Kevin Allman

Magazine work

I've got a story in the new issue of Get Active! magazine...a consumer piece on the best smoothies for the gym.

Posted sans comment

Kudos to some Louisiana reporters

South Louisiana has always had some much better reporters and media than one would expect (or, some would argue, much better than it deserves). The collective bullshit detector of the populace is strong and finely tuned, and it's reflected in both the print and electronic media (well, in a lot of cases).

As the quality of local TV news around the country has gone down the toilet, WWL-TV has managed to hold the line with truly solid local journalism. Lately the station's Lee Zurik has been a total rock star pit bull, from his exposé of how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is stuffing local levees with shredded friggin' newspaper, to last night's exposé of a certain buffoonish public service commissioner and how a huge share of his campaign contributions come from the very agencies he's sworn to regulate. The Mosquito Coast has a nice tribute to Zurik here; it's well-deserved.

And the Independent Weekly in Lafayette, La., is way ahead of the game with this week's cover story on Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and how his much-vaunted ethics and transparency campaign is concealing something very different. Written by Jeremy Alford, it's the piece that the national media are going to be revisiting in future months and years when they stop speculating about a possible Jindal vice-presidency and swooning about his star turn on Jay Leno's couch.

I'm in the Gambit this week

I have a cover story in this week's Gambit Weekly about the New Orleans Craft Mafia, a group of young(ish) women who are leading the D.I.Y. craft movement in the city.

This was my first piece for Gambit, and I was really pleased with how it turned out -- I got to work with one of my very favorite photographers, Cheryl Gerber, and Gambit's Dora Sison did a great concept cover. Editor Will Coviello was easy to work with, and whoever did the layout (sorry, I don't know your name!) also did a fine job.

I'm always harping on how a story isn't just a bunch of words --  it's a complete package of words, graphics, layout, photos, illustrations -- and this is an example of how it all should work. Thanks, all!

Saints owner Tom Benson buys WVUE Fox 8. Hel-lo, sports department!

Dave Walker of The Times-Picayune broke the news this morning that Tom Benson, the very interesting owner of the New Orleans Saints, is buying WVUE-TV, the New Orleans Fox affiliate. (See a photo here.) One commenter/wag on the newspaper website wanted to know:

Will he move the TV Station to San Antonio if the state won't build him a new retractable roof studio?

Beyond the jokes, this means that Fox 8 will be the only locally-owned station in New Orleans, which is, on the face of it, a good thing. But the potential for conflict of interest (and Benson's often-mercurial relationship with the press) made me wonder what, if any, guarantees were being offered to the station's journalists when it came to covering the Black and Gold.

I emailed WVUE sports director Eric Richey and asked him:

- Have you been given any guarantee of editorial independence when it comes to covering the Saints and the Hornets?

- Do you foresee any conflicts of interest?

Eric wrote back:

Thanks for your interest, you're right, quite an interesting day for all of us here at Fox 8. Our News Director Mimi Strawn has told us to direct all questions concerning the sale to our GM Vanessa Oubre.  We should all know more in the coming months. If you watch our website now, the latest news has a one-on-one interview with anchor John Snell and Tom Benson that might help.

I watched the interview, and Benson assured Snell he expected the WVUE news team to do their jobs without consideration for the team...but it's a fascinating potential conflict of interest, and I'd be curious to see what the sports department's take on things would be should the team go -- oh, say -- 2-6 late in the fall. (Not that that would ever happen.)

The Portland Tribune and KPTV: why no conflict-of-interest disclosure?

KPTV-TV, Portland's Fox affiliate, covered the ch-ch-changes at the Portland Tribune in a nice story that put a pleasant-as-possible spin on the paper's scaling-back of its print edition:

The Tribune described this move as freeing its staff up to post more news online and eliminate some of the –- environmentally and economically -- wasteful paper product.

On Monday, the newspaper will launch a daily online paper at portlandtribune.com.

The paper's president said the strategic move will make the paper more environmentally friendly.

He also said that it will allow the paper to cover breaking news like never before.

The changes come at a difficult time financially for the print industry.

"The cost of newsprint has gone up 21 cents since Dec. 1 of last year. What we're trying to do is manage the publishing side and online side in a robust economic way," Portland Tribune President Steve Clark said.

Clark said the company is laying off six employees with the changes.

Sweet, sympathetic, and a bit PR-ish -- but howcum no mention of the fact that the Trib and KPTV are partners? The paper and the TV station have paired up on stories before, and the partnership was (responsibly) mentioned in Clark's original letter. In the past, that disclosure's been boilerplate in other stories that have run on KPTV about the Trib.

It's basic conflict-of-interest, freshman J-school stuff. But in this particular case, it just didn't seem worth mentioning at KPTV.

The Portland Tribune: what you get when you fire copy editors

Last week, the Portland Tribune fired most of its copyediting staff and announced:

On Monday, May 5, the Portland Tribune enters its next phase of innovative, cutting-edge journalism as the newspaper launches a more complete daily online newspaper...

This morning:

Too bad there wasn't a copy editor around to cry foul on that dec.

Dept. of Unfortunate Headlines Dept.

Please tell me that someone, anyone is awake at the switch of the Toronto Star's op-ed page....

The Portland Tribune makes its announcement

As expected, the Portland Tribune announced to its readers this morning that it's cutting jobs and going from a twice-a-week publication schedule to a weekly. The letter to its readers, from Portland Tribune president Steve Clark, tries to put a pretty bow on the move by spinning it as a move to "a more complete daily online newspaper that will be accompanied by a single weekly print edition to be published each Thursday."

It's a strange, sad letter -- a combo plate of defensiveness and buzzwords:

We were the first to identify sustainability as the future of our communities and worthy of its own major publication: Sustainable Life....We become even more environmentally sensitive by launching the nation’s most sustainable daily newspaper in America’s most sustainable community.

"Sustainable," in Portlandese, is like "family values" -- it's an amorphous, commonly recognized Good Thing that no one can quite define; it means whatever you want it to mean at the moment. In this case, it seems that the Trib is trying to say that going weekly has its upside because it's Kind To Trees.

What else?

This means your best source of local news – on the Web and in print – just got better as we expand breaking coverage of Portland and regional news...

In moving to a once a week print newspaper and online daily, we will employ fewer people in some departments.

How they're going to expand news coverage by employing fewer people isn't quite explained, but I guess it's the kind of the thing you have to say in situations like this. What you don't have to do, though, is take potshots at your competitors as you're bailing water.

Such as The Oregonian:

The Tribune consistently has defied those readership trends and criticisms by providing print and Web journalism that robustly and increasingly serves Portland in ways that other media – including the state’s 158-year-old daily newspaper – do not.

Such as bloggers (also known, in many cases, as "your readers"):

We fully expect that there will be those who will criticize our strategy. Through the years, we have routinely been scorned by some, including bloggers who are prone to vitriolic negativity.

Such as the other alt-weeklies:

Other comments may come from competitors such as Willamette Week – which makes a practice of throwing stones at us and others, but rarely praise.

Oh, grow up. The Tribune isn't a bad paper, and it's not its fault that newsprint costs are soaring, advertising is down (probably forever), and the industry's entire future is in question. I hope the Tribune survives and manages to come up with a "sustainable" business model. But flailing around, sniping at, and whining about your competitors just makes you look petty and small.

Oregonian layoffs: a clue from the past

Yesterday's news that The Oregonian is attempting to slash costs by offering a buyout to every part-time employee in the place was just the latest tremor (or death throe) in the newspaper world; but in light of that announcement, a publisher's memo from last August seems a little...well, prescient.

In summer 2007, the O was going through its second "voluntary retirement offer" in two years. At the time, publisher Fred Stickel said: "This voluntary retirement offer is necessary in order to keep our company payroll in line with revenue. Unlike other companies, we do not reduce the size of the staff through layoffs."

But here's the money quote:

Here at The Oregonian, we are still fully committed to our pledge to regular, full-time employees with regards to job security:

“No full-time, non-represented regular employee will ever be laid off due to economic conditions or the introduction of new technology so long as they successfully complete their probationary period, continue to do their job satisfactorily, are willing to retrain if necessary, and we continue to publish this newspaper.”

There will be no change in our commitments to non-represented full-time, regular employees. We shall continue honoring them in the future, as we have in the past.

Part of me thinks this is laudable and wishes other publishers would go on the record this boldly.

And another part of me thinks that the continued emphasis on "full-time" was a shrewd bit of wiggle room by a company whose corporate eye was on the dying sparrow, even back in summer 2007.

O cynical me.

(By the way: in the 2007 buyout, they gave the buyout-ers a year's salary and full medical and dental benefits to the age of 65, which is by any modern standard pretty generous. I'll be curious to see what they offer up to the part-timers as compared to the old-timers.)

"Sean Payton in love with big receivers"

I like Fletcher Mackel's New Orleans sports blog at WDSU. I just do.

This headline about the Saints coach made me laugh out loud. Really, Fletcher?

Black Thursday in Portland media

First Oregon Media Insiders reported, then the Willamette Week's Byron Beck confirmed, that The Oregonian is about to offer all its part-time employees, in all departments, a buyout:

In an unprecedented move, every part-time employee at The O (that tallies up to around 300 people company-wide) is being offered a buyout by the powers that be (we heard it's driven by publisher Fred Stickel's office).  In the latest cost-cutting measure during difficult economic times in the newspaper industry, the O's part-time employees have been told they will receive letters in the mail in the next week addressing their personal situations (salary, benefits, etc.).

And now Matt Davis at the Portland Mercury says that the O's competitor, the twice-weekly Portland Tribune, is hemorrhaging as well:

The Portland Tribune has been reportedly canning newsroom people today, and may go one day a week.

This all comes on the heels of some other things that I'd been hearing (the Trib eliminating all freelancers, and the Willamette Week paring its editorial budget to the quick). I never worked a hell of a lot for any of these places, but I'm sure glad I got out of that media market. Awful.

Update: Now Beck is reporting the Trib has:

laid off a news writer, a Web reporter and nearly the entire copy editing staff.  We've also heard from at least one Trib insider that the paper will drop from twice a week (Tuesdays and Fridays) to once a week, on Thursdays.

Sad.

No copy editors? A good copy editor is worth a dozen mid-level managers.

And...once-a-week publication?!?!

Will it become the city's third alt-weekly? What the hell kind of business strategy is that?

The smartest thing the Trib could do is tack hard-right; that's the only market left in Portland. The city's already got the institutional left-leaning daily, the established alt-weekly, and the snarky alt-alt-weekly that's snapping at both their heels. Seems like the smartest thing to do would be to morph into a contrarian publication that snipes at all of them, rather than a sad mashup of all three, scrabbling for the same eyeballs and advertisers.

Sic, sic, sic

Notes from the US presidential campaign trail:

Asked who she'd go out with on a date -- with any celebrity, living or dead -- and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton chose . . . a Republican.

Her fantasy date would be with President Abraham Lincoln, Clinton said in an interview being published in the People magazine hitting newsstands Friday.

The question: "If your husband gave you a pass for one night and you could go on a date with any celeb, alive or dead, who would it be?"

Clinton's answer: "That's such a dangerous question! How about Abraham Lincoln?"

Another surprising tidbit: Despite the 19-hour days she puts in on the trail, she's apparently never heard of the energy drink Red Bull. Asked if she's ever had one, she replied, "No. What is it?"

Clinton, D-N.Y., also equivocates on a few either-or questions: She refused to choose between comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, said she likes both wine and beer, and wouldn't select either "American Idol" or "Dancing With the Stars"; she said her mother -- who lives with the Clintons -- keeps her up to speed on both programs.

She did, however, choose Weight Watchers over the South Beach Diet -- but didn't elaborate on her own eating habits.

Except this didn't appear in People magazine. It appeared on ABC News' website.

ABC News.

I'm coming around to the school of thought that the D.C. media aren't as infuriatingly shallow and insular as they appear to be; they're genuinely sick, sick in the way an alcoholic or a drug abuser knows he or she is sick, but feels powerless to repeat a destructive compulsion.

Books at Jazz Fest

Great piece by Susan Larson, books editor at The Times-Picayune, about the booksigning tent at this year's Jazz Fest...including the story of Hunter S. Thompson and the golf cart.

Margaret Jones' Diaries: the video

Journalist Harry Allen has uncovered a fascinating piece of the Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer puzzle: a video that seems to be a promotional vehicle for her now-discredited memoir Love and Consequences:

These days, publishers often commission promo videos to be posted on MySpace or YouTube; I don't know if they really help sales, but they're cheap to produce and they can't hurt. As Harry explains:

It seems to have been shot as part of a companion “electronic press kit,” or EPK, for the disgraced author’s quickly-canceled book tour and publicity campaign. (In the wake of the outrageous controversy, Riverhead recalled all of the 19,000 copies of Love and Consequences it had previously shipped, from a 24,000 total copies printed, the sum of which were then certainly pulped.)

Harry's shrewd, funny analysis of the video is well worth reading (and you've got to see the picture of Sister Souljones' high school graduation pic to believe it), but I'm not sure the vid was shot in South Central L.A., as he hypothesizes. It's certainly not Eugene, Ore. -- the palm trees in the background are pure L.A. -- but the tract houses in the background are more Brady Bunch than Watts (check the spiffy landscaping and the lack of bars on the windows).

The biggest "tell" in the whole thing, though, is the fact that Jones/Seltzer just sits there for all 10 minutes of the video. I've seen a lot of these publishers' promos, and they usually involve an author walking around, telling stories from their memoirs on the sites where the stories occurred.

Jones/Seltzer couldn't walk around and bring her story to life -- because it was an easily disprovable pack of lies. No street corner locations where she dealt rock; no battered-but-humble family home where "Big Mama" dished out neckbones and homespun wisdom in equal measure. So she just sits there like she was being interviewed on the Today show, a white woman in front of some well-kept houses, talking in vague generalities about education and "potential" and inspiration.

It makes me wonder what it would take for Riverhead to have smelled a rat in this story -- or, indeed, in how much denial the publisher was willing to engage not to smell a rat.