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.

PHXated hearts Laurie Roberts

… and we don’t care who knows it.

Roberts, the Republic columnist, has been all over an ongoing scandal out of Maricopa County probate court; certain people who have the bad luck to come under the supposed protection of the court have apparently would up with their estates drained of money by what seems to be high legal and care fees.

As you can imagine, what the certain people have in common is sizable chunks of money, or did until they were put under government protection.

The poster child of this has been Marie Long, who had a stroke in 2005. At the time she was worth $1.3 million. Now she’s broke and about to be evicted from her nursing home.

One of Roberts’ several columns on Long is here.

Today, Roberts had details on another probate court case, about a 49-year-old guy, Edward Ravenscroft, whose drug addictions got him in big legal trouble. Now, Ravenscroft is lucky; a lot of folks arrested for possession three times would be in prison. Fortunately for him, he’s a pharmaceuticals heir supposedly worth $5 million.

According to Roberts, felicitous circumstances like this — rich folks coming under the care of the probate court — triggers certain arrangemens:

In January 2009, attorney Paul Theut was named Ravenscroft’s guardian-ad-litem and within a month Theut asked that Sun Valley Group be brought in to oversee the millionaire’s estate. Ravenscroft, he wrote, cannot manage his affairs due to drug and mental-health issues and “has property that will be wasted or dissipated unless proper management is provided.”

So they proceeded to manage it for him.

According to court records, Theut collected $62,000 of Ravenscroft’s money in his first 3½ months as GAL. Larry Scaringelli was appointed his attorney after Commissioner Michael Hintze rejected Ravenscroft’s own choice of a lawyer. (Being the one to foot the bill, Ravenscroft thought he ought to have some say in the matter.) Scaringelli collected nearly $33,000 in his first five months. Sun Valley and the Maricopa County public fiduciary, which is Ravenscroft’s guardian, haven’t disclosed their take.

Neither Scaringelli nor Theut returned calls to explain their bills.

Ravenscroft is now locked out of his own house and is living on a friends couch. He tells Roberts that the charges now exceed a half-million dollars.

Roberts’ blog is one of the better ones in town. Here she is on some recent antics in the state legislature:

Apparently, all the state’s problems have been solved because Senate Appropriations Chairman Russell Pearce, one of the Legislature’s key members, has introduced a bill mandating that the state hang a copy of the Ten Commandments at the entrance to the state Capitol.

This is, of course, fantastic news for tens of thousands of Arizona’s children, who I’m guessing now won’t be summarily tossed out of the state’s health-care plan for the poor. And it must mean that our leaders have found a way to fully fund Child Protective Services so that the little children — the ones we could save if we fully funded the agency — won’t have to suffer.

Potential East Valley Tribune sale is expanded

The East Valley Tribune is reporting that its long-discussed sale to Thirteenth Floor Street Media has been delayed because the company is negotiating to get the EVT’s sister papers in the Valley as well:

The new letter of intent also includes assets of the Sun City Daily News-Sun, Ahwatukee Foothills News and Arizona Interactive in Chandler, which publishes the Clipper advertising shopper and does commercial printing. The Daily-News Sun also publishes the Glendale/Peoria Today and Surprise Today newspapers.

The deal expanded because the operations are so closely intertwined, Freedom said in a statement.

Thirteenth Street owner Randy Miller was expected to be in the Valley this week visiting the staff at Freedom locations.

More details on the new developments at Heat City.

PHXations, January 12, 2010

update: Another journalist move: Le Templar, the East Valley Tribune’s opinion page editor and political blogger, is moving to the Goldwater Institute, where he will be communications director. He’d been with the EVT 10 years.

Last week, the paper’s editor, Chris Coppola, anounced that he will be joining the Arizona Republic as an suburban editor.

The EVT was headed for closure at the end of the year until it was said that a company called Thirteenth Street Media, led by Randy Miller, had agreed to buy it. The end of the year came and went only with an announcement that negotiations were continuing.

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Rene Gutel, the local radio reporter, is leaving town to join … the foreign service.

My family goes to Washington in February for 4-12 months of training, then to be deployed to an embassy somewhere in the world, exact locale TBD! I’m terribly excited. This is the dream job I’ve always wanted going way back to high school so I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Gutel dropped out of graduate school at Berkeley, where she was studying Andalusian poetry, to take up radio reporting. She’s been with KJZZ since 2004. She had her first child, a boy, a few months ago, too.

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For Third Friday, the Heard has a series of events tonight. The first is “Changing Direction: A Conversation on Transitions and Influences in the Now.” It starts at 6 p.m. Cochran’s the PAM’s head contemporary curator; the panel includes artists Bob Haozus and Nora Naranjo Morse. There will be a performance by soprano Jennifer Stevens at 8 p.m. as well. It’s free.

You hate to kick the EVT while it's down ...

.. and granted, it’s New Year’s weekend. Still, here’s the front-and-center well of its front page this a.m.:

p.s.: Heat City is reporting that the paper’s editor, Chris Coppola, is leaving—for an editing job at the Arizona Republic.

Are readers getting the information they need from local news?

One of the things I’m interested in journalismwise is the quality of local news. We all have the internets available to us now, so few of us are dependent on our local news sources for anything but local news, right?

At the same time, many of those local news sources, particularly the print ones, are quite vulnerable right now, given the state of the industry.

Part of the reason I pick on local papers so much is that, in this context—and please excuse my French—to keep printing the same shitty stuff you always did is to sign your own death warrant.

Here’s some examples.

One’s minor. You might have noticed how the Republic is reviewing the big stories of the decade, year by year, this week. There’s a list of national stories on the front page, local stories on the Valley & State page, biz stories on the business page.

It seem crazy to me the paper wouldn’t put the local stories on its front page. That’s the insight it has no other publication can compete with.

In what context is the idea “Boy, we think the tsunami was one of the biggest stories of 2004!” front-page news in a local paper?

All local newspapers are going to turn their interests sharply homeward in the coming years; the Republic is still acting as if it’s a prime source of national and world news for its readers. It’s not.

Put it in a fucking sidebar.

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Here’s another example. The Phoenix Business Journal has a story plugged on its front-page today about retail sales in the month between Christmas and New Year’s:

Retail sales climb 2.3 percent
Retailers got some good news at the end of the holiday shopping season with sales up 2.3 percent from last year, according to figures released Tuesday from the International Council of Shopping Centers.

A few grafs down, the story cited similar figures from MasterCard. The trouble is that the story didn’t say what most national news stories on the topic did, namely that there was an extra shopping day in the period this year, which means that the actual increase in sales was only about 1 percent.

It’s a small thing, but in an information age, information matters. Why should I subscribe to the PBJ—which is supposed to be displaying some expertise in business issues—when even a casual reader of business news like me immediately spots deficiencies in its reporting?

The PBJ story gets worse. The second sentence of the story makes no sense:

The [council] described the increase as significant and said procrastination by holiday shoppers, coupled with a crippling Northeastern blizzard, proved strong for retailers.

Note that the council is telling us the increase was significant when in fact it wasn’t. And how was the blizzard “strong for retailers”? Am I missing something?

Another: In my Northeast-Phoenix-zoned local-news tab this a.m., there’s a story about … some crappy bar on Camelback. Here’s the hed and first graf:

Sip Tiny Tinis on big night out at updated HB Hanratty’s
HB Hanratty’s Pub in central Phoenix has started serving Tiny Tinis, 4-ounce pours for $4.

As usual, for some unknown reason the story doesn’t come up on AZCentral.com, though I noticed another story, here, that plugs the same drink.

The question, again, is why a newspaper wastes staff time assigning, writing, editing and publishing press releases.

(Not to mention the question of how this particular press release—about a bar on Camelback—came to be included in a zoned section devoted to northeast Phoenix news.)

High-wire act at the EVT

The publisher of the East Valley Tribune has posted a letter on the status of the paper’s pending sale. The news in the letter is … there is no news:

To Our Readers,

This week we have received a number of inquiries regarding the future of your newspaper. Because we value your trust in us and the relationship with all our readers, we wanted to provide a brief update.

While we have not yet reached a final agreement with Thirteenth Street Media for the sale of the Tribune, we remain in active discussions with them working to conclude the final details of a sale.

Please know that we will continue to publish and distribute the Tribune and provide our customers and readers with excellent service just as we always have while these discussions continue. Our Phoenix-area Web sites will also continue operating normally during this period.

Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

Julie Moreno
Publisher, East Valley Tribune

Two months ago, the paper’s bankrupt owner, Freedom Communications, said it would close at the end of the year. Three weeks later, Thirteenth Floor came into the picture. Background on what’s happened since here.

Dan Gillmor and the "Mediactivization" of America

That’s Dan Gillmor’s goal in a new book, Mediactive. Gillmor, a professor at the Cronkite School, has posted the first chapter online.

It seems as if it will be a survey of the changes in media we’re seeing (most notably the implosion of print media’s business model) and his vision of how journalists—and, importantly, consumers of their work—might see their way through.

I get a sharp pain behind my eyes when I read a lot of the idealistic prescriptions for American journalism. There’s a lot of “coulds.” People could participate in journalism a lot more than they do.

But let’s face it, most won’t—because they don’t care, because they don’t have the skills, or, in most cases, simply because they have a life and have better things to do.

In that context, this graf is refreshing:

Don’t get the idea that this is some kind of stern lecture about how you must do this or that or else you’re a bad person. Nor is this an “eat your (insert vegetable you loathe) because it’s good for you” exercise. We’re talking about doing something that’s often fun, if you have the slightest curiosity about the world, and downright useful the rest of the time.

I’m interested in the whole book. As he posts chapters, if I have something to say I’ll discuss it here.

A few thoughts on the first part of the first chapter—not to criticize but rather, as he asks, to provide feedback for iterations of the book as it’s being written. Gillmor writes:

Yet to assure a continued supply of quality information, we have to address the other side of a classic economic and social equation: demand. And to put it mildly, our demand today isn’t so great. In fact, it’s downright crappy.

Unless we all demand something better than we’ve been getting, we will get more of the same sludge that now dominates the world of news. I have nothing against entertainment. But information that doesn’t help us make better decisions about our families and our communities leaves us short-changed.

Two comments. One, I’m not sure it’s productive, in this particular discussion, to apply value judgments like “crappy” to demand. Believe me, I find the taste of the average American consumer positively horrific. And it’s fun to ridicule it.

But the future of journalism demands a tough engagement with… well, reality. And reality is what is going to dictate the success of media in the future. So let’s remember that people never really bought news. (Gillmor makes this point, one of my pet contentions on the issue, early in the chapter.) A lot of them were buying advertising, and in the end, what people paid made up only a small fraction of the average newspaper’s budget.

So there’s never really been a mass demand for news where it counts, which is the pocketbook. My point is just that, in this context, demand isn’t crappy. It is what it is—and those who hope to create the news of the future need to figure out what people want.

That said, there’s a big upside to this: People actually didn’t want a lot of what they were getting, because it was being provided by monopolies that were mostly serving their (that is, the monopolies’) advertisers. That’s why, to note just one obvious example, papers still have travel sections. The advertising department demands it.

So the good news is that a lot of the resources newspapers did have were wasted, journalistically. Only a small part of the average newspaper’s editorial budget went to actual news. In this context, the upside is that the new creators of content are free from a lot of the crap—here the word is appropriate—newspapers used to foist on us.

I’m sure Gillmor will get to those points as he goes on. I’m enjoying it thus far.

The bright side of the decade from hell

Chris Coppola, the editor of the East Valley tribune, tries to limn it in a commentary today. He acknowledges the wars and economic troubles that have marked the past ten years, but makes this case:

[…] I’m not convinced the ’00s were all bad for us locally. The progress made in developing our freeway system and introducing light rail in the East Valley, along with ongoing improvements at Gateway and Falcon Field airports in Mesa, and Chandler’s municipal airport, will pay major dividends for this region down the road. History has proven that an efficient transportation system is a major key for any area’s economic health.

We’ve also seen an explosion of new hospitals and medical facilities and expansion of higher educational facilities — all the types of things that add to quality of life and prove attractive to new industries looking to set up shop with varied, and well-paying, jobs.

He goes through each town in his subscription area and notes the steps each has taken to position itself for the future.

My only complaint: In such a Republican area, in reviewing the crises of the decade he could have noted the failures of that party, both philosophically (in how, for example, its distaste for regulation helped create the housing and financial mess) and politically (an utterly failed president, a dismaying 2008 presidential candidate).

Don’t get me wrong: If anything, PHXated despises Democrats even more than Republicans. And I’m rooting for both Coppola and the paper. But it doesn’t help anyone not to utter some simple truths.

The future of the EVT, incidentally, remains in doubt, Heat City reports:

Earlier this month, a spokesman for the Mesa newspaper’s parent, Freedom Communications, said Dec. 24 would likely be the day the company would tell a federal bankruptcy court about the deal it hopes to strike with a Colorado businessman wanting to buy the Tribune.

But late Thursday, after nothing had been filed with the court, company spokeswoman Maya Pogoda said attorneys “have not finalized the agreement” with hopeful buyer Randy Miller.

The buyer of the East Valley Tribune is asking staffers to re-apply for their jobs

Things don’t look good. Nick Martin writes in Heat City:

First, [Thirteenth Street Media owner Randy] Miller asked employees which position they are applying for – a problem because Miller has not said which positions might be available.

Later, Miller asks applicants to include three references, but he adds one instruction: “Please do not include relatives or former employers.”

No former employers, you say? So who does he want listed? Friends? Community leaders? A journalist’s sources? It’s unclear.

We should prepare for some grim holiday news from the East Valley Tribune. The smart business move is to radically downsize the serious staff and let the malleable souls remaining keep the thing filled with business-, advertiser- and government-friendly newsblurbs.

That, coincidentally, is what the company did when it took over a paper in Tucson called the Explorer. Here’s a former staffer quoted in the Tucson Weekly talking about where things were headed:

[The new editors] asked me and Oro Valley reporter Patrick McNamara if Marana and Oro Valley had [public information officers], and we said, “Yeah.” Do they send press releases? Do you put them in the paper? “No, not always. It depends on what it is. We never run a press release from a PIO.” They seemed a little taken aback by that. I quipped that most of the press releases for Marana were, “Come take a picture of this cactus we just planted.” Everyone else seemed to chuckle, but when they didn’t chuckle, I sort of knew I wasn’t going to be a part of these guys’ plan."

I can’t imagine the EVT was losing a lot of money. Its current owner, Freedom Communications, has claimed only that it had been “unprofitable” for the last two years. You can view that as a careful choice of words; on the other hand, the company is in bankruptcy, so maybe the word doesn’t have a special meaning. On the third hand, the company was loaded down with debt and might have been trying to unload a paper that wasn’t losing money just to raise cash.

The big question is how much debt Thirteenth Street is taking on to accomplish its own acquisition. The poster child for this scenario is Tribune Company, which took on oceans of new debt solely for the purpose of the privilege of being owned by Sam Zell. It, too, is in bankruptcy.

The EVT is a serious newspaper right now; if Thirteenth Street is rigorous in the cost-cutting, it can coast on that reputation (and the reflexive ad buys) for a while before folks really start noticing the decline in quality. In the meantime, again, its hard to see how a lot of local journalists won’t be facing a tough holiday.

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.

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.

Will Joe Arpaio really "Meet the Press" at the Cronkite School?

It’s been an unobtrusive line at the bottom of the this semester’s ASU j-school event calendar:

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.

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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!

EVT to stop publishing at the end of the year

The East Valley Tribune had tried slashing staff and even cutting publication to three days a week, but was finally forced to give up, the paper’s publisher told staffers today, according to Heat City.

The paper is owned by the Freedom chain, based in Orange County, California, which is in bankruptcy. Reports Nick Martin:

The closing makes the Tribune the second Arizona newspaper to shutter this year. In May, the state’s oldest newspaper, the Tucson Citizen, was shut down by its owner, Gannett. The Citizen has since become a local blogging website for the media chain.

“This is probably the most difficult decision a company can make,” Freedom CEO Burl Osborne said in a news release. “But ultimately, after considering all available options, this is the best alternative for our company.”

The paper won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its lacerating series on Joe Arpaio, “Reasonable Doubt.”

Martin has more details on the closing here.

The city of Anthem has its own magazine

Who knew? As is annoyingly frequent, I can’t find the AZCentral.com version of the story, printed in the Republic today, that details how the city of Anthem has decided to keep publishing the monthly magazine “Freedom Way.”

There was apparently some controversy in the town from residents worried that the magazine costs the community money.

No one, apparently, questioned whether it was appropriate for the town council to be publishing a magazine in the first place.

One councilman, according to the story, tried to get the council to pass a measure banning the magazine from endorsing candidates or taking campaign ads. According to the Republic, “The idea failed to gain support.”

As is also typical at the Republic, the story raised more questions than it answered. Is the magazine endorsing candidates now? How did the thing get started?

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.

A new black newspaper in Tucson

The Vanguard is being put out by the local Black Chamber of Commerce with a 1000 print run, the AZ Daily Star says. The chamber’s president, Clarence Boykins, is the publisher.

Boykins, who said he put up the initial investment to start up the Vanguard, is publisher. He tapped Tucson freelance writer and editor Theda K. Rogers to be executive editor.

Boykins picked up the first 16-page edition, printed at Territorial Publishers, Friday and called it “a great beginning.”

He said the paper aims to improve communication for blacks who are dispersed around Southern Arizona, while increasing the understanding of black culture in the larger community.

Nick Martin's "Beta Journalism"

Martin is one of the better reporters in town; you can see his grim piece on the third serial shooter in the most recent issue of Phoenix Magazine.
He was an EVT staffer let go in one of the recent rounds of layoffs, but his blog, Heat City, lets him follow a few of his reportorial hobbyhorses.

His latest posting is a proposal for a variant on some of the new thinking of how traditional journalism can take advantage of some of the power of the web.

The trouble to this point has been that traditional journalism has had a hard time letting go of the control it’s used to having in reporting and telling stories. Martin’s proposal:

This could be done by creating a new web application to make it all possible. Here’s how the app would work:

1. A journalist writes a story and posts it online in “beta” form.
2. The public can then log in to suggest extra sources, point out typos, critique for bias and upload media.
3. The journalist or editor makes or approves changes, verifies facts and posts a final draft sometime later (maybe hours or days). The names of the people who helped in the process are included at the bottom of the story as named contributors, giving them ownership of the piece.

Beta Journalism (working title) would be that open-source application. The idea relies heavily on the concept of crowdsourcing. It embraces the knowledge of the community. It tells readers: This is a work in progress – please help us improve it.

You can read his complete idea here.

Espresso Pundit posts the complete "Desert Divas" client list

PHXated was at a small but lively Society of Professional Journalists meeting last night, and the conversation predictably turned to the varying ways old-school media types and newer practitioners view their respective responsibility to society and their readers.

To me it’s patent that the daily newspaper world, for example, long ago forfeited its claims to moral superiority. Not because of any particular turpitude, but just because of arrogance, lassitude, and timidity.

Anyway, I thought about it again while being unable to stop myself from taking a look at the list of Desert Divas clients Greg Patterson, a conservative former state rep. who blogs as the “Espresso Pundit,” put up.

He says the list of names was already available; this, however, is a complete spreadsheet with the identities of the alleged clients, their addresses, and, most queasiness-inducing, a column of notes.

All in all, pretty grim reading:

WAS TRYING TO USE STOLEN CREDIT CARD!!!! CARD WAS IN A WOMAN’S NAME, CLAIMED HE HAD HER PERMISION

PER SCOTT AT AZ-CONFIDENTIAL DO NOT SEE EVER!!! EXTREME CASE OF HERPES!!!!

MANAGER AT THE HOTEL TOLD BRITTNEY TO LEAVE THAT IF SHE DIDNT SHE WOULD BE IN BIG TROUBLE

And, forgive me:

HAS HUGE OPEN WOUND ON HIS BELLY & VERY DIRTY – HAD LENA IN TEARS

Anyway, besides the obvious issue that not all of the names and address are necessarily correct, there’s also sensitive medical details, and even private information that probably should not have been released by the police—like security codes for apartment complexes and gated communities:

“LIKES JAMIE & JAMIE LIKES TO GO THERE GATE CODE [XXXX] BLDG # 9 APT # 2152 BELL RD & 101S”

I blocked out the code and didn’t include the full address, but you can see the problem.

Here’s how Patterson said the material was revealed:

After a few months of dead ends, I finally went to my Secret Weapon—Sal DiCiccio. Councilman DiCiccio thinks that if information is public that it should actually be available to…you know…the public. DiCiccio sent his right hand guy, former Tribune writer Hal DeKeyser to take care of it and by golly, they stone walled him too…but persistence pays off.

I’m agnostic on releasing the clients’ names; but the police department screwed up by not redacting the list of details that could help burglars and predators. And Patterson wasn’t smart by not hiding the most sensitive information himself.

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.

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.

Live, from the Cronkite School!
Live-blogging as Joe Arpaio meets the press.

* PHXated is live-blogging the event as it happens. Refresh for updates *

Thus endeth the live-blogging.

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In the end, a little anti-climactic. The professors did a good job, but Arpaio just blandly deflected the inquiries.

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The students who disrupted the event are still milling around upstairs. Seems odd that the school had no way to shut them up or hustle them out. It’s a bad precedent that ten or twenty people—I’m guessing—can disrupt the desires of hundreds of others.

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They seem to be ending it.

This is wrong. The event is over. Callahan is trying to lecture the disruptive students. He points out they’ve lost twelve minutes of questioning. And that they’ve effectively left Arpaio to have his views unfiltered in other media venues.

Wide applause from those left here.

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A disruption. Protesters are singing a parody song to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody. Arpaio puts a funny hat on, but then took it off.

Callahan is trying to quiet the crowd.

This is embarrassing for the school. It’s wrong to disrupt an event in a venue called a “First Amendment Forum.”

Callahan can’t be heard from the dais. Some students are yelling “Shut up” to the idiotic protesters.

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RR is asking him about racial profiling and targeting political opponents. Are you above the law?

Why have there been so many officials saying they were targeted?

A: Implies he got his question from someone else. RR: My words came from me.

A: I don’t know about police chiefs who don’t like me. I don’t know about mayors. RR: Phil Gordon. A: Well him.

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He’s getting pressed on making records available—another thing he’s been getting dinged on. He says they are getting better.

SG presses him on releases video of a certain inmate. “I’m not too familiar with that one. I”m sure they got the information."

What do you consider a reasonable amount of time? There’s been an unwritten law of ten days, but when they ask for thousands of pieces of information it takes time.

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Steve Elliott: Presses him on his home address being publicized. I found your address in public document in five minutes.

A: There might be some slipperage but it’s still a violation. I have a lot of threats on me.

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A: What’s the saying? “The buck stops here? There?” I feel comfortable when I go home at night. Blustering: “I will continue to deal with the media!”

A: “I have nothing to hide. I want to thank you students. You are the future of journalism. I love this Cronkite.”

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SG: Have you rethought that? A: No, there are times you might re-evaluate.

SG: Do you stand by what was done? A: I’m saying it was a learning process.

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“Everyone’s afraid to drink with me. The media is not my enemy.” He’s getting a little unhinged.

Would a normal politician agree to this? Green: Absolutely.

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A: “I kinda like the media!”

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Green bring up his subpoena of all New Times’ information from its web site, including IP addresses of visitors for three years.

A: Not going to go into all the reasons things were done.

He pleads litigation again. But concedes he’s “learning.”

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No one’s laid a glove on him yet.

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RR brings up New Times. They do hard-hitting reporting. They published your home address. In Oct. 2007, you arrested the editor and publisher of the paper i the middle of the night, on a misdemeanor. I was an executive editor of a paper. We often reported on grand jury testimony. I was never threatened with arrest. Were the arrests appropriate? Was it a mistake?

A: They increased my popularity.“By the way, it’s a free weekly paper.” (Groans from the crowd. A deputy, he said, made the decision to arrest the pair. Most arrests are for misdemeanor. Can’t talk more—litigation.

RR: Is publishing grand jury testimony automatically grounds for arrest in AZ now?

A: It all depends.

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Steve Elliott asks him about not sending press releases to the EVT. The scrape wound up in court and the paper won. The judge said you were petty. Did you act properly?

A: Two issues. The judge never ruled against us. “You have to improve,” he said. They had a way to get press releases. They could drive downtown. (!) He said the problems were fixed. We did improve. The releases are now on the web.

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Susan Green asks what about those not allowed to a press conference?

A: I average 200 interviews a month with media.

SG: People have shown up and been denied access to press conference.

A: One or two out of thousands. Security reasons. They use the press conference to sandbag me, or disrupt it.

She presses him: They are doing the stories that aren’t so favorable. Are you using access as a weapon?

A: I’m not afraid to face the media. They ask questions that are off the subject of a press conference.

This is a specious point. He has a crazy idea of what a press conference is. She should be pressing him on the fact that he doesn’t allow himself to be questioned on hard topics.

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Rick Rodriquez starts off the questioning. “It’s going to be a learning experience for students.”

Q: Media relationships—he got great press coverage for being tough. Your son in law works for Republic. Other side: Journos who do critical stories get frozen, even arrested. Deputies have threatened to arrest a report. Is media a tool or the enemy?

There’s protest noise from outside

A: I have to get to people I serve. I have an open door policy. You can come to the tents. I don’t have to have handlers. [I’m paraphrasing] Sometimes there are problems with media. I’m human. I’m still going to deal with the media.

I’m still here, will continue to do my job. I report to the people directly. I have nothing to hide and I do my job.

RR presses him. What about threatening to arrest a reporter asking for public records? A says he’ll arrest anyone who breaks the law.

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Callahan asks for “respect” from the audience and says he’ll stay after and answer questions. His mike is going in and out.

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Callahan is explaining the format—he notes there’s been some "misunderstanding"about the “Meet the Press”-style format. He’s referring to the rabble-rousing by Stephen Lemons and some student activists. He’s making the case that it’s appropriate to have profs question Arpaio without letting the audience at him. It’s sad he has to do it, but whatever.

Then he amps it up to “misreporting.” He’s not paying Arpaio. It’s not “a speech, an interview or a debate.” It’s journalists asking questions of a political leader.

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See below for background on the three interviewers.

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About to begin. The session will last one hour, Dean Callahan just said. Arpaio just walked in, to smatterings of applause.

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Some early photos from the event.

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The live internet stream of tonight’s event will be here, the school says.

The event will also be shown on video on the pedestrian mall just south of the school. It’s on Central Avenue between Fillmore and Van Buren.

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One of the benefits of the event tonight is that I will be able to indulge my fondness for the word interlocutor. Our interlocutors this evening, as described on the school’s website:

The interviewers are three Cronkite professors and veteran journalists: Steve Elliott, digital news director of Cronkite News Service and former Associated Press Phoenix bureau chief; Sue Green, broadcast news director of Cronkite News Service and former managing editor of ABC15; and Rick Rodriguez, the school’s Carnegie Professor of Journalism and former executive editor of the Sacramento Bee.

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Meanwhile, Nick Martin, at Heat City, is tracking one of the many ongoing Arpaio legal sideshows:

An all-out showdown could be in the works today over whether one of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s officers will apologize for taking an attorney’s confidential files. It all goes back to an Oct. 19 incident in which Maricopa County detention officer Adam Stoddard was caught on a courtroom security video swiping a document from the files of a defense attorney while her back was turned. Superior Court Judget Gary Donahoe has since ordered the detention officer to hold a news conference to apologize for taking the document. If he refuses to do so by the deadline – set for today – Donahoe said he would throw the officer in jail for contempt of court.

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Stephen Lemons, at New Times, continues to be skeptical that the Cronkite School profs will be hard-hitting enough tonight:

Arpaio and his PR staff are practiced media manipulators. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see Arpaio play the profs like a flute tonight. Though out of pride, if nothing else, you would hope these J-school teachers would not wish to be bested like that.

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The site tonight is the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. It’s a key part of ASU’s move into downtown Phoenix; the school sits in a distinctive orange building on Central Avenue, just across the street from the new Civic Space Park and a massive piece of public sculpture, Janet Echelman’s “Her Name Is Patience.”

The school’s Monday evening events are held in its second-story atrium, which allows room for several hundred students to sit in front of the stage and on steps and balconies above it.

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Arpaio’s relationship with the press can be said to be dismal. The East Valley Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its investigation into his various managerial and legal deficiencies.

The series, “Reasonable Doubt,” can be read here.

The Phoenix New Times has spent untold resources over the last few years investigating Arpaio’s practices as well. There’s a fairly complete rundown of its work here.

During the course of one of these series, County Attorney Andrew Thomas and Arpaio actually sent deputies to arrest the editor and publisher of the New Times chain, Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, in the middle of the night.

While the arrests drew national attention (New York Times story here?) the reaction against Arpaio in Arizona was something less than wholesale outrage, suggesting either that the image of the press is much worse than one might expect … or that Arizonans, being Arizonans, haven’t thought too hard about the implications of mass arrests of journalists.

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For the convenience of readers, I’m inserting my previous coverage of this event below.

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Live, from the Cronkite School: Joe Arpaio meets the press.

If you’re just coming to the story of Joe Arpaio’s appearance at the ASU journalism school tonight, here’s a precis of developments thus far:

Many months ago the school got Arpaio to agree to a “Meet the Press”-style grilling at the school. The interlocutors will be three professors: Rick Rodriguez, Susan Green and Steve Elliott. The event is at 7 p.m. Monday, that’s tonight, in the second floor atrium of the Cronkite School, which is the east side of Central Avenue downtown, between Van Buren and Fillmore.

(The session itself is open only to students; the school’s going to show the event on video on the mall just south of the building, and will stream it live here.)

Arpaio’s talks a lot—blusters, really—in public, of course, but he’s a slippery figure; who wouldn’t want to see him in an enclosed space questioned closely by three journalists?

Besides the obvious—the extraordinary number of inmate deaths in Arpaio’s jails, the myriad documented cases of mismanagement, his excessive use of his police powers against rival elected officials, and any number of other abuses of power—it will be interesting, given the setting, to hear Arpaio talk about the decision-making processes that lead to the 2007 early-morning-hours arrests of the editor and publisher of the Phoenix New Times alternative newspaper.

Well, this is Arizona, and things don’t always make sense. Some students, misapprehending the nature of the event, have said they will protest, saying they were “outraged” that there won’t be questions from the audience.

PHXated went to Berkeley and is, uh, not unsympathetic to the idea of student protest. In this case, it’s dumb. It’s a rare chance to see a public figure as brittle and indefensible as Arpaio in a controlled situation. Why not see how it plays out?

As PHXated has written before: It’s uncool to say it in this Age of Everyone’s a Journalist, but this serves the public a lot better than having a bunch of Arpaio’s opponents declaiming at him from a microphone. The students should shut up and come watch the session. If it turns out to be filled with lobbed softballs, then they can protest.

And speaking of dumb, now the local tea party folks are riding to Arpaio’s defense. Again, this being Arizona, they’ve managed to trump even the misguided students. Here’s a press release I got the other day:

American Citizens United is organizing a rally in front of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. There is a great push from the Hispanic students of Journalism (some of them children of illegals and others illegals themselves). They have been encouraged by “La Raza” and other local pro-amnesty organizations to go into journalism so they can have an influence on public opinion. And you can guess what opinion they want to change to get amnesty.

Again, it’s tonight at 7 p.m. MST. Let the zoo begin!

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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.

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.

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Is the Cronkite School’s “Meet the Press” night with Joe Arpaio going to be a zoo?

As you might know, Sheriff Joe Arpaio is going to be interviewed by three journalism professors onstage at the Cronkite School on Central at 7 p.m. Monday. The event is looking more and more like it’s going to be a spectacle.

First, a bunch of misinformed ASU students have decided that, since audience members don’t get to question Arpaio at the panel, the school is somehow giving him a platform to spread his views unchallenged.

The students are planning a protest outside the event.

But as the title of the session—”Meet the Press”—makes clear, the point is to have the sheriff questioned closely by some informed professionals.

It’s uncool to say it in this Age of Everyone’s a Journalist, but this serves the public a lot better than having a bunch of Arpaio’s opponents declaiming at him from a microphone. The students should shut up and come watch the session. If it turns out to be filled with lobbed softballs, then they can protest.

(By the way—Stephen Lemons notes here that CBS 5 has a new investigative report on Arpaio scheduled to run tonight at 10 p.m.)

Now the Sheriff Joe contingent is getting into the act, too. Below is a press release I just got from the Phoenix Area Tea Partyers. (Note the slur on the students half-way down.)

Looks like Monday is going to be quite a scene:
SUPPORT SHERIFF JOE
Time: November 30, 2009 from 7pm to 7pm
Location: First Amendment Room-Second Floor
Organized By: American Citizens United

Event Description:
This is an event I saw posted on Resistnet and thought our group may be interested.American Citizens United is organizing a rally in front of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism.

There is a great push from the Hispanic students of Journalism (some of them children of illegals and others illegals themselves).
They have been encouraged by “La Raza” and other local pro-amnesty organizations to go into journalism so they can have an influence on public opinion. And you can guess what opinion they want to change to get amnesty.

Please keep it orderly, no yelling or name calling. Resist the anger we all feel when our country and those who protect it get attacked. We must remain civilized to be credible.

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Will Joe Arpaio really “meet the press” at the Cronkite School?

It’s been an unobtrusive line at the bottom of the this semester’s ASU j-school event calendar:

Meet the Press: Sheriff Joe Arpaio

The title at once says it all and nothing; but the idea, if it works, will be an unusual opportunity for a few serious journalists to question Arpaio about his record and methods live on a stage.

Those scheduled to be asking the questions are three profs from the school: Rick Rodriguez, Susan Green and Steve Elliott. The event will be held at 7 p.m. Monday in the second floor atrium of the Cronkite School, which is on the corner of Taylor and Central downtown, just two blocks north of Van Buren.

Already, the event has been misinterpreted; Stephen Lemons of New Times is, unusually for him, off the mark on this issue today in his blog:

As mind-numbingly impossible as it is to imagine, Sheriff Joe, avowed enemy of a free press and brown people everywhere, will be the guest speaker at the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism’s “First Amendment Forum” this Monday, November 30. Talk about eating turkey after Thanksgiving. Arpaio lecturing at a First Amendment Forum? Too bad Idi Amin’s not around anymore. ASU could have him come chat about human rights.

From the start, the idea was exactly the opposite; Arpaio will not be lecturing, he will be being questioned by three journalists.

That’s why the student activist Lemons cites, who says she’ll be protesting the event because the audience won’t be allowed to question the sheriff, is off the mark as well.

Sure, it’s an old media model—but in this case, it could be revelatory. Arpaio’s a slippery figure, and it will be interesting to see if the three interlocutors, if they’re prepared, can pin him down on the facts he’s so casual with.

And let me just say this about that dull old Old Media format: There’s no substitute from questioning by smart and prepared people; the idea to sacrifice that so that a bunch of political opponents of Arpaio declaim at him from a mike on the floor is not a smart one.

Arpaio could as yet back out, the questioning could turn out to be pallid—but it’s wrong to criticize the school for giving Arpaio free rein to speak when that’s not the idea at all.