works fine if you resubscribe.
At the RadiatePHX get-together at Hula’s Modern Tiki on Central last night, representatives of CityScape, the massive, nearly $1 billion mixed-use development at Central and Washington downtown, gave an upbeat overview of the project. You can read about it on the site’s site, here. The representative confirmed there would be a CVS pharmacy on the site. He said there would be a grocery, but couldn’t name the replacement for AJ’s yet. Finally, he did give this tantalizing hint, of a “surprise” “entertainment venue” overseen by a “local person.”
6:14 PM
A few notes about the Arizona Republic
Q: Who’s writing the paper’s Arizona Living section?
A: Not Republic reporters. Two days into the week, a total of nine feature stories. One was written by a Republic staffer. The rest were all wire stories, and lame ones at that. (“Facebook buds make workouts a bit easier.”)
On Sunday, there was a big page of things to do this week. Top item: John Mayer doing a VH1 Storytellers show. (I can’t link to it because it doesn’t sem to appear on the web.) It’s hard to be optimistic about the future of the paper when it seems like virtually no one working at the place cares about the substance of what they are publishing. A city the size of Phoenix and the best thing they can suggest doing over the course of the week is sitting on your butt and watching a routine basic cable show?
Our favorite story this week, however, was a strong Richard Ruelas feature Saturday about the frontier-day newspaper wars between the Republic and the Phoenix Gazette.
In a history of the Republic Ruelas noticed a funny story, dating from 1912, about how the Gazette was caught stealing news from the Republic, then called the Republican, which planted a fake story that the Gazette duly lifted. Wrote the Republic:
Lacking the enterprise which it boastfully claims and being utterly devoid of the commonest ethics belonging to the newspaper business, [the Gazette] has been brazenly and methodically stealing the news which The Republican has paid to have gathered and to publish.
Ruelas is one of the few people at the paper who does actual reported features. A week or so ago he did a long and fairly interesting reconstruction of an ineresting bit of rock ‘n’ roll arcana: Was Bono targeted for a shooting at a Tempe show back in 1987?
The year Arizona was consumed with controversy over Gov. Evan Mecham’s decision to cancel a state holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. was also the year that the Irish band U2 played four concerts here.
And dealt with death threats, according to the band. According to the oft-told tale, lead singer Bono would be shot while performing the group’s ode to King, “Pride (In the Name of Love).”
The band’s memory of this 1987 incident has appeared in various books, in magazines and in Bono’s induction speech when the band entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Ruelas skeptically pieces together various recollections to figure out how much of the story was true.
2:55 PM
More on "Kidnappings R Us"
The Arizona Republic reports this a.m. that kidnappings were down in the city last year—slightly:
Phoenix police anticipated a drop in kidnapping reports in 2009 compared with the previous year, though with 302 filed through November, the numbers haven’t decreased significantly.
2008’s total of 359 earned Phoenix the nickname “kidnapping capital” of the U.S.
The story, irritatingly, doesn’t answer or drops a couple of tangential issues readers would like to know the answers to.
One, the LA Times last year reported on the Phoenix kidnapping problem—basically one a day—and finished it with this disturbing sentence: “Police estimate twice that number go unreported.”
That would be about a thousand of these incidents occurring each year. That’s a mind-blowing figure when you consider that they are all taking place in a limited part of the valley. They aren’t happening at the Biltmore; that means that life in the less-swanky parts of town is correspondingly dangerous.
Two, the story doesn’t discuss the kidnapping rates in the rest of the valley or in Maricopa County as a whole. As I read it, it carefully makes clear the figures are for the city only. There’s no reason to think the kidnappings stop at the city’s edge. Based on crude population figures, we could expect at least double that number are occur in the county as a whole.
And here’s the depressing prognosis:
Phoenix Home Invasion and Kidnapping Enforcement investigators say they have dismantled dozens of small gangs involved in kidnappings and home invasions, which led to a small drop in the overall numbers.
“Dozens” of gangs dismantled … and the rate has gone down less than 20 percent.
7:00 AM
Which page of the Arizona Republic do you read?
Today, you could read page one, which contains the start of an in-depth Associated Press debunking on so-called Climategate. The story begins:
LONDON – E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data – but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by the Associated Press.
The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.
Emphasis added. AP says five reporters read all 1000-plus emails, totaling about one million words.
Anyway, that was on the front page. (Satisfied, Expresso Pundit?)
Now, since the Republic is a full-service operation, you could also read Robert Robb, on the paper’s ed page, who has been enraged about the Climategate emails for weeks. For example:
[L]eading climate scientists conspired to hide uncertainty in the data, prevent others from checking their work and suppress conflicting judgments.
Even before these revelations, there were reasons to be circumspect about what was known about the effect of industrialization on global climate. There is, first of all, the hubris of believing that human beings can concoct a series of mathematical equations in a computer model that fully duplicate the interactions within the earth’s atmosphere.
All three sentences are problematic.
(The last is the current denier talking point: “It’s all too complex to know for sure.” It’s also rhetorical gibberish: “The hubris of believing that human beings can concoct a series of mechanical devices that could fly a human being across long distances.”)
Anyway, today, Robb is back on the case again, this time muttering ominously about how the emails are a nail in the coffin of academic peer review.
There’s no reference to the AP story, just as in the past he’s never acknowledged similar assertions by most knowledgeable observers.
All of this is to get back to one of PHXated’s little hobby horses, namely the poor editing at the Arizona Republic. In a state like Arizona, of course there’s going to be an energetic little right-wing columnist who nibbles on the national blogs and regurgitates them for the less sophisticated folks on the home front. That’s Robert Robb.
That’s fine. But why doesn’t an editor push Robb a little? This sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen at the Republic much, so here’s a few sentences any busy op-ed editor at the Republic is welcome to cut and paste into an email to Robb:
Hey, Rob: Did you see the AP story we ran Sunday? 1800 words, pretty in-depth. You been banging on the emails as “deeply disturbing.” AP says not so much. Since you’ve been out front on this you need to address it one way or the other so readers don’t think you’re dodging it.
7:00 AM
E.J. Montini: Hey Sheriff Joe—What am I, limburger?
The Republic columnist wants to know why everyone’s getting arrested but him:
It seems that with each passing day, a new and different critic of Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas and Sheriff Joe Arpaio is investigated, charged, indicted and arrested.
And with each new investigation, each new charge, each new public vilification that is orchestrated and carried out by the two most powerful law-enforcement officials in the county, I get more and more angry.
[…]
How could you look at the slings and arrows that have been aimed at you, at the number of times you have been subjected to what you believe to have been unfair, unjust criticism, and bust these individuals ahead of me?I mean, really, what’s a guy got to do to get arrested in this county?
7:00 AM
The Arizona Republic lays into Andrew Thomas
After a new round of indictments of Andrew Thomas’ political enemies on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, the paper editorializes against the Dimmer Twins:
Even if it were possible for these elected officials to erect a wall between their politics and their crime fighting, Arpaio and Thomas already have botched that job hopelessly.
They have investigated as a criminal enterprise the construction of a new county courthouse they oppose. They have followed low-level county employees to their homes to conduct intimidating interviews. Indications strongly suggest they bugged, or attempted to bug, the county administration offices.
These are not the actions of justice seekers. They are the acts of venal, retribution-minded political actors with badges and guns.
7:25 PM
Another example of how AZCentral.com sucks
“Hey kids! Let’s go to Lake Pleasant! We’ve never been there before. Tommy—why don’t you look up the best route on the internets!”
“Great, Dad! I’ll look it up on AZCentral dot com! Why, with just a few clicks, we can get a map that shows us exactly where it is!”
“Terrific, son! What are you finding out?”
“It was simple, pops! Here we go!”
“Um, that looks a little weird, son. Why is it in Morristown? And where in the hell is Morristown?”
“Oh, Dad, you just don’t understand the web! AZCentral dot com has great maps you can manipulate to find out exactly where we’re going! Let me pull the map out a bit. It has to be right—it’s AZCentral dot com, ’Arizona’s home page’! Gimme a sec, Dad. Click … click … and—voila!”
“Um, Son, isn’t that Lake Pleasant way over there to the right, 60 miles away from the red arrow?”
[The child’s lower lip begins to tremble] “You mean, AZCentral dot com wasn’t right?”
[Hastily] Wait, Tommy, I can get us there. Just click on the phrase ‘Lake Pleasant Regional Park,’ though, so we can find out if we can fish."
“Daaaaaad!”:
[Child bursts into tears] “There’s nothing there!”
[Sorrowfully] "I’m afraid not, son. [Sigh] I thought it might be a few more years before we had this discussion, but we might as well have it now.
“Let me tell you what happened. You’d think that, with many decades of publishing in the state, the Arizona Republic would have an unparalleled storehouse of information about things to do in the area, including recreational activities. That would all be very useful to visitors to the paper’s web site, AZCentral dot com.
“But that would take a genuine care about serving readers. Papers like the Republic got out of the habit of thinking like that decades ago. In the internet age, it’s a lot easier to just put banners on the site about all the things to do in town, without actually providing the information folks might need to do any of it.
“The result? A supposedly local web site that can’t keep track of a goddamn lake fifteen- or twenty-square miles in size. You can see that no one at the paper ever looks at the results. It doesn’t even tell us if there’s a marina, if we can fish or swim, or what. There’s virtually no information at all, and the one bit of information it does have, the address, is incorrect.
“You see, son, this is why the daily press in America is in trouble. For decades they made millions with their local monopolies. Now, they have to be on the web, but their thoroughgoing timidity, internal lassitude and penny-pinching ways means they are singularly ill-equipped to compete in these new paradigms. Not to mention—”
“Uh, Dad?”
“Yes, son?”
“I’m bored. You always get a little wound up when we talk about stuff like that.”
[deep breath] “You’re right, son. Next time we’ll just use a good old-fashioned paper map.”
[smiles] “Aww, Dad!”
[Exeunt, pursued by a bear]
[Curtain]
12:14 AM
More bad editing at the Arizona Republic
The paper’s good run of strong Sunday stories peters out this weekend with a numbingly long recounting of the mercury spill at an Avondale High School last February. It struck me that there’s some news in the story, but it’s buried so low in the piece, and surrounded by so much of the Republic’s legendary ability to raise more questions than it answers in its reporting, that it’s easy to miss.
There are the little things that are irritating—like waiting eight paragraphs to tell us that the school is in Avondale, and then only indirectly, or waiting fifty-five grafs to tell us how much mercury was actually involved. (Two tablespoons’ worth.) Even the date on which the spills occurred is divulged clumsily.
To me, the meat of the story is who was to blame. Here is where the major fumble comes. There’s a classic “he said/she said” conflict as to whether the school’s teachers had or had not complained to administrators about hazardous chemicals.
The thing is, we know who’s right:
Police discovered that since 2007 teachers had warned district administrators multiple times, verbally and through e-mails, about hazardous materials in the school.
The he said/she said thing is classic lame journalism in the best of circumstances; here it’s positively buffoonish. The information that the police have the actual emails should be related first. Then it’s fair to get comment from administrators.
This is what I think should have been the lede of the story. (It’s possible the Republic has reported this all out before, in which case the story should have said something like “The Republic reported back in August that police say teachers had complained in emails about hazardous materials at the school, but we never bothered to report the allegations out.”)
(The paper’s online archives are so stingy that there’s no way to follow how the paper has covered the story till now.)
In any case, the lede should have been: “A Republic investigation shows that teachers at an Avondale High School complained repeatedly in emails to school officials on campus in the months before a mercury spill endangered children, shut down the school, embarrassed the district and ran up nearly $1 million in cleanup costs.”
But, of course, after telling us the police have emails talking about this key issue, the paper doesn’t tell us who sent them or who received them. These are serious allegations, but they are never addressed, and logical lines of inquiry are left hanging, like this one:
Superintendent Dudley Butts resigned in July with little public notice, saying it was a family decision.
Why didn’t the reporter contact Butts and every other ranking school official at the time for comment? The reporter quotes an assistant superintendent saying she hadn’t heard complaints from teachers, but that’s before we learn about the emails.
Again, I’ve been enjoying the Republic on Sunday of late, but this story was a colossal waste of time and effort.
12:00 AM
Joe Arpaio at the Cronkite School: The zoo approacheth
The Arizona Republic and KPHO have both posted stories about Monday’s live “Meet the Press”-style interview of Joe Arpaio at ASU’s Cronkite School of journalism.
Arpaio’s going to be questioned by three profs from the school at 7 p.m.
Both stories are pretty incompetent. The Republic story says that interest in the event will surely swamp the smallish school atrium where the interview will be held, so the school’s going to show it on a large video screen and stream it over the internet.
The paper doesn’t bother to tell readers where the screen will be, or what the web address for the stream is.
For the record, the video will be shown in the public mall just south of the Cronkite building, which is on the east side of Central Avenue between Polk and Fillmore.
The video stream will be here, according to the school.
The KPHO story is equally unhelpful; worse, it lets the sheriff natter on about how good he is with the press:
“There have been blips about some weekly newspaper — we didn’t give an answer to a request — but that’s been straightened out. But I think it’s great. If there’s anyone who has an open door policy, I think it’s the sheriff,” said Arpaio.
As anyone who reads the New Times knows, there are three inaccuracies in merely the first sentence alone. The KPHO reporter doesn’t bother to ask him about them.
The Republic story doesn’t mention that some students plan to protest the event; the KPHO story does, but neither note that local Tea Party activists are showing up as well.
PHXated’s background on the event is here and here.
12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic needs editors
I don’t mean the paper is hiring. I mean that they need people who know how to edit news stories.
The paper’s recent profile of new councilman Bill Gates is a classic puff piece. But even by those standards it’s empty. The reporter doesn’t bother to tell his readers how Gates happened to get onto the council, or even what district he represents.
We get passages like this, which I don’t think mean anything:
The Phoenix Mountains Preserve, which lies largely in his district, offers another opportunity for citizens to organize, he says.
“We can encourage people to get together,” Gates says.
And the reporter doesn’t bother to get a single outside person to comment on Gates.
All of these are elements an editor should make sure is in the story.
And consider this hedline from the Republic today: “NE Valley isn’t noticing any housing rebound.” The pleonastic, almost slangy “any” is something a copy editor should have taken out; it looks bad appearing on the paper’s web home page, which is where I saw it.
You have to read the story about seven times and wade through masses of statistics to apprehend the thesis, the significance of which is never articulated or discussed.
I think the point of the story is that northeast Phoenix is the most affluent part of town, and that in some way it may be a bellwether for an economic rebound. But no one is quoted to make that point or say whether that’s typical in housing downturns. And the story never explains what area of town, precisely, is under discussion.
Finally, there’s a news blurb on page two of the Valley & State section about how the city is going to take over a section of drainage ditch near PV Mall.
It’s a funny story, written in an oddly passive way:
According to Hasan Mushtaq, floodplain manager for the Phoenix Street Transportation Department, disputes have arisen over who is responsible for maintenance of the ditch. The City Council last week authorized the city manager to take over the parcels involved.
Emphasis added. The story never says what the “dispute” is. Read on and you find out that the assessor’s office says the ditch is owned by a local homeowners association—and that recent floods have flooded homes of that association because the ditch wasn’t kept clean.
Now, this could be a funny story. Reading between the lines, it seems like the association has been negligent and is now whining and trying to get the city to take over part of its land—and of course, you can imagine the howls we’d hear if the deal weren’t removing a financial obligation from the homeowners. Instead, it’s just another Arizona Republic story that raises more questions than it answers.
12:00 AM
The Republic doesn't always suck
As is the norm on Sundays, the paper puts some resources into a few strong stories.
The paper’s lede, nearly 2500 words by reporter Catherine Reagor, examines how shenanigans at county foreclosure sales are corrupting the process:
When foreclosure homes come up for public auction in Phoenix, a minimum opening bid is set and bidding is open to anyone.
At least that is the way it’s supposed to work.
But a Republic investigation into the daily public auctions held on the Maricopa County Courthouse steps and at some local law offices suggests a growing number of homes are sold for less than the posted opening bid.
Prices on some foreclosure homes are being dropped below the opening bid just hours or even minutes before the auction. Buyers aware of the “drop bids” scoop up the houses before other bidders know about the price drops.
There’s another good story in the living section: Richard Ruelas’ portrait of Don Logan, the Scottsdale diversity officer who got a bomb in the mail five years ago. It’s an engrossing look both at Logan’s personal history and also the almost absurd cruelty that nearly killed him in 2004:
[H]e got a strange feeling about the package. He shook the parcel, listening for rattling. Then he stood to the side, leaned the box away from him and cut the packing tape. He felt heat and saw smoke.
The seconds following the explosion are a blur. Logan remembers running down a hallway, feeling the hot sting of metal shards embedded in his forearm. He looked down and saw blood. Then he was outside, staring up at the sky, wondering what had happened.
Investigators later told Logan that if he hadn’t held the parcel at the irregular angle, the 2-inch-wide hole that was bored into his receptionist’s counter would have been in his chest. They also told him that he was a novelty; they had never spoken with someone who opened a mail bomb and survived.
A pair of white supremacist brothers, Dennis and Daniel Mahon, are set for trial on the murder attempt next year.
12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic comes out against the Mormon Temple, but for the wrong reasons
An editorial says the plan, originally for a 48-foot-high building, “needs tweaking”:
The church deserves credit for lowering the building by 8 feet, to 40 feet. But more concessions are needed to make this project a nice fit for the neighborhood.
The Church still gets to add a spire of nearly 80 feet on top.
It’s good the paper, however delicately, is telling the city council to limit the church’s plans to what is currently allowed.
But it should have made clear that the Mormons vaporized any claim to religioso bonus points when it went on a jihad against gay marriage.
As PHXated has said before, the Mormons should be able to build what the current zoming allows—a thirty-foot building—and nothing more.
The Church’s hostility to gay marriage—and its funding of anti-gay marriage initiatives here and in California—is within its right. But there’s no reason the city should give special dispensation to an institution that spends its money persecuting those who are striving for equal rights under the law.
Phoenix has enough problems with its national image without having the Mormon Church’s profile be any higher than it is now—literally or figuratively.
12:00 AM
How does the Arizona Republic irritate us? Let us count the ways ...
The main thing is just dopiness, I guess the word is.
A few days ago the paper, in one of those irritatingly un-bylined stories it likes so much, listed a bunch of local news squibs that for some stupid reason or another made it into Ripley’s Believe It or Not. This was how one started:
“Man’s best friend” may not cut it for a Scottsdale dog named Buddy, a trained German shepherd who saved his owner’s life by dialing 911 when he began having a seizure, police said.
Leaving aside the atrocious prose, you read on to discover … the dog didn’t “dial 911” at all:
Buddy […] is trained to press a programmed button until a 911 operator is on the line.
The story is just a bit of schmaltz for I guess the paper’s less demanding readers, but there’s a larger issue here of basic accuracy—and the feeling of bait and switch smart people are left with when reading stuff like this. When folks talk about the demise of newspapers, let’s remember that the papers would be in a lot better position if they spent a little less time packaging (and in this case repackaging) silly stuff like this.
Here’s another example: A column in the paper on Sunday, by syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, about the Iraqi immigrant who ran down his daughter and another woman in his car because he thought she was becoming too westernized.
The headline on the op-ed page was “Father, daughter caught in clash of cultures in Ariz.”
Headlines are hard to write in terrestrial publications, particularly when, as here, you have to write something coherent about the story to fit into the space assigned.
Still, “clash of cultures” is a bad hed. Running over a 20-year-old with your car isn’t “cultural.” It’s homicidal. And secondly, the column itself was making exactly the opposite point; that the father ran down his daughter and then fled the country, and that words like "honor"—as in the term “honor killing”—weren’t appropriate.
p.s. Looking up the URLs for these two stories, I was struck again at how useless AZCentral.com is. I couldn’t find either story in the paper’s online archive and had to go begging in Google News. And when I searched for the father’s last name to find the second one on AZ Central, here’s part of what came up:
Nice!
12:00 AM
Arizona Republic circulation down 12 percent
New figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation—the outfit that monitors newspaper subscription rates in the U.S.—shows that newspaper circulation plunged again this year.
How much? By more than 10 percent over the same period a year ago, on average.
The Arizona Republic’s circulation is now down to 316,000 and change. That’s a decline of 12.3 percent this year.
Some papers suffered even steeper losses, but in many cases this was due to the elimination of free copies, service to local hotels and other voluntary circ. pullbacks. I don’t know if the Republic has made any strategic moves like that that might have affected its circulation so severely.
What’s causing the paper’s circulation decline? Would love to hear from readers or any Republic employees what their theories are.
12:00 AM
Bad editing at the Arizona Republic. (Latest in an ongoing series.)
The decline of the American newspaper is being caused by many things, the collapse of the industry’s business model first among them.
But it’s also true that the editorial employees of the papers have brought some of this on themselves. How? Well, basically by not doing their jobs well.
There’s always a lot of talk about how newspapers are biased, a lot of which is overstated. What makes readers uncomfortable, though, is being left with questions after they read a story.
Given the resources at the paper’s command, and how much the reporters and editors are being paid, it’s not too much to ask to have them anticipate what those questions are, and answer them before the story goes to print.
That’s what editors do, and if they don’t readers start to feel that the paper doesn’t care about them.
Now, this didn’t matter when the papers held an effective monopoly on news dissemination. Today that’s not the case, and it’s all the more important.
I found a slew of examples just in a couple of days last week.
Consider the case of the professor associated with ASU, Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel memorial prize for economics last Monday. Every other paper in the country said that Ostrom lived in Bloomington, Indiana, and was a professor at the state university there.
The local papers, of course, played up an ASU connection—Ostrom oversees some sort of study center there—but didn’t bother to try to find out how substantive (or tenuous) the connection was. (Most national news outlets also noted that the economics prize is technically a memorial Nobel, which the Republic didn’t, but whatever.)
You can read this whole Republic story—in which we learn in turn that she’s a “part-time professor” and a “research professor” and a “faculty member”—and never get a sense of what Ostrom actually does at ASU. It leaves a subtle feeling that the Republic wasn’t giving us the whole story—probably because Ostrom’s role is pretty tangential.
Indeed, it wasn’t until Wednesday that we found out the extent of her involvement:
Ostrom communicates with ASU on conference calls several times a month and has come for three or four weeks in January for the past four years.
As for what she does, I read this …
Ostrom is the founding director of an ASU center incorporating a variety of disciplines that aims to guide policies toward more sustainability. It is the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, and it is in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change in the College of Liberal Arts.
…and still don’t know. A good editor would have asked that both bits of information be in the first story—and that the second should have been followed by any sort of tidbit that could give a layperson a sense of what it was her center actually did.
Here’s another example. You know about James Ray, the self-help guru who oversaw a sweat-lodge-ceremony-gone-wrong a few weeks back. On Sunday, the paper ran a story with this hedline:
Sweat-lodge leader mum about ritual Sheriff: Adviser refuses to describe day of deathsThe story began:
A spiritual adviser and self-help author whose saunalike sweat lodge ceremony left two people dead Thursday has left the state and is refusing to tell detectives what happened during the spiritual-cleansing ritual, Yavapai County Sheriff Steve Waugh said.
Sure sounds like Ray isn’t cooperating! Four days later, we get a followup, based on an AP dispatch, that contained this passage:
When an audience member asked Ray to describe what happened, he declined to elaborate, saying only that he has hired his own investigative team and is cooperating with authorities.
“We’re looking for answers,” he said. “I’m as frustrated and confused as other people are.”
That story leaves the impression that Ray is cooperating. Why didn’t the editor notice the discrepancy? Again, a reader gets a sense that people inside the paper just aren’t thinking—and not even reading their own paper.
Another example—a story in the Valley & State section about a lunkhead with some large dogs that were barking and bothering the neighbors. Things had escalated until there was talk of restraining orders and lawsuits; the story was all about how mediation solved the problem.
The story went on for an eternity but never answered the questions in any reader’s (and presumably any editor’s) mind: What’s the law about barking dogs? For those of us who know letting your dogs bother your neighbors is a misdemeanor, the questions continue: Why didn’t the police just enforce the law? Were other neighbors bothered? Why didn’t the reporter ask the dope with the dogs why he just didn’t stop them from barking?
According to the story, a mediation session solved everything by … making the idiot get anti-barking collars for his dogs. The mediation didn’t fix anything, it was just part of what read like a crazily incompetent and drawn-out process that should have been solved early on, by a simple enforcement of city law.
Finally, while editorial pages operate under different rules, the standards of rhetoric dictate that a persuasive argument is one that anticipates objections in the reader’s minds, and answers them.
It’s obvious that some Republic editorial writers aren’t familiar with that concept. Case in point: A recent editorial criticizing President Obama for going on the attack against Fox News. It was the editorial writer’s contention that that would only serve to draw attention to Fox:
Just why the president has opted to declare open war with Fox News is beyond explanation. By raising the network’s profile, Obama has all but guaranteed higher ratings for his nemesis.
Now, this sounds like a Republican talking point, but the issue isn’t whether you agree with Obama or Fox. Here again, a lot of questions are raised.
For one, I think anyone who thinks about this for more than a few seconds can see it’s precisely wrong to say the move is “beyond explanation”; obviously, there’s a strategy involved here. I’m not a big political expert like an Arizona Republic editorial writer, but it’s certainly possibly that this is part of the Obama administration’s moves to characterize the right as a bunch of prejudiced crackpots. It’s a plan the right has been accommodating nicely, and it’s not surprising the administration is taking Fox on.
More importantly, the editorial carefully doesn’t take a position on the issue on the merits; recently, for example, the Fox News gave the country wall-to-wall coverage of the tea-bagger rallies at the Capitol, but barely paid attention to an equally large gay march last weekend.
Whoever wrote that editorial had an editor; and that editor should have told the writer to address the issue of Fox News’ undeniable right-wing slant, and then discussed head on how a political problem like that should be handled by a Democratic administration—because that would have made the writer’s point more persuasive.
The unshakable sense you get from the Republic most days—most days, not all—is that some pretty basic journalistic norms are not followed. And that’s the fault of the editors. When the Republic starts facing the same end some of its fellows have, let’s remember that some of the employees there didn’t help themselves when they had a chance.
12:00 AM
Do psychics have PR agents?
It sure seems like it. Hard to believe a big-city newspaper would be receptive to a pitch from the tarot-card industry to drum up some business—but it’s even harder to contemplate a paper coming up with this story on its own:
When the going gets tough, Valley residents apparently go in search of the metaphysical.
Local psychics and astrologers say that while they’re seeing some decline in business as longtime clients cut back on discretionary spending, the recession is bringing them many new customers.
I missed this gem in the paper; it was brought to my attention by the blog Mediactive, overseen by ASU j school prof Dan Gillmor. Says he:
No newspaper, as far as I know, gives its pages over to self-described psychics. Yet the Republic’s story quotes several, along with the astrologers, with a straight face.
It even provides a helpful sidebar explaining the difference between psychics, astrologers, fortune-tellers and mediums (in each case with the same level of “here’s what they say, never mind what science says” logic). For example, we learn that a psychic is “sensitive to non-physical or supernatural forces and influences, able to see into the future and into the events in a person’s life. Often uses tools such as tarot cards, crystals or tea leaves.” Gosh, thanks the the deeper insight.
12:00 AM
Why does the Arizona Republic capitalize the words "white" and "black"?
The paper ran a recent AP story on the fallout of the Tiger Woods meltdown in the black community. Here’s a sample graf:
When three White women were said to be romantically involved with Woods in addition to his blonde, Swedish wife, blogs, airwaves and barbershops started humming, and Woods’ already tenuous standing among many Blacks took a beating.
(I can’t link to it because, as usual, the AZCentral web site doesn’t know what the paper prints.)
It got worse from there:
The darts reflect Blacks’ resistance to interracial romance. They also are a reflection of discomfort with a man who has smashed barriers in one of America’s Whitest sports …
“America’s Whitest sports”! Sounds like a variant of “American’s Next Top Model.”
Now, I know this style tic isn’t new. But to my knowledge it’s fairly unusual among major papers. Here’s a link to the original AP story on Tiger Woods, in which the words “white” and ‘black" aren’t capped, for example.
Now, despite the headline above, I know why the paper capitalizes “white” and “black.” While no serious news organization has ever done it, it became fashionable, decades ago, in some liberal and overly race-conscious circles to capitalize “black” in print as a sign of respect or pride when discussing racial issues.
Now, since Arizona has one of the smallest African-American populations in the country, you’d think this wouldn’t be an issue here. But apparently someone at the Republic decided, Yeah, we’ll capitalize “black”—but only if we capitalize “white” as well.
The years pass, and now it’s just another indicator of the paper’s lack of sophistication.
p.s. Why shouldn’t the words be capitalized? Because there’s no reason to. They aren’t proper names. Words like Hispanic are capitalized because they are derived from proper names. It’s just the way things are.
11:19 PM
Why is the Arizona Republic trying to bore us to death?
PHXated doesn’t understand how certain newspaper editors, as their industry crumbles down on their shoulders, just … give up.
Consider what I assume would be the half-dozen or so editors who have ultimate responsibility over page two of the paper’s “Valley & State” section. There’s Elvia Diaz, who is the assistant editor credited with oversight of the Phoenix news briefs section. I assume there is an editor to oversee that entire page of news briefs; and that that editor is topped by at least one deputy local editor, and then the top local news guy or gal.
That prestigious position probably still must report to some sort of assistant managing editor with oversight over local news; over that person is the managing editor, who in turn is answerable to the paper’s exec editor or editor in chief.
Anyway, here’s a sampling of what that group offered up to us the other day. I can’t link to it because, as usual, AZCentral.com doesn’t always know what the Republic publishes:
Community to host garage sale
PHOENIX— Residents of Kierland in northeast Phoenix are holding a communitywide garage sale from 7 a.m. to noon today.
This hot news story goes on for three more grafs, including this dulcet explanation of what a garage sale is, in case any mentally disabled people happen to be reading:
Neighbors will fill their driveways wth bargain-priced purchases ranging from furniture to clothes to chuldren’s items.
Everyone involved should take a moment to pat themselves on the back, for taking the time to research, write up, edit and print a little bit of news that under no circumstances could possibly give anyone a reason to subscribe to the paper.
PHXated’s previous breathless coverage of the paper’s intrepid news briefs editorial corps can be found here and here.
6:00 AM
Mayor Phil and his GF get into trouble
Turns out Mayor Phil Gordon has been dating one of his political consultants. The trouble comes because he’s been paying her for political work and has in the past nominated her to city boards.
Sarah Fenske in New Times has an in-depth story here.
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon hasn’t needed to raise money since he waltzed to reelection in the fall of 2007, leaving a war chest stocked with $370,000.
Yet in the last two years, Gordon has paid his chief fundraiser big bucks all the same. Records show that Gordon paid fundraiser Elissa Mullany and her business partner, Cate Wunder, a total of $39,000 since January 2008. That’s a period in which the campaign hasn’t shown a dime of revenue.
Gordon says he’s been daing Mullany since his breakup with his wife; their divorce is not yet final. (Mullany’s married but separated too, Fenske says.)
It looks like the mayor had to put out a press release about the relationship after Fenske started nosing around. Here’s how the Arizona Republic plays it:
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon on Tuesday asked the city attorney and a former Arizona Supreme Court chief justice to review his political ties to consultant Elissa Mullany, the woman he is now dating.
The request came after The Arizona Republic and another media outlet inquired about the relationship and whether Mullany was benefitting from any taxpayer dollars.
Note the lack of grace with which the Republic acknowledges its competition. My issue with this isn’t so much not naming the New Times as with the clumsiness. Good journalism should handle various issues consistently, and it shouldn’t leave obvious questions in readers’ minds.
A lot of stories are pursued by different news outlets at the same time. It’s appropriate to say, in those cases, “The mayor released the information after news organizations started querying the office about it.” But if they are going to note that one other outlet in paticular is doing the asking, the paper should name it.
Why did it not name New Times? Maybe it’s because Fenske had a lot more information.
The Republic trumpets its “review” of the matter … and shares it with readers in three paragraphs.
Fenske’s piece is 1500 words long, and more than forty paragraphs. And it has a lot of evidence of the positively continental attitudes of some of the major players in the story:
Mullany, who was then known as Elissa Peters, was divorced from her first husband, Aldon Terpstra, in December 1998. She married James Mullany five years later, in October 2003. She has two young sons.
A former City Council staffer, James Mullany now works for former Phoenix Mayor Paul Johnson at his development company, Old World Communities/ Berkana Townhomes. Thanks to an appointment from Gordon, he’s also on the city’s Deferred Compensation Board.
3:18 PM
How the Arizona Republic drives us nuts
Reason #42. Bad editing.
In too many stories, you just can’t figure out what’s going on based on the information the paper gives you. It’s the editor’s job not to let that happen.
Here’s a good example. Vernon Parker, the mayor of Paradise Valley, who might run for governor, has been accused of wrongdoing by the federal government and is now suing for $2 million in damages. Fine. But read this precis in the paper, emphases added:
Parker, who heads his private consulting firm, VBP Group LLC, was accused of using his political influence to obtain an SBA contract, the claim says.
The SBA Inspector General’s Office began an investigation into the contract. It later published a report on the agency’s Web site that said Parker was a federal employee with the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the time of the contract application, and that federal employees are prohibited by law from competing for government contracts.
[…]
“The SBA’s Inspector General’s Office accused my client of inaccurate financial statements and an untruthful application for certification. All of those allegations, save one, have been thrown out,” attorney Paul Charlton said.
The story continues for a half-dozen grafs, but never explains a) whether in fact Parker applied for the grant while he was working for the agriculture department, an easily acertainable fact; or b) which allegation hadn’t been thrown out.
The reporter, Ofelia Madrid, evidently talked to Charlton; why didn’t she just ask him whether in fact Parker was working for the department at the time?
6:00 AM
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
Newsflash: The Arizona Republic continues to be irritating
We’ve noted before that an increasing number of unnamed scribes are contributing copy to the paper, particularly in the Living section. (PHXated was a longtime arts editor, so is especially sensitive to that section’s work.)
Today, we noted with keen anticipation a refer at the top of the Living page promoting a piece about a Wallace and Ladmo tribute: “Fond Look Back. Party to mark 20 years since final episode of ‘Wallace and Ladmo.’”
But turning the page, we find it’s just a tiny little story, bylined “The Arizona Republic”—and that the party is the screening of a few old shows at the Valley Art Theater.
As Dwight on “The Office” would say, “Question: Will Bill Thompson or Pat McMahon be there?”
(Ladmo passed away years ago; as far as I know the other two are still around.)
Answer: I haven’t the faintest idea, because “The Arizona Republic” didn’t tell me one way or the other.
Of course, you can imagine that the paper is pretty strapped, staffwise, these days, and the Living section staff had a lot to do that day.
Except … The lede story of the section that day was an AP thing about Sonya Sotomayor. The second lede was a feature on Christmas books, from the Miami Herald.
Down below there was a phoner interview with a country singer named Sara Evans to promote a show in town, by Larry Rodgers … and a little recipe about how to make a “hot toddy.”
And that, along with the Wallace and Ladmo squib, was the sum total of the section’s work that day.
p.s.: As is usual, the story doesn’t come up through the AZCentral.com search box, but does on Google News.
7:00 AM
Bill Goodykoontz on the disappearing critic's screening
The Republic’s film critic notes that the movie studios are showing fewer and fewer movies to critics for review:
I’m starting to feel like Charlie Brown. I never get invited to anything.
OK, that’s an exaggeration.
But this much is true: Of the three major releases that open Friday, Sept. 11, today none was available for review. I watched a fourth film, “Lorna’s Silence,” on DVD.
The three films are Sorority Row, a slasher pic; Whiteout, a thriller with Kate Beckinsale set in Antarctica; and I Can Do Bad All By Myself, the latest bit of sentimentality from Tyler Perry.
Slasher films make money whether they are good or bad, and Perry presumably doesn’t care or doesn’t need to care what white critics say about his black films.
Whiteout is more of a puzzle; locally, it was screened on a Wednesday night, which is too late to make the Republic’s deadlines. That strategically leaves local word-of-mouth to the screening audience and to less-serious local critics. Beckinsale, as Goodykoontz notes, is a fairly respectable actress, but in the end even respectable actresses end up in bad films, and the studio was trying to give the thing whatever protection from critics it could.
Manohla Dargis in the NYT, for example, reviewed it today. Her verdict? “[A] perfunctory, by-the-numbers approach to the story and its characters.” And she ended with this kiss-off:
And shouldn’t there be penguins? I thought every movie about Antarctica had to have penguins. Has someone done market research proving otherwise? Is the whole penguin thing over? Or maybe the penguins read the script and told their agents to pass. Smart birds.
Goodykoontz’s is a good reminder, though, that the movie studios, like the record companies, while busily marketing themselves in public as friends of consumers and fans, often work behind the scenes in ways to screw over their customers—and in this case their news sources.
6:00 AM
Who's writing what at the Arizona Republic?
Yesterday, the paper had a big spread on long-gone Phoenix landmarks—everything from Legend City to the Cine Capri to Caf’ Casino.
The byline? There was none. Just “By The Arizona Republic.”
In the Calendar section was a big full-page review of the new movie 9. The byline? There was none.
I assume it was Bill Goodykoontz, but what’s up with that?
p.s.: And why, after the paper has just printed a story about something called “Caf’ Casino,” does a search for the phrase “Caf’ Casino” not produce the story in the AZCentral.com search engine?
Ditto for “Legend City.”
And ditto for the “Cine Capri.”
And why, oh why, is the damn thing immediately accessible in Google News?
6:00 AM
Dramatic journalistic one-upsmanship at the Arizona Republic
A few days, ago, you will recall, we examined the news briefs of the Arizona Republic’s Valley and State section and found that no bit of press-release banality was too low for the paper to assiduously chronicle and waste newsprint on. (“Republic Watch: Another example of why newspapers are dying.”)
One item in the Phoenix news briefs column, you will recall, was the breathless accounting of the opening of a community-college cafeteria.
(“The Phoenix College Culinary Cafe officially reopens today for the fall semester. Lunch is served every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.,” the story began—and went on for another four paragraphs.)
After perusing the paper this morning, we are sensing a little office rivalry. Not to be outdone, the West Valley news briefs section sees the Phoenix one’s Culinary Cafe—and raises a student-run eatery!
Student-run eatery opensAVONDALE – Estrella Mountain Community College’s student-operated restaurant opened last week on campus, 3000 N. Dysart Road.
The cost for a three-course meal at Regions Restaurant is $8.95, plus tax.
The restaurant opens to the public from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays.
The brief goes on from there, but you get the idea. The important news is that Republic’s not-to-be-outdone coverage of community-college dining-room offers continues.
6:00 AM
Even an Arizona Republic basher would have to admit ....
… that the front page today doesn’t suck.
It’s symptomatic of the design changes so many papers have adopted that only four actual stories begin, or purport to begin, on that page. But they include:
- A long recap of the the legislative shenanigans that created this year’s budget crisis
- A look back at the economic meltdown, one year ago (This was technically a long blurb to an AP story, but it should count.)
- The lede, the first in a series by by reporter Pat Kossan at how some local charter schools are abusing the tuition tax-credit program
- And a splashy intro to the first of another series, this one on the underlying issues of the health-care debate.
3:49 AM
Why people don't subscribe to newspapers any more
Exhibit no. 371 in a series, from the Arizona Republic:
5 pallets of water are donated
SCOTTSDALE – The Greater Southwest Chapter of the Club Managers Association of America has donated five pallets of water to Arizona Helping Hands Inc.Terra Waldron – vice president and general manager of Desert Highlands, a private golf and residential community in Scottsdale – and her staff joined forces to collect two pallets of water for Helping Hands.
This was the lead item in the paper’s Scottsdale news column this a.m. It continued for five more paragraphs.
It’s bad enough that newspapers reprint press releases and sell them as news; do they have to reprint boring press releases? How did the writer stay awake while typing out those sentences? Who at the Republic thinks that people want to read stuff like that instead of actual news? Why, after the paper has gone through one recent round of layoffs, does the staff that remains have to spend its time doing things like this?
And finally, I used AZCentral.com’s search engine to try to find this story after seeing it in the paper. No matter how I searched for it, it didn’t come up.
Here’s the search for “Waldron,” for example.
I went to Google News and … it came right up, giving me the story I linked to above.
In other words, the paper’s web site doesn’t even know what’s on the paper’s web site.
6:00 AM
Why newspapers are dying: A case study from the Arizona Republic
Your host here at PHXated has an interest in the media, and recently wrote a long article on the state of the daily press. The essay, “Five Key Reasons Newspapers Are Dying, and Why They Don’t Get Talked About Much,” was printed over two days in Splice Today.
After a day of radio silence, during which I thought no one cared about the subject (and even if they did I’d bloviated too long) a few folks noticed the article and started tweeting about it.
I was happy about the interest that resulted, because it demonstrated to me that serious subjects could still be treated substantively these days, and that people would take the time to read the result. For a few days, life was fun. I was interviewed by the Times and got some nice words from some people who are spending a lot of time figuring out the future of the industry.
Anyway, I just saw that I even got noticed by the Seeing Red AZ blog.
But neither they nor anyone else wondered about the identity of one major character in the piece, an unnamed paper in “one of the very largest cities in the U.S., … in classic flyover territory, a sociological light year away from a major media center.”’
Here’s part of it:
You can see the evidence of it [i.e., what I argue is the press’s thoroughgoing timidity and blandness] in the pages of virtually every daily in the U.S. I live now in one of the very largest cities in the U.S., but it’s in classic flyover territory, a sociological light year away from a major media center. Here’s a list of the headlines that appeared on a recent day on the front cover of the paper’s feature section, including both stories and news squibs:
“Wooden Memories”
“Test your hearing”
“Free burrito for teachers”
“Post office food drive”
“Fight Crohn’s and colitis”
“Mom and Estában”
“Healthful salsa non-guilty pleasure”
“Great gifts for teachers”The first of those—“Wooden Memories”—was the compelling headline of a big feature about folks who keep old wood-shop projects around the house because … they just can’t bring themselves to get rid of them.
“Wooden Memories”! “Healthful salsa”! It’s obvious from reading down that list of headlines that there was nothing there of remote interest of just about any sentient being. But that’s not what the paper’s editors were aiming for. The point is that there was nothing there that could possibly offend anyone.
Any editor who presided over such a sorry collection of non stories and journalistic Malt-o-Meal at a time when papers should have been fighting to make themselves relevant to readers should of course have been fired.
But, inside newspapers, that’s what is, paradoxically, regarded.
Indeed, the top editor of that paper just got a new job: He was stolen away by another well-known American newspaper, one of the ones currently facing bankruptcy and closure. You’d think a paper in that position would be fighting back. Instead, they turned to a guy who’d overseen the publication of sections like that.
6:00 AM