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Media
Philadelphia Media Network (PMN) has announced that the Inquirer and Daily News newsrooms will merge when they move from the Inquirer building at 400 N. Broad St. to the old Strawbridge store at Eighth and Market Streets in July 2012.
Whatever that means. Reporters at both paper-of-record and brash-tabloid say they have no idea what’s going on.
One newsroom insider is worried that the merger will set the stage for more layoffs, and is “not excited about it.
The Media Mobilizing Project, a Philadelphia coalition of community groups that uses the media to get their message out, helped produce a five-part documentary for The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience. The 11-state tour is being organized by big-time television host Tavis Smiley and the high-wattage Princeton intellectual Cornel West, and was launched to raise two prominent black voices highlighting President Obama’s failure to deal with poverty — in the black community and throughout America.
Some 46.2 million Americans live in poverty — that’s one in six of us. And the Census Bureau only counts people who make, say, $17,374 for a family of three as impoverished.
Here comes Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Philly, Occupy Everywhere — and it looks like pretty serendipitous timing to air their films.
The Drudge Report, an archaic conservative news aggregator whose choices bewilderingly help set the agenda for most everyone in the mainstream media, has been pumping this headline:
“CHAOS: THOUSANDS LINE UP IN PHILLY FOR FOOD STAMPS...”
It turns out the genius journalistic sleuths at Drudge were linking to a misleadingly titled CBS 3 news report about people who had suffered flood damage lining up to get food stamps from FEMA. But wow: crowds of poor black people in a downtrodden place like Philadelphia makes for a better news hook when you’re trolling for web traffic.
(CBS 3 already has one thousand likes--do not encourage them!).
An editor friend of mine emailed me to ask, “Is this a big story in your neighborhood? Drudge seems to think so!” No, no, no.
Yesterday, journalists at the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer were offered buyouts in the city's latest round of newsroom downsizing. According to a letter from Daily News management posted at poynter.org, “those eligible are all current full-time Guild Daily newsroom reporters, columnists, writers, editors, artists, photographers, copy editors, make-up persons and desk assistants.”
The buyout also includes The Inquirer, according to one newspaper employee who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the matter's sensitivity: three Daily News buyouts from any department and seventeen total from the Inquirer, including five “non-protected” positions (mostly management, like editors).
The buyout is open until September 21.
While we sometimes have scruples with the two dailies (that’s what puts the alt in alt-weekly), these papers serve a crucial watchdog role in Philadelphia. And they have incredible reporters, from Mike Newall’s crime writing and Chris Brennan’s inside look at local politics, to the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that uncovered rampant police corruption.
"It is certainly disheartening to see buyouts of journalists," Temple professor of journalism Andrew Mendelson writes to City Paper. "The buyouts are likely foreshadowing layoffs and other restructuring. This has been happening widely in journalism but it always seems worse when it is local (and many of the potential people affected by this are Temple alums) and at a publication that is more working-class-focused in its history."
This is one more sad day for Philly journalism, coming one year after The Philadelphia Media Network purchased the papers (and philly.com, with which City Paper has a content sharing agreement), which had gone into bankruptcy.
But perhaps it could have been much worse.
“I see this as a good thing, in that it gives us some idea of what the company is planning once the no-layoff clause expires at the end of the month,” according to an email from the anonymous source.
"Before this news yesterday, no one was sure how many people might be in trouble from that.
Now, we know that they're cutting (which people are obviously disappointed in considering how many cuts this place has gone through), but at least it's not a HUGE number. Any job losses suck, but losing 20 people out of hundreds isn't the apocalypse.
Anyone who thinks we can't put out great products with 20 fewer people is wrong.
As for feeling in the newsroom, I think there's a sense of 'waiting to see who's going to take it.' No one wants to lose a co-worker they've had for 10, 15, 30 years...but unfortunately that's going to happen for a few folks."
Yesterday, journalists at the Philadelphia Daily News were offered buyouts in the city's latest round of newsroom downsizing. According to a letter posted at poynter.org, “those eligible are all current full-time Guild Daily newsroom reporters, columnists, writers, editors, artists, photographers, copy editors, make-up persons and desk assistants.”
It’s not clear whether the offer applies to reporters at the Philadelphia Inquirer as well. The buyout is open until September 21.
While we sometimes have scruples with the two dailies (that’s what puts the alt in alt-weekly), these papers serve a crucial watchdog role in Philadelphia. And they have incredible reporters, from Mike Newall’s crime writing and Chris Brennan’s inside look at local politics, to the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that uncovered rampant police corruption.
"It is certainly disheartening to see buyouts of journalists," Temple professor of journalism Andrew Mendelson writes to City Paper. "The buyouts are likely foreshadowing layoffs and other restructuring. This has been happening widely in journalism but it always seems worse when it is local (and many of the potential people affected by this are Temple alums) and at a publication that is more working-class-focused in its history."
This is one more sad day for Philly journalism, coming one year after The Philadelphia Media Network purchased the papers (and philly.com, with which City Paper has a content sharing agreement), which had gone into bankruptcy.
Brian Howard, former Editor-in-Chief of the City Paper and my former boss and editor, is leaving GRID magazine, as part of a larger change at Red Flag Media, which owns GRID and Cowbell, both of which Brian was editing.
GRID hired Brian last Winter, as I understood it, to bring a little more (and much-needed) journalistic oomph to the magazine. They're sure to lose some of that oomph with his leaving: Brian is a top-notch editor and a top-notch guy.
Yesterday, he wrote the following letter (forwarded to CP by a little birdie) to his colleagues at the magazine:
Hey GRID folks,
As most of you know, my duties here at Red Flag Media have not been limited to editing GRID, and have also included overseeing a music magazine called Cowbell.
In the last two weeks, there’s been a fairly major tectonic shift happening at Cowbell. As was reported on phawker.com, the Cowbell masthead is being retired and Red Flag will reviveMagnet, a revered, Philadelphia-based print publication that had in recent years—due to unforeseen circumstances not related to the viability of the magazine—existed as a web property.
These things are tricky, and as it works out, Magnet comes with an editor/publisher. Which means that like the Cowbell name, my time here is also winding down. I’m assured that this is not a reflection on the quality of the work we’ve done together over these eight issues, but the residue of a necessary decision made elsewhere in the company.
I’ve truly enjoyed working with all of you, and assume our paths will cross somewhere in this city in the future—most likely in the bike lanes or at the P.O.P.E.Please direct all future editorial inquiries to Alex Mulcahy
The School District of Philadelphia cleaned its media relations house on Monday when Director Jamilah Fraser and two staffers stepped down alongside Superintendent Arlene Ackerman. Fernando Gallard, a long-time (and thanks to calls from me and other reporters, long-suffering) staffer, is now acting Communications Director.
This is only the most recent of many public relations shakeups at the District. The School District announced the hiring of Fraser and two staffers in November 2010, eleven months after Arlene Ackerman fired two long-time communications staffers. Fraser was Ackerman’s fourth communications chief since 2008.
The Notebook reported that Fraser, like her predecessors, made $170,000. High salaries for central office executives in general, and communications office employees in particular, have sparked controversy throughout Ackerman’s tenure, and staffers have even been accused of coordinating outside protests to support her.
And then there was the $986,000 spent on outside PR in addition to the $2.86 million the District pays for in-house communications.
View galleryOn Thursday, I wrote about new Brown University study findings that the Philadelphia area is by many counts the nation’s most separate and unequal. Regardless of class, black and Latinos attend much worse schools than their white counterparts and live in far more impoverished neighborhoods.
Two articles on the front page of this week’s Sunday Inquirer--one moving, the other mundane--offer a sad if unintentionally sardonic illustration of the different worlds Americans live in. In Camden--one of the country’s poorest and most violent cities--a nine-year old boy was blinded by a stray bullet that missed his brain by millimeters. In suburban Doylestown, the news was this: a small number of neighbors are grumpy about the town's First Friday art walk, charging that “the 6-year-old event has exploded beyond the town's capacity, drawing thousands of outsiders who make noise, clog sidewalks and streets, gobble up the locals' parking, and unleash ‘roving bands of teens’ who wander unsupervised.”
Are gangs walking the streets, carrying out violent flash mobs? No, there haven’t been any crimes committed or anything. A handful of locals just, you know, find it a bit too noisy, and so they founded a Facebook group that now has, umm, 41 members (journalists included).
U.S. District Court Judge Edmund Ludwig, who moonlights as president of the Doylestown Historical Society, sees the event as manifesting a dark, suburban underbelly. The town center, he writes, “sometimes seems like a ‘war zone’--to be avoided by those who have a right to be here.”
Our hearts go out to Judge Ludwig and the others who brave the mean streets of Doylestown during their afterwork shopping. Meanwhile, Camden is a war zone.
“Jorge, who prefers the Anglo pronunciation ‘George,’ was walking home through East Camden to feed his pet parakeets when a bullet sliced through his temple, damaging optic-nerve fibers behind his right eye and exiting through his left.”
He panics waking up blind in the hospital. “Where’s my eyes? Where’s my eyes? I can’t see!”
“On the afternoon of Monday, June 27, Jorge became one of the 103 people who have been shot in Camden in the first seven months of 2011--up 24 percent for the same period last year.”
The two front-page stories say a lot about each place. But together, the suburban and urban articles tell a bigger story about what’s gone wrong with our region--and, probably, with America.
How did today’s front page Philadelphia Inquirer story by Andrew Maykuth on the promise of natural gas drilling (“Penn State report even more bullish on Marcellus Shale”) fail to mention the recent groundbreaking New York Times investigation that found “industry estimates might overstate the amount of gas that companies can affordably get out of the ground”?
Or, that “gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying, according to hundreds of industry e-mails and internal documents and an analysis of data from thousands of wells”?
The Inquirer did note that the “study is likely to generate considerable controversy. Anti-drilling activists said past Penn State reports overstated the jobs created by gas development and failed to count the cost of potential environmental problems of drilling.”
But the documents uncovered by The New York Times constitute a factual basis for the activists’ concern, and The Inquirer should have reported it. Indeed, I’m not sure they’ve ever reported on the Times’ natural gas findings.
Reporting is an iterative and incremental process, strengthened by important, already-available information. This is true even when that information was first reported by another (behemoth) outlet. In Pennsylvania we are undergoing fast and potentially risky changes to our landscape, water supply and economy. Readers deserve the most and best information they can get.
With the help of $18.2 million in grants from the 2009 stimulus, the Media Mobilizing Project, a Philadelphia-based non-profit — and past critic of the city's progress in narowing the "digital divide" in access to media between rich and poor —opened 5 new public computer centers on Friday along with ... the City of Philadelphia. Mayor Nutter himself was on hand at 42nd & Chestnut, one of the 5 locations being run by MMP, for the ribbon cutting.
According to site organizer Willie Colon, anyone can utilize the services and facilities offered at these centers, but the group has strategically placed these new technological hubs to align with their current efforts and initiatives. Colon said that the Media Mobilizing Project identified their target audiences and from there urged the city to give them the funds. The two worked simultaneously to acquire and spend this money, and Colon says that his organization is a "natural fit" to run these centers. A total of 77 public computing centers will open (some already have) under the stimulus funds, and five were put under the MMP.
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