GJR_Vol42_No325

Winter 2012 • Volume 42 Number 325 • $7.00

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The Valley: How TV rights could dry up budgets

by Scott Lambert • Page 10

Arkansas case shows dilemma of juries and social media

by Eric P. Robinson • Page 4

Meet the new boss: Chicago journalists rolling with punches, lawsuits

by John McCarron • Page 8

Who is covering the Farm Bill?

by Sam Robinson • Page 9

gatewayjr.org

We need your help.

Gateway Journalism Review is looking for people to analyze their local media.

Notice how we’re avoiding the traditional terms for this position.

We don’t really want ombudsmen because that doesn’t really define what we need. The same can be said of news councils. Truth vigilantes don’t fill our needs either.

Media critic works best. We need people to critically analyze how media in their area do their jobs. We not only need to know what they’re writing about, but what they aren’t writing about and why. We’re interested in those who cover how the media in their area report on stories being covered by national media, or how media respond to the needs of their local audience.

Too, we are interested in all the mass media: print, online and broadcast journalism; photojournalism; advertising; public relations; integrated marketing communications and entertainment media.

The Gateway Journalism Review starts from the proposition that media in our basic 16-state coverage region may operate from a different viewpoint than many media outlets operating on both coasts. Considering that we live in a region described by those who live on the coasts as fly-over country, we would like to know how media work while the rest of the world flies over.

That doesn’t mean we don’t cover issues outside our target area, both nationally and internationally, but it does mean our primary focus is on America’s midsection.

squaring off in the recall election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, we are interested in how these factors affect how Wisconsin media cover the story. We want to know if there is a difference in the coverage and if certain media entities in Wisconsin show a pronounced bias in how they cover the issues. We’re interested in which publications left-leaning Wisconsinites read. Same for those who lean right. We’re also interested in how coverage in Wisconsin is different from the coverage seen nationally. We at Gateway Journalism Review think someone in Wisconsin could better answer that than we could.

differences in how local or state media cover a story and how national media may portray the same story. We want to take some of the “accepted” stereotypes assigned to many who live in our region and pick at them. At the same time, we’re interested in how media cover the situations that arise that reinforce those stereotypes.

We think Gateway Journalism Review is providing a service to an area that is underserviced, and we need your help.

Scott Lambert, Managing Editor

Every state in our coverage area has its own issues. The entire expanded Midwest is not a conservative bastion, nor is it a leftist haven. Our goal is to find people who live and work in our region to report on the subtleties of their state’s media that would not be visible by just examining a few newspaper or website articles or television reports.

We want critics who can point out

For example, while the national spotlight may focus on how prounion and anti-union forces are

If you are interested, please email us at gatewayjr@siu.edu.

Winter 2012 • Vol. 42 No. 325 • $7.00

Sports & Money 10 • T he Valley : How TV rights could dry up budgets Scott Lambert Charles Klotzer Founder William A. Babcock Editor Roy Malone St. Louis Editor

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16 • A questionable Fine story Pat Louise

19 • Framing Paterno’s legacy Scott Lambert

Features 4 • A rkansas case shows dilemma of juries and social media Eric P. Robinson

5 • S upreme Court copyright decision may not injure symphonies William H. Freivogel

6 • Media may revisit Iowa miscount Scott Lambert

7 • C overing campaigns: National media move on while local media remain Scott Lambert

8 • M eet the new boss: Chicago journalists rolling with punches, lawsuits John McCarron

9 • Who is covering the Farm Bill?

Sam Robinson

20 • Teaching Media Ethics–West Meets East William A. Babcock

22 • B ankruptcy: Lee Enterprises follows an American Business Tradition David Lander

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24 • Silicon Valley Wins Round One in SOPA Fight William H. Freivogel

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25 • Keeping Jewish Light Burning Eileen P. Duggan

26 • B ook Review: Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns Joe Pollack

27 • Flap with C JR Charles L. Klotzer

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 3

Features

Arkansas case shows dilemma of juries and social media

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[The juror] continued tweeting after the trial judge specifically told him to stop . . .

While the court said the dozing juror alone required reversal of the conviction and sentence, the court added that the second juror’s tweets also required a reversal.

The Supreme Court was particularly concerned about one of the juror’s tweets, “Its (sic) over,” sent 50 minutes before the jury informed the court that it had agreed on a sentence.

As a result of this tweet, the court said, followers of the juror’s Twitter feed – including, the court said, at least one journalist (with the online magazine Ozarks Unbound) – “had advance notice that the jury had completed its sentencing deliberations before an official announcement was made to the court.”

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The Arkansas Supreme Court has reversed a murder conviction — and death sentence — in a case where one juror tweeted during trial and another fell asleep. Both of these problems, the court said, constituted juror misconduct requiring reversal and a new trial. Erickson Dimas-Martinez v. State, 2011 Ark. 515 (Dec. 8, 2011).

E r i c P. R o binson

Courts nationwide have been struggling with the issue of jurors’ use of social media.

Dimas-Martinez’s lawyers also pointed out that the tweeting juror had sent his messages during the trial despite continued admonitions to the jury throughout the trial warning jurors not to do so, and that he continued tweeting after the trial judge specifically told him to stop after defense lawyers discovered an earlier tweet he had sent. (That one said, “Choices to be made. Hearts to be broken. We each define the great line.”)

Courts nationwide have been struggling with the issue of jurors’ use of social media during trials, which is a challenge to the legal system’s notions that the evidence jurors use in deciding a case must conform to rules of evidence and other legal considerations; jurors should not discuss the case with each other until deliberations, and with non-jurors until after the verdict.

These cases raise the question of whether admonishing jurors to not use the Internet and social media is effective.

In 2009, the Indiana Supreme Court denied a new trial in a civil case in which a juror had answered a cell phone call during deliberations. Henri v. Curto, 908 N.E.2d 196 (Ind. 2009). In that decision the court recommended that trial courts “discourage, restrict, prohibit or prevent access to mobile electronic communication devices by all persons except officers of the court during all trial proceedings, and particularly by jurors during jury deliberation.” This led to changes in the state’s jury rules banning juror use of all electronic communications devices, and to jury instructions admonishing jurors not to use these devices or social media to discuss or Continued on Page 28

Page 4 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

Features

Supreme Court copyright decision may not injure symphonies W i l l i am H. F reivogel without royalties, while copyright protection requires royalties.

The law that the court upheld extended copyright protection to works of foreign artists from the early 20th century who created their works at a time when U.S. law did not provide them with copyright protection. In addition to Russian composers such as Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky, the law also applied to paintings by Pablo Picasso, movies by Alfred Hitchcock and books by authors such as C.S. Lewis and Virginia Woolf.

The case had been brought by Lawrence Golan, a University of Denver professor who conducts a number of small orchestras.

He argued that a substantial new burden would be put on such small arts organizations by requiring royalties for pieces such as Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Shostakovich’s Symphony 14 and Stravinsky’s Petrushka.

Established opera companies and symphonies should not be hurt seriously by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding a law that moved the work of composers such as Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich from the public domain to copyright protection.

Timothy O’Leary, general director of Opera Theatre of St. Louis, said in an interview, “It is possible that (the decision) will add some additional costs but not substantially.”

O’Leary said that about one of Opera Theatre’s four productions each season is under copyright, but that “we don’t make decisions about what operas to perform” based on whether royalties are due.

In a 6-2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress did not violate the First Amendment by taking works in the public domain and placing them under copyright protection. Works in the public domain may be performed

In recent years, the United States has become such a strong advocate of copyright worldwide that people forget that more than a century ago, a U.S. senator described his own country as “the Barbary coast of literature” and its people as “the buccaneers of books.”

To protect domestic publishers, Congress did not extend copyright protections to most foreign artists, composers and authors. In 1994 Congress passed a law to remedy that situation by extending copyright protection to foreign works created between 1923 and 1989.

Golan argued that Congress couldn’t take works in the public domain and put them under copyright protection.

He maintained that this was not a constitutional exercise of Congress’ copyright powers because the copyright clause says the purpose is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Extending protection to works already created does not promote new scientific discoveries or artistic creations, Golan argued.

Continued on Page 28

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 5

Features

Media may revisit Iowa miscount S co tt L a mber t “The methods are the same as they were in 1980,” Yepsen said. “Back then, the caucus may have been at Martha’s house and a few people would come over and they’d vote and Martha would count. Now you have a couple of hundred people going to a school lunch room and they still have Martha counting up the votes.”

The media coverage of the Iowa caucuses has surpassed the actual import of the Iowa caucuses. Hordes of parachute media invade the state of Iowa every four years and set up camp. They follow every move by every candidate, they record every mistake and question every statement.

At the end, they wait for the tally to see who won and then they move on.

The Iowa caucuses bring forth visions of a quaint political contest, with presidential hopefuls scooting from county to county and espousing their vision for the country. The vision then pans to an Iowa farmhouse, where friends and family gather in a living room to make their choice over who should represent their party for president.

That image rang true once, but today’s reality is much different. Today’s reality is staged media events, with members following each particular hopeful as he or she makes his or her staged stump speech. Not only that, but once the media leave and Iowa returns to the normalty that is Iowa, the public finds out that the winner of the Iowa caucus didn’t really win. Sorry Mitt Romney, it was actually Rick Santorum. But then again, some other votes may not have been counted either. OK, let’s just call this one a tie.

This could be a problem says David Yepsen, long-time dean of Iowa politics and current director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Iowa raises complaints every four years because it is the first of the political primaries or caucuses and therefore given increased media coverage and importance. The miscount could create problems for the 2016 caucus.

“This is a disappointing development for the campaign and for the caucuses,” Yepsen said. “The Iowa caucuses have always had a problem with counting. In fact, this is probably the most accurate they’ve been.”

The Iowa presidential caucuses were never set up to be a national media event, with cameras watching every ballot and with actual numbers being so important.

Page 6 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

But this year, the story went back to Iowa. But the focus didn’t stay too long. The same day the announcement was made about the mistake in Iowa, three other major political stories broke; the statement by Newt Gingrich’s second exwife that he wanted an open marriage, Rick Perry dropping out of the race and the final presidential debate before the South Carolina primary. Iowa didn’t get much more than a mention on the regular political beats.

“I can’t think of a day where you had that many developments,” Yepsen said. “On any given day these would have all been a big story and they’ve been jammed into one day.”

The other stories all went away after a couple of days. The Iowa story will be around for a while.

“We’re going to hear more about the Iowa caucus problem in the coming months and years,” Yepsen said. “I think it hurts the future of the caucuses. Candidates and media people will not go to Iowa if they aren’t going to get an accurate count. Reporters won’t want to write stories about something that is not accurate.”

The story will continue. During a lull in the campaign season, reporters will go back to the Iowa mistakes and rehash it, wondering what effect the mistake had on Santorum’s campaign and questioning the importance placed on Iowa.

The shrill calls from the media that Iowa means nothing will only get louder.

But in the end, four years from now, the media still will most likely grab their parachutes and take off — destination Iowa. It’s part of the campaign.

Scott Lambert is managing editor of the Gateway Journalism Review. He worked as a sports journalist and editor for 13 years.

Features

Covering Campaigns: National media move on while local media remain S co tt L a mber t The image of media members, parachuting from the sky and invading the state of Iowa every four years, is clear. It’s hard not to envision those reporters, dangling from their chutes, notebook in one hand, camera in the other, as they glide down onto the rolling hills of Iowa.

It’s also hard not to envision the media in Iowa looking up into the sky and wishing it was duck season. The Iowa caucuses are the first major event of the presidential campaign season. Media members and political junkies argue the importance of the Iowa caucuses every four years, but they still come. And they cover every bit of minutiae that can be covered in Iowa. Then they leave — on to New Hampshire while the media from Iowa continue to cover their beats the way they always have.

“The day after the caucus, the national media is out of there,” said David Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

“As early as 1980, the candidates and the media would hop on the plane to Manchester (New Hampshire). They’ve had

planes that left at midnight to get ready for the next day.

For national media, once the caucus is over, Iowa is over.”

Yepsen should know. He’s been covering the Iowa caucuses since the 1976 Presidential campaign. He knows what it’s like to cover the caucus.

“The locals spend the next few days wrapping up the results,” Yepsen said. “There are follow-ups and wrap-ups and stories about where the race heads from there. And then, so many of the media go back to their original beats.

So often, you have people pulled in from different beats to help cover the caucuses.”

Yepsen never minded the influx of national media every four years. For him, it just made the game a little bigger and the stakes a little higher.

“It’s a competitive game for everybody,” Yepsen said. “It’s a high stakes game and there are a lot more people at the table.”

Continued on Page 29

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 7

Features

Meet the new boss: If Chicago newspaper readers have noticed an absentmindedness in their favorite daily — a bad photo caption, perhaps, or a misnumbered jump page — it may be that worker bees in the city rooms are distracted over who is in charge.

Or worse, they may not be sure if their retirement savings are about to be grabbed by aggressive creditors in federal bankruptcy court. Sure there are management shakeups and staff unrest wherever one looks in the news business these days, especially print. The old business model has blown up and it seems nobody but Google has figured out a new one.

But lately, hundreds of Chicago journalists find themselves stuck in a special section of print purgatory. The Tribune Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection not long after its misbegotten 2007 takeover by Chicago real estate mogul Sam Zell. Early on it was assumed by many that the major banks that lent Zell $8.2 billion to buy out previous shareholders — lenders led by big-name Wall and LaSalle Street investment houses — would speedily win control and name a new management team.

The plot thickened, however, when an aggressive group of smaller creditors, led by investors in the business buying the debt of bankrupt companies and pushing for maximum recompense in court, charged that the entire 2007 transaction was a “fraudulent conveyance.” They allege there was never any chance the Zell-run company could repay the borrowed $8.2 billion.

At first, this was not a big a concern to journalists in the city rooms, or WGN radio, or TV or at any of the company properties from the Baltimore Sun to the Los Angeles Times.

After all, Zell’s original choice for Tribune Company CEO, a flamboyant radio executive named Randy Michaels, had been eased out after a run of bad publicity over alleged sexist behavior and a raucous poker party in the walnut-paneled publisher’s suite. Since then, Trib publisher Tony Hunter and editor Gerould Kern have righted the ship and are generally considered steadying influences.

Chicago journalists rolling with punches, lawsuits J o hn M c C arron

in October that the junior creditors, who hold a type of subordinated debt called PHONES, might be entitled to $1.2 billion. Or when Sam Zell, the billionaire architect of the dealgone-bad, himself filed suit in December claiming he, too, is owed up to $225 million from former TRB stockholders.

At any rate, the three-year-old, multi-jurisdictional tangle of lawsuits — already drawing comparison to Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the interminable lawsuit at the center of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House sendup of the British legal system — shows no sign of concluding anytime soon. Judge Carey announced late last year the next hearing likely will be in May at the earliest.

The judge likely hopes major and minor creditors will settle their differences out of court. It’s anticipated that, when the major creditors inevitably take over, the company will be broken up, and its TV and radio assets will be sold off.

Late last year a local investment group, Wrapports LLC, completed purchase of the Sun-Times and its 40 suburban dailies and weeklies for $20 million. The sale was set in motion by the death in March of James Tyree, whose investment group saved the newspaper from bankruptcy in 2009.

Faced, like the Tribune, with steadily declining circulation and ad revenues, not to mention profit-less online operations, the Sun-Times has undergone several recent downsizings.

By December, according to insiders, its company-wide head count had fallen below 300 and the newsroom complement below 100.

Much now depends on the creativity of Timothy Knight, the ex-Tribune Company lawyer brought on by Wrapports Chairman Michael Ferro Jr. to return the company to profitability. The Sun-Times new CEO oversaw the $650 million sale of Tribune Company’s Newsday to Cablevision Systems Corp. in 2008. One early move has been to erect a partial “pay wall” on SunTimes.com to charge for more than 20 page-views per month.

The big sweat began last year when the aggressive smaller creditors filed suit, not just in federal court but in state courts around the country, claiming even minor shareholders of old “TRB” common should be required to hand over their allegedly ill-gotten gains. Suddenly hundreds of work-aday Trib employees, from assistant photo editors to hallway security guards, found themselves threatened with having to refund all or part of the $34-a-share they received in 2007 when they sold shares held in retirement accounts and payroll deduction plans.

It heartens beleaguered staffers at the Sun-Times that the new ownership group includes civic leaders such as John Canning, a private equity investor already helping to underwrite the online Chicago News Cooperative, and Bruce Sagan, longtime owner-publisher of the Hyde Park Herald.

Nor did it ease their anxiety when, rather than dismiss their claim out of hand, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Carey ruled

John McCarron is a freelance urban affairs writer and 40-year veteran of Chicago journalism.

Page 8 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

The new investors also include a major fundraiser and adviser to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, as well as the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks NHL franchise.

Features

Who is covering the Farm Bill?

S am R o binson

Regional and local media in core Midwest agriculture states have been remiss when it comes to coverage of the $260 billion five-year 2012 farm bill and the rush in November to try to push the bill through the Congressional super committee without debate.

The failure of the so-called Congressional super committee to reach agreement on national debt and budget issues has been disappointing to many. However, this inaction may end up being a blessing for those wanting to thoroughly vet the upcoming 2012 farm bill.

There had been very little discussion of the 2012 farm bill at any level of media until mid-October of 2011. That is when the small, joint committee with directions from the House and Senate Agriculture committees began pressing forward with their plan, trying to get it to the super committee for approval in late November.

A simple Internet search of news items during late October and early November using the key words “farm bill” would garner dozens of online stories. This may initially appear to be ample coverage of the issue, but deeper reviews of the stories reveal the root problem. Most of the articles were re-runs of a wire service story that was produced in mid-October. Very few were either original, from mid- to small-sized media outlets, or included local details and interviews.

Since the failure of the super committee, media coverage of the 2012 farm bill has once again fallen off the mainstream media radar.

With its Washington, D.C. dateline, the wire service article circulated across the country. Many media outlets picked up the story and ran it. Some used it as a frame for a minimally tweaked version of the story for their region.

Almost all of the major metropolitan newspapers carried some version of the wire service article.

So whether people were reading news from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or Dallas, they could read the same quotes from Mr. Bruce Babcock, an agriculture economist from Iowa State University, whose quotes were in the original wire service story.

The articles also included the same information about the proposed $23 billion cut in Farm Bill spending over the next 10 years.

The online search for 2012 farm bill news from across the U.S. did generate a hit for an original article ran in the Gadsen Times in Alabama.

This article stood out because the writer, Dana Beyerle, did the apparently unthinkable — interviewed an actual farmer. Beyerle had several quotes from a farmer whose operation is located in Aliceville, Ala. This provided a good local application of the proposed Continued on Page 30

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 9

Sports & Money

The Valley:

How TV rights could dry up budgets S co tt L a mber t

Every March, the argument starts all over again. Media pundits, columnists, analysts, college basketball fans, coaches and just those people who fill out their NCAA Tournament brackets every year all pitch in their two cents over which teams did not qualify for the NCAA Tournament through at-large bids.

While making these arguments, these people use words like RPI and phrases like “who they played and who they beat” to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that team A deserved to be in the tournament, not team B. Usually the argument breaks down into two camps, one camp arguing that an average team from one of the top six conferences (the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac 12 and Southeastern Conference) is more deserving of tournament selection and the other camp arguing for the other 25 conferences. Often, media members mention money, usually in passing.

Money is not a matter that should be breezed over.

The amount of NCAA media money college basketball conferences receive from the tournament and how that money is doled out (pg. 12) are important to teams and conferences. The money is needed to meet athletic budgets.

The exposure leads to exponentially more money and prestige and, in some instances, increases in overall student enrollment.

The Missouri Valley Conference traditionally found itself in good shape for a conference that doesn’t have major football and isn’t one of the six major conferences mentioned above. The Missouri Valley Conference consists of 10 teams, dotting the states of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa. The money earned from the NCAA Tournament is important for schools from the Valley because that money plays a vital role in most schools’ athletic budgets. And this is where a possible problem awaits the Missouri Valley Conference. The conference has not had the success in recent years it has had in the past.

In 2006, the Missouri Valley Conference played eight games in the NCAA Tournament. The NCAA will make its final television money payment on those eight shares this year. In three of the last four years, the conference has placed one team in the NCAA Tournament and played only one game. Take away the $1.9 million dollars the conference receives for the 2006 season and replace it with $245,000, the amount paid if the league only gets one team in the tournament and schools from the Missouri Valley Conference could receive a significantly smaller paycheck next year. That’s why the Missouri Valley Conference desperately wants more than one team to qualify for the NCAA Tournament this year. (Graphic 3 p. 15)

Revenues and Expenses S cott L amb er t

The differences in money between the six major conferences and the other 25 conferences are extreme. The money these six conferences receive from television and major football allows these conferences to spend more money on facilities, coaches, recruiting and marketing. It also leads to different perceptions in the quality of teams.

Here’s a look at some of the differences between conferences thanks to bbstate.com’s database.

In 2010, the University of Texas received more than $143 million in athletic revenues, sport nearly $114 million in athletic expense and listed basketball expenses of 8.8 million. The University of Kansas, the team Northern Iowa knocked off in 2010, reported receiving total athletic revenues of $71.8 million, paid athletic

expenses of $60.2 million and basketball expenses of $10.9 million.

In 2010 in the Big Ten, Michigan State University received more than $80 million in revenues, spent $61.6 million in total athletic expenses and $8.3 million in basketball expenses. Ohio State University earned $123.1 million in total revenues, spent $104.9 in total athletic expenses and spent $4.5 million in basketball expenses.

Northern Iowa reported athletic revenues of $14.6 million in 2010, with $14.3 million in expenses. Northern Iowa spent less than $2 million on men’s basketball. Creighton, a school without football but with a strong basketball program and a fancy arena in the Qwest Center,

Page 10 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

reported revenues of $14.2 million in 2010.

The school broke even that year, reporting its expenses as $14.2 million and reported basketball expenses of more than $5 million.

Butler, a back-to-back NCAA men’s basketball national championship game contender, also broke even, reporting total athletic revenues in 2010 of $12.3 million, expenses of $12.3 million and a total of $2.8 million in basketball expenses.

The profits from Michigan State’s (subtracting revenues from expenses) athletic programs would equal $18.4 million. Wichita State University lists its total athletic expenses as $16.7 million.

Sports & Money

Athletic departments across the country deal with the impact of television revenue monies every year. Sports media spent hours discussing the impact of realignment between the six major conferences and the money involved. At the same time, the 25 other conferences carried on as usual under the media’s radar, trying to find ways to make their budgets work. Most know that if their conference is successful in the NCAA Tournament, the money can go a long way in making their individual schools financially solvent.

Supporting athletics All universities have certain ways to earn sports revenues.

Those include ticket sales, merchandising, student fees and television revenues. The largest television revenues come from football bowls, entities that are not negotiated through the NCAA, but instead from television corporations to college conferences and through the BCS agreements.

The largest player in this is Disney, which through ESPN and ABC Sports controls all six BCS bowls, including the national championship game. ESPN pays these conferences

well for basketball also. In fact, taking averages that appeared on businessofcollegesports.com, conservative estimates show universities that compete in the six major conferences can expect more than $10 million in revenues from television rights deals with ESPN, Fox and other companies. Some will make more than $25 million per year in television rights revenues. That’s before television money from Bowl games or the NCAA Tournament money is paid to the conferences.

Compare this to the deal the Missouri Valley Conference has with ESPN and with Fox. The ESPN deal is about $190,000 per year. The schools in the Missouri Valley Conference received approximately $290,000 last year from the NCAA Tournament. Next year could be even less. This isn’t going to make a school financially secure.

At the same, a major cut in NCAA television revenue money would have a negative impact.

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The largest television revenues come from football bowls

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“The money is huge,” said Southern Illinois University Athletics Director Mario Moccia. “We all know what is going off the books in a year. It has an impact. Salaries being what they are, you have to start to question ways to make ends meet. Do you take on another pay game in football?

There are only finite ways to cut revenue.”

Continued on next page

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 11

Distribution of Basketball - Related Monies According To Number of Units By Conference, 2005-2010 NCAA Pool Distribution by Conference - source NCAA.org

Page 12 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

Sports & Money

Television doesn’t just play a monetary role for conferences and individual universities either. There’s a difference in exposure as well. Teams from the six major conferences play on prime television slots on ESPN, CBS and Fox. A conference like the Missouri Valley Conference must take a different approach.

Missouri Valley Conference Commissioner Doug Elgin said one key element that he was happy with the latest ESPN television contract was that ESPN gave up its rights of exclusivity that said if the Missouri Valley Conference was going to have a game televised nationally, it would have to be from ESPN or the other broadcasting entity would have to pay ESPN a rights fee.

“ESPN relented on the current contract that we just signed for this year and they not only allow us to take games on Fox Regional, Fox National but they also simulcast those games online,” Elgin said. “They have the rights online, outside of our six state footprint, and that’s an additional 91 million homes.”

That allows Fox to carry more Missouri Valley Conference games on its regional and national channels. The Valley’s deal with Fox ties into its deal with Learfield Sports, a sports marketing company. The terms of the deal are confidential. With Fox, the Valley actually pays for the right to broadcast its games but gets to keep a large percentage of the advertising sold at games.

its regional package. The thought of possibly getting into 91 million homes, along with an increased amount of coverage on ESPN networks, helps the conference gain exposure.

“It’s so important for us to be able to remain relevant,” Elgin said. “It’s important to be available nationally.”

Southern Illinois University once was a recipient of that exposure. For six straight years, Southern Illinois was a powerhouse in the Missouri Valley Conference, qualifying for the NCAA Tournament in each of those years and in 2008 actually spent an entire day on national television as

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‘It’s so important for us to be able to remain relevant,’ Elgin said. ‘It’s important to be available nationally.’

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Individual schools in the conference are already finding ways to either increase revenue or cut expenses. The Missouri Valley Conference’s Missouri State University played two pay-football games last year, which means the team received money to play at a school from one of the six major conferences. The two games resulted in a pair of losses and a nice paycheck. Northern Iowa dropped its baseball program. Southern Illinois University’s largest contributing factor to its basketball program is student fees.

These are all ways to increase revenue or cut expenses for the athletics departments.

ESPN brought its GameDay crew to cover a game against Creighton. But Southern Illinois University dropped from the precipice of relevancy after that year and lost its opportunity to become marketable nationally. This lost exposure affected the entire Missouri Valley Conference.

The Valley became an afterthought and lost what national exposure it had.

That exposure is nowhere near the exposure found in the six major conferences. But it wasn’t always that way. In 1979, the NCAA Championship game was a battle between the Missouri Valley Conference’s Indiana State University, led

by Larry Bird, and the Big Ten’s Michigan State University, led by Magic Johnson. The game is still the highest rated NCAA Tournament game in television history.

That same year, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network was born. By 1980, ESPN was covering the early rounds of the NCAA Tournament.

What’s important, says Elgin, is the exposure provided by getting Valley teams to a national audience. In years past, the Valley reached approximately 9.5 million homes with

The national attention of the 1979 championship game and the rise of cable television led to the explosion of March Madness. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament became an event, capped by the yearly ritual of filling out tournament brackets.

All the while, ESPN carried more and more games. In the 1980s, the network also introduced SportsCenter, a sports highlights The money the NCAA men’s basketball conferences receive from the NCAA television rights contract with show that captured the nation’s CBS and Time Warner’s Turner Sports makes multiple bids important. The two entertainment entities interest. The company brought in agreed to pay the NCAA $10.8 billion over 14 years for the rights to televise the NCAA men’s basketball professional journalists with strong tournament. That money is distributed to 31 NCAA conferences and those conferences pay that money reputations and gained credibility out to the individual schools in the conference. The money is distributed to the conferences over what as a journalistic organization as well they call a Six-Year Rolling plan. Every game a conference plays in the NCAA Tournament counts as one as a clips show. ESPN now had a unit or share. Each unit or share is worth approximately $245,000. Conferences are paid that share for news show to promote the sports six years, making every year important for each conference. Conferences benefit from multiple bids and it was broadcasting. tournament wins for six consecutive years.

Graphic 1 How the payout system works

Design by : Dontrell Sims

Continued on next page

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 13

Graphic 2

Design by : Matthew Weindenbenner

Sports & Money

Television rights contracts grew exponentially and even though ESPN didn’t get the rights to carry the NCAA Tournament, the network carries more than 1,200 games per year on its broadcast and internet stations. The company also profits from its coverage of games on SportsCenter. As ESPN garnered more and more television rights contracts for large sums of money to six specific conferences, it became an obvious conflict of interest for those on the journalistic side.

And the arguments begin. The six major conferences have more money, more exposure and are marketed as superior to the other 25 conferences. Ask the mid-majors and they’ll say the same thing. The deck is stacked against them.

It isn’t fair. They’ll also say how important that second NCAA bid actually is. And how much success in the NCAA Tournament can mean to a school and a conference. And how much the exposure helps — when they get it.

The revenue money also led to a more pronounced gap between the conferences that had large television resources and those that didn’t. The exposure leads to a perception that all teams from the six major conferences are superior while the money leads to resources that allow teams from those conferences to major recruiting advantages. The differences are pronounced. (Graphic 1 p. 12)

“Listen, we were the recipients of ESPN’s exposure,” Moccia said. “And we hope to get things turned around here and hopefully, we’ll be the recipients again.”

This led to fewer and fewer teams from smaller conferences being selected into the NCAA Tournament as at-large bids.

(Graphic 2) At the same time, media coverage (from national shows like SportsCenter) of top schools from the other 25 conferences has decreased or is presented in a negative context.

The league is gaining some exposure this year. Big wins by a number of teams early in the season and continued solid play by both Wichita State University and the University of Creighton have opened some eyes. That second bid is possible — and important.

Scott Lambert is the managing editor of the Gateway Journalism Review. He worked as a sports journalist and editor for 13 years.

TV plays role in conference realignments J oe P ollack

It can begin with a small stone, dislodged by the hoof of a deer or a gust of wind. It rolls downhill, nudging a smaller stone, or a tuft of grass, or a twig.

Bolstered by this increase in mass, the stone moves faster, acquiring other debris. And it isn’t long before a full-fledged landslide is under way.

That’s basically what has happened to college football in the last few years. Money was the first stone, television the quick-to-join second and, sweeping everything in its path, the landslide has crashed through college conferences from coast to coast. There are many reasons this tsunami of

Page 14 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

sports occurred: lust for power, money, ambition. And maybe there’s no blame: the world moves on, it changes, people develop new roads to success.

Television and money have teamed to be a primal force. ESPN, which receives revenue every time a TV bill is paid, was an early player and has become the biggest in the sports business. The network has a lot of technical skill and has brought some new thinking to the sports television industry.

But amateur sports are cheap to produce. While there are rights fees and

equipment costs and announcers and producers and others to pay, most of those folks make peanuts when compared to singers or entertainers. And the real talent — the athletes on the field — make nothing, no matter how many times the game is replayed or the highlights re-run.

The copycats soon arrived. Major League Baseball formed a network; so did the National Football League. The New York Yankees and Madison Square Garden formed networks and found a new source of revenue, too. Major college conferences soon got into the act and discovered that minor sports had some appeal as well. Athletic departments quickly became the richest part of the university. After all, swimming and gymnastics and hockey all have fans, but it’s difficult to draw an audience to watch someone write formulas on a chalkboard or examine microbes through microscopes.

Not all these networks are alike. The NFL makes so much from TV rights that the only games it shows on its own network are on Thursday nights.

Otherwise it’s old games, highlights, discussions with “experts” all trying to talk at once. Some college networks cover all a school’s games; others just show minor sports and highlights and try to sell tickets, souvenirs and the like. When the University of Texas set up its own in-state network and refused to share large profits with other Big 12 schools, all loyalties evaporated, traditional rivalries that had lasted more than a century vanished. Everything changed and everything is in flux.

While this is being written, a sports news flash arrived, pointing out that a “judge” (sports departments don’t care which bench) has ordered West Virginia University and the Big East Conference to enter mediation to settle their competing lawsuits. West Virginia wants to leave the Big East and join the Big 12 and last November it sued the Big East for its freedom. The Big East countersued, pointing out that West Virginia was supposed to give 27 months notice.

The Big 12 lost Colorado to the Pac-12, Nebraska to the Big 10 and Missouri and Texas A&M to the Southeastern, but it acquired TCU and West Virginia from the Big East (the latter pending the outcome of litigation or mediation or maybe a coin flip). The Big East also lost Syracuse and Pitt to the Atlantic

Design by : Matthew Weindenbenner

Graphic 3

Sports & Money

Coast Conference and added Houston, SMU, Central Florida, Boise State and San Diego State, the latter two just for football, starting in 2013.

San Diego State belongs to the Big West for all other sports, but to the Pac-12 for soccer until 2015, when the soccer team moves to the Big West. Boise State is in the Mountain West Conference now but moves to the Western Athletic Conference next year, though it will remain in the Pac-12 for wrestling.

The first round of juggling may have ended, with a hiatus about to begin, but the hiatus is merely the calm before the next storm. The Bowl Championship Series folks, who control a lot of money, seem to have accepted the fact that the BCS will be extinct soon. As the Big Ten, SEC, Pac-12 and other conferences grow both larger and stronger, they soon will combine into four, or maybe six, super conferences that will blanket the nation. They will then plan and run their own national championship football and basketball games, and they will tell the NCAA to go fly a kite.

And where do the media fit in? Well, the TV networks will pay lip service and pro-bono commercial time to student-athletes, but they are reluctant to cough up cash for kids. Columnists and beat writers are mostly fans of the hometown team and of the conference in which it plays. Reading a variety of writers brought few nuggets of hidden information, few questions about motive, little discussion of money, either incoming or outgoing. Colleges moving into new, more powerful conferences will have to spend large amounts of money on enlarging stadiums and increasing the range of recruitment. As an example of a newcomer, Missouri likely will struggle for a few years, especially in football and basketball. Getting a stadium up to SEC standards is expensive, though it should not interfere with coaching or recruiting. And the rivalry with Kansas will be gone.

On the other hand, hotel developers will see profits increase because SEC fans travel a lot. St. Louis should pick up some overnight-visitor money, and football victories will mean more because the competition level will rise sharply.

Joe Pollack is a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist and operator of the blog www.stlouiseats.typepad.com

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 15

Sports & Money

A questionable Fine story P a t L ouise In November 2011, Joe Paterno won his 409th game as football coach at Penn State University, becoming the alltime Division I leader in coaching victories.

Also in early November, the Syracuse University coaching duo of head coach Jim Boeheim and assistant coach Bernie Fine began their 36th season together on the bench in what looked like a promising year, with the Orangemen ranked No. 1 from December until mid-January.

As 2011 ended, both Paterno and Fine were no longer coaching. Paterno, who died Jan. 22, was fired in November after almost five decades at PSU. Administrators said he did not do enough to put a stop to sexual abuse of young boys by a coach in his program. Fine lost his job after two former SU ball boys said Fine sexually abused them when they were children.

For Paterno, the end came when a grand jury indicted Jerry Sandusky — Paterno’s longtime friend, retired assistant coach and once heir to take over the Nittany Lions — on multiple counts of sexually abusing boys, including on the Happy Valley campus.

Unlike Sandusky, Fine has not been charged with any crimes and two of the four who accused him said in January that they made up the claim of child sexual abuse.

The remaining two men, who are brothers, cannot bring charges because the statute of limitations has run out.

Syracuse University at first put Fine on administrative leave, but fired him a week later when a tape came out from 2002 in which Fine’s wife — being secretly taped by one of the men claiming abuse — indicated her husband of 28 years might target young boys.

While the two matters have much in common, including the nature of the charges and timing, when it comes to placing responsibility on why these matters did not come to light earlier, the two stories take very different paths. At Penn State, the scandal for what is called a cover-up falls on the football program and the administration; the university also fired its president and has placed other administrators on leave after they were indicted for lying to the grand jury.

In Syracuse, public cries of failure to protect children have been aimed at two longtime media: the Syracuse PostStandard and ESPN. ESPN broke the story of Fine’s being accused of abuse by two former ball boys the night of Nov. 17. In doing so, the Connecticut-based sports network also broke with journalistic convention. It not only named the two men who said they were victimized sexually by Fine, but used their comments and faces on camera.

Page 16 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

Bobby Davis, now 39, and his step-brother, Mike Lang, now 45, spoke at length with ESPN about what they said was abuse over three decades by Fine, years that for Davis continued from his pre-teens into his late 20s, he said. Davis talked about road trips he took with the team when the abuse occurred, he said, with coach Boeheim seeing him in Fine’s room and in the same bed.

As the public and most of the media immediately tried to grasp the meaning of this story while still struggling with the Penn State situation, both ESPN and the Post-Standard already had a huge jump on the story. Separately, after Davis had first gone to the Syracuse City Police Department in 2002, he had approached first the newspaper and then the sports network with his story.

After police had told him the statute of limitations had expired, Davis brought his accusations to the Post-Standard.

The newspaper quietly put two reporters on the story, first to talk to Davis at length and then try to corroborate his story. PS Executive Editor Mike Connor, in a lengthy column to readers Nov. 20, said two reporters worked for six months talking to dozens of people. No one — not even those who Davis said had also been abused, including his brother, Lang — backed up his story. To see if the paper had a publishable story, the two reporters wrote what they had, a 140-inch narration of Davis’ charges. A dozen editors and reporters met in a story meeting; the paper decided it did not have a story that met the standard to publish.

After being told there was not enough for a story by the Post-Standard, Davis went to ESPN, which conducted a similar investigation and came to a similar conclusion.

In 2003, ESPN reporter Mark Schultz said, everyone, including Lang, denied that Fine had been abusive to them or Davis. And finally, Davis took his complaints to Syracuse University in 2005. The university conducted a fourth independent investigation, finding nothing to substantiate Davis’ claims.

Reaction from the public regarding the explanations about why nothing was done from 2002 to 2005 bounced between confusion and anger. What has changed since 2002, several people asked on the online forums for the newspaper and network, other than the Penn State scandal coming to light?

The only change in the initial ESPN report in November from what had been learned eight years ago is that now Lang said he too had been abused by Fine.

But much of the anger was aimed toward Boeheim, whose unequivocal defense of Fine rankled child abuse victims and advocates. Boeheim, who has known Fine for almost

Sports & Money 50 years since both were part of the Syracuse University basketball team in the mid-1960s, said Davis and Lang were using the Penn State story to make money and get attention.

Two days later when the Orangemen played in the Carrier Dome for the first time in 35 years without Fine on the bench, a chair in his usual spot was left empty. Players touched it as a gesture of support before the game. Fine issued a statement saying he was innocent of all accusations as the Syracuse Police Department and university began new investigations. Everyone seemed content to let the matters be resolved in that fashion. Then on Sunday, Nov. 27, readers of the Post-Standard and viewers of ESPN woke up to two stories that drastically altered the tone of the situation.

The Post-Standard had an interview with a third man who said he was a victim. Zach Tomaselli of Maine said Fine had abused him in 2002 in a Pittsburgh hotel room during a road trip the Orangemen took. What made Tomaselli’s accusation different from Davis’ and Lang’s is that the statute of limitations had not run out.

Tomaselli’s story that Sunday still generated some skepticism. His own father called him a liar and said his son never took a road trip to Pittsburgh with the team. Tomaselli himself has been charged with sexually abusing a teenage boy in Maine. This month, Tomaselli, who in February begins a jail term after being found guilty of child sexual abuse, said he lied and doctored emails in regards to being abused as a boy by Fine. But while Tomaselli’s claims raised questions, the voice ESPN was playing that November Sunday morning did not. The network aired portions of a tape made in 2002 when Davis secretly recorded Fine’s wife, Laurie, during a discussion about what Davis said detailed his abuse by Fine.

ESPN said a voice expert confirmed that it was Laurie Fine on the tape. While she never directly backs up Davis’ claims, she does not deny them or show any outrage or surprise. She instead said her husband had issues regarding attraction to men and that she saw something happen in her house one night between Fine and Davis. She told Davis that had it been another woman, she would have known what to do. She also implies what Davis told the network in that new story. When he was 18, he and Laurie Fine had a sexual relationship.

The tape changed everything for Orange fans.

By the end of the day, SU had taken Fine off administrative leave and fired him immediately.

“We do not tolerate abuse,’’ Chancellor Nancy Cantor said, adding the university did not know of the tape during its 2005 investigation. Had it

Making tough decisions on breaking story Opinion P a t L ouise

As both a two-time graduate of Syracuse University and a former six-year employee of the Syracuse Post-Standard, I have been asked quite a bit what I think of the allegations about Bernie Fine and how the newspaper covered the story. Although it’s hard to explain to the public, my fear is public criticism of the Post-Standard’s decision not to publish the story nine years ago will make news organizations more willing to print one-source stories that can ruin the reputations of innocent people by being wrong.

While the Penn State story seems more damning, the Bernie Fine story seems to dart in directions you don’t think possible. You go to bed one night with Jim Boeheim’s strong support of his friend ringing in your ears. You wake up to hear Fine’s wife on tape asking one of his accusers if he ever had oral sex with her husband. In the Penn State situation, there was ample evidence that higher ups knew about the abuse Jerry Sandusky is charged with over several years. That chain of knowledge is missing at Syracuse.

In November, when the Penn State story broke, I wrote on Facebook that even though my college football team didn’t win a lot of games, I felt sure that if a child was sexually abused people at my alma mater who suspected it would do something to help the child. I believe that today as much as I did when I wrote it.

As for the Post-Standard, I have great sympathy for my former colleagues as they struggle to explain to a disbelieving public the need for confidentiality of sources. Reporters don’t give unrequested information to the cops and say, “Here, check this out.”

Even when we are asked for information from law enforcement, in the form of subpoenas, we choose jail over compliance. It is difficult to explain to people that reporters do this to preserve the public’s access to important but confidential information. It is especially hard when readers accuse the news organizations of failing to protect children from sexual abuse.

Frankly, the tape doesn’t put this story in the confirmed column for me, despite the titillating talk and innuendo. I recognize that non-journalists will not understand this. But our credo is: Just because you say it’s so doesn’t make it so. How many journalists have had a conversation start with, ‘I’ve got a story for you’ and by the end of the explanation discovered that there is no story?

I respect that other media will say they would have chosen to run the story in 2002, or done something else. This is not an absolute black or white profession.

Gather up all the front pages of newspapers on any given day. No two will be identical. Neither the Penn State nor Syracuse story is close to winding up. Do I wish that when I see SU flash across the ESPN sports wire at night it would be a story about the top 5 Orangemen? Absolutely. But that just isn’t going to happen right now.

While these stories will keep going with intense media focus, I do wonder how this will change journalism, for it surely will. I fear that next time an accuser brings a one-source, no outside evidence story of abuse to a newspaper, that paper will look back at the protests of the Post-Standard’s method of coverage.

That paper will choose to risk ruining an innocent person’s reputation rather than have its own reputation questioned. And that, I think, is another sad lesson we will have learned.

Continued on next page

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 17

Sports & Money

Fans on Internet forums said they too thought the tape went a long way in confirming Davis’ story. Unlike when Penn State fired Paterno, no students rioted on the SU campus; at the team’s next game 48 hours later in the Carrier Dome, Boeheim received a standing ovation during warm-ups.

Fine’s empty chair was gone. In a post-game press conference after Syracuse’s seventh win of the season that night, Boeheim fielded more questions about the investigation than he did about his team in a press room crammed with at least twice the number of journalists as usual. He said he would wait for the full results of the investigation to see what had happened on his watch.

The next morning, the focus shifted from Boeheim back to the original two news sources of the story. The public learned in the disclosures a week earlier why no story had been published in 2002 or 2003, but neither the PostStandard nor ESPN had fully disclosed everything it had learned; while ESPN did break the story of the Laurie Fine tape made in 2003, it neglected to say it had actually had the tape since 2003.

“

“

Readers of the Post-Standard have hammered the paper with calls and emails . . .

And the Post-Standard, which wrote about the tape after ESPN’s story Sunday, had heard the tape in 2002. Davis had made the recording at the request of the newspaper in an attempt to have his story backed up for publication. Both the paper and the network, after listening to the tape years ago, decided independently that it was not enough to go on.

While Connor again wrote a column detailing that decision, as did ESPN’s Schultz, they quickly ran into criticism.

Media across the country called into question the news judgment of both news organizations. Readers of the Post-

Standard have hammered the paper with calls and emails saying the paper had a moral obligation to give the tape to police, or at least tell Davis to give the tape to police or the university. Readers questioned how Connor and other editors could live with themselves knowing they might have let Fine continue his abuse for eight more years. ESPN has been charged with managing the story to boost ratings after it was embarrassingly behind on the Penn State story.

Cantor said both were wrong in not releasing the tape to the university or police. Had we been given the tape in 2005, Cantor wrote in a USA Today Op-Ed column, we would have gone straight to the authorities. She said both ESPN and the Post-Standard owed better explanations for withholding the tape for almost 10 years.

“

[T]he Post-Standard and ESPN will have to work hard to repair what seems to be a broken trust with their readers and viewers.

“

known, she said, Fine would have been fired then. Even Boeheim backed off his full support of Fine, saying he agreed with the firing. “The allegations that have come forth today are disturbing and deeply troubling,’’ he said.

Other than losing his job of 35 years, Fine’s status has not changed from before the allegations went public three months ago. Although under investigation, which has included searches of his home and SU basketball office, he has yet to be charged with any crime. His wife, whom some have said should be charged for remaining silent while knowing child sexual abuse was going on in her home, has also not been charged with any crime. Followers of the Orangemen and the story seem content to follow Boeheim’s example and wait for the investigation to conclude before offering further thoughts on Bernie Fine. But when it comes to the two news sources that broke the story, both the PostStandard and ESPN will have to work hard to repair what seems to be a broken trust with their readers and viewers.

Pat Louise is a 1984 (Newhouse) and 2001 (Whitman) graduate of Syracuse University. Her journalism career has included six years at the Syracuse Post-Standard, including three years as a sports editor heading up coverage of SU sports. She currently lives in upstate New York, where she is publisher of a community weekly newspaper and teaches journalism at Utica College.

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Framing Paterno’s legacy S co tt L a mber t Media like their subjects to be easy: their heroes to be heroes, their villains to be villains.

The backlash continued. The Los Angeles times quoted Phil Knight, owner of Nike, when he said this about the media:

Celebrities are wonderful until they do something that proves they aren’t wonderful. Stories must be framed to make it easy for readers to understand what really is happening. And then a story like that of Joe Paterno comes along and it makes media’s job so much more difficult.

“This much is clear to me: If there is a villain in this tragedy, it lies in that investigation and not in Joe Paterno’s response,” Knight said.

For 50 years, Paterno was the ideal of college football coaches. His 409 wins were the most of any Division I football coach. He graduated 80 percent of his students. He gave money back to his school. He was easily framed as the granddad of college football — until last fall when news about Jerry Sandusky broke. Sandusky, Paterno’s former assistant coach, is currently charged with more than 40 counts of sexual abuse with boys under the age of 15.

Another Paterno assistant, Mike McQueary told Paterno that he saw Sandusky raping a young boy. Paterno notified his superiors but never approached Sandusky or the police about the incident. Paterno could have done more than just report his knowledge of Sandusky’s misdeeds. He should have helped those kids.

HuffingtonPost.com had a blog from Dr. Yvonne K. Fulbright, a sexuality educator who defended Paterno’s actions. The Philadelphia Inquirer questioned the scandal’s role in Paterno’s death and Inquirer columnist Stu Bykofsky played the role of St. Peter and admitted a sainted Jo Pa past the Pearly Gates.

Was this the new frame for Paterno? Were the media wrong when they laid so much blame on his role, or lack of a role in stopping Sandusky? How should the media portray Paterno?

One of the best answers came from the Decatur HeraldReview’s Mark Tupper, a columnist who covers the University of Illinois. Tupper wrote that maybe a man can be good and still do a bad thing.

The media then turned on Paterno. He had to be fired, even if the way Penn State officials fired him was cowardly. His reputation was ruined; Paterno was framed as just short of an accomplice to Sandusky’s horrors. He was the man who did nothing while the monster raped young boys in the locker room.

But that’s difficult. It calls on the media to break its routine.

Paterno was a good man and a good coach. And he did wrong. Where does that leave him? It’s not an easy answer and media have struggled to come to terms with this. No easy frame for Paterno exists. Should his lack of action erase 50 years of positive action. Do the thousands of lives he affected in a positive manner cancel the lives his inaction ruined?

And then Paterno died. His death, on Jan. 22 changed the frame. First, the media didn’t get it right, reporting his death one day before it actually occurred. Then the media found themselves taking another look at the story that has dominated sports headlines since November. A backlash started. A story on CBS.com said:

Columnists still are struggling with this question. A Google news search shows more than 5,000 hits using the words “Joe Paterno” and “legacy.” More will be written.

Some will denounce, other defend and a few will try to step away from the routine and question what a man’s legacy really means.

“Coach, educator, devoted family man — and hero wronged. That’s how former Penn State head coach Paterno was remembered yesterday at a public memorial on the university’s campus.”

Scott Lambert is managing editor of the Gateway Journalism Review. He worked as a sports journalist and editor for 13 years.

G TEWAY J OU R NA L IS M R E VIE W

gatewayjr.org Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 19

Features

Teaching Media Ethics — West Meets East W i l l i am A. B abcock

While I’m now back at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, I spent last fall semester in Beijing at the University of International Business and Economics teaching not only ethics but also basic Western-style reporting and a graduate seminar on how Hollywood depicts journalists.

In addition, I gave a series of lectures to the entire UIBE community and at other universities in and around Beijing and consulted on research projects with a variety of Chinese scholars. It was my first time teaching in China, and the first time any of my students (all of whom spoke English) had an American professor.

China’s mass media, as do the media of every nation, reflect the culture of their country. Harmony has been the watchword of Chinese civilization since the time of Confucius, and that nation’s media produces messages designed to promote harmony among its 1.4 billion citizens. Harmony, though, has different connotations in this society.

To quote the Christian Science Monitor’s Beijing correspondent, Peter Ford, keeping China “harmonious” means the Middle Kingdom’s authorities are “stifling dissonant voices through censorship, arrests, and other familiar tools.” Indeed, during my time in Beijing it was impossible for me to Google “Tiananmen” or “Falun

Gong” or “Nobel Prize” or “Liu Xiaobo” — or even the word “freedom.”

In all of my three classes there were student “minders” — some of whom were obvious, some not — entrusted with the task of reporting to Communist Party representatives at UIBE what transpired in my classes. Faculty members frequently monitored my classes so they might report back to university and party authorities.

In such an environment, teaching was inherently quite different from teaching about the mass media in the United States. News not geared to promoting a harmonious culture is considered unethical news. Reporting of natural disasters or accidents or protests or controversies is seldom done unless a harmonious spin can be put on the reporting.

“

“

So, what’s it like to teach in China — especially to teach Western Mass Media Ethics? If I had 100 yuan (about $15.60) every time I heard that question during the past five months, I could comfortably retire — at least in Beijing, where noodle dishes and taxis are very affordable.

during my time in Beijing it was impossible for me to Google ‘Tiananmen’ or ‘Falun Gong’ or ‘Nobel Prize’ or ‘Liu Xiaobo’ — or even the word ‘freedom.’

Chinese students rarely discussed the West’s media coverage of sensitive issues in their own country. Perhaps this is because they were reluctant to confront embarrassing issues; perhaps it was because they knew so little of such coverage, some of which could be accessed via Internet only by skirting Chinese censors. And when students discussed sensitive issues, they tended to do so in one-on-one conversations rather than in front of the class, where minders and observers might be present. Rarely did students put in writing anything that might be seen as critical of China’s media or supporting of international media coverage of their own nation.

Nearly 90 percent of my students were women, and at UIBE as is the case with many Chinese universities, women make up the majority of the students, and this in a nation where there are more men than women. Men hold

Page 20 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

Features the vast majority of governmental and “private sector” jobs.

In the reporting class, students often found it difficult to ask “why” questions when interviewing university officials or others in positions of authority. “Why” questions can cause embarrassment to officials, and thus are seldom posed by Chinese journalists. Thus students were relatively unaware such questions could — or should — be asked, even though some students in the class aspired to one day work for one of China Daily’s new bureaus in the United States.

Students in the class dealing with journalism movies were quite surprised to see Washington Post journalists acting independently of the government in All the President’s Men. I ended up showing the movie over two days as I needed to stop the DVD frequently to answer questions and discuss the meaning of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and repeatedly explain how the media and government are separate entities in America. After watching another movie, The Killing Fields, a few class members left the class in tears after witnessing the movie’s depiction of the atrocities of the Communist Khmer Rouge forces.

For one assignment, ethics class students divided into individual groups, with each group critically analyzing the 2011 coverage of China in a different American newspaper. The group with the class minder was the most critical of the media’s coverage. For the class’ final exam, ethics students were asked to evaluate an article in the Dec. 22, 2011, New York Times. The story, by Times correspondent Edward Wong, reported on a revolt — or protest — over land sales in Wukan, a village on China’s southeast coast. Most students found the article, headlined “Canny Villagers Grasp Keys to Loosen China’s Muzzle,” to be a fair, ethical piece of journalism.

Finally, I’m reminded of an editor I had who preached the need to let a story “die a natural death,” and not try to fashion a wrap-up bow at the end. As I’m unable to think of a neat way to summarize my teaching experience in China, I’ll heed his advice. So suffice it to say that despite how well my ethics students did on their final exam, teaching about Western media and media ethics in the Middle Kingdom frequently left me feeling like Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.”

During the late 1980s, Dr. William A. Babcock, who has a graduate degree in international communication, was Asia Editor of the Christian Science Monitor. When not teaching journalism at UIBE in Beijing, he is professor and deputy director of SIUC’s School of Journalism.

Walls, however great, don’t work W illiam A. B a b cock

In a world of an increasingly omnipresent media, denial is becoming an endangered species. But not in China, where media censorship is increasingly omnipresent.

In an attempt to strengthen its great Internet firewall, China is requiring those using microblogs, China’s Twitter-like websites, to register their real names. According to recent Reuters reports, Chinese authorities have accused microbloggers of spreading “unfounded rumors and vulgarities,” online content unacceptable to the ruling Communist Party.

China’s Communist Party is denying Twitter users the right to freely blog — a right most Internet users in other countries enjoy. China also has in recent years worked to censor the Internet, thus denying its citizens the ability to easily access news and information of sensitive topics.

Unfortunately, China’s current leaders have failed to learn from their 5,500-year continuous history that walls don’t work. The most architecturally spectacular wall of all time, China’s Great Wall, took hundreds of years to construct and at one time snaked across some 5,500 miles of often rugged mountain ranges. Millions of the nation’s citizens were kept busy erecting the wall unsuccessful in keeping out invading Manchus and Mongols.

Just as the invading hordes breeched the Great Wall, China’s youth are able to learn through creative Internet circumvention about their government’s ethnic cleansing of some 1 million Tibetans, repression of the Falun Gong religion, denial of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo and the estimated 65 million people that international human rights organizations estimate were killed under Chairman Mao’s rule.

Denying open access to information and denying the accuracy of Western reporting about China has simply made the current youth of the Middle Kingdom more curious.

For example, during my recent stay in Beijing I gave a series of lectures at universities in and near Beijing, and students asked the same question, either during my talks, in the Q&A sessions following the lectures, or in chats after my remarks: “Can you tell me what happened in Tiananmen,” they would ask.

They knew from my introductions that I had been the Christian Science Monitor’s Asia news editor during the late 1980s and they risked the sanctions of Communist Party members at the lectures by asking me — often publicity — about the events of 1989.

The Chinese government is careful to never mention Tiananmen. For example, in Quick Access to The People’s Republic of China: The First Sixty Years (1949-2009), displayed and sold at the National Museum of China, there is no mention of the June 4, 1989, protests that resulted in the massacre by soldiers of 400 to 3,000 Chinese protesters — many of them students — in the streets near the world’s largest public square.

Still, China’s digital natives know of the Tiananmen killings. And they want to know more; not only the truth about Tiananmen but truths of all aspects of their nation.

This thirst for knowledge cannot be silenced by governmental denials or media censorship, for not only are Chinese youth smart and tech savvy, they also are well traveled and thus able to get information from all corners of he world — modernday Manchus and Mongols all.

On my first week back in Carbondale an SIU student from China approached me after my introductory lecture and asked, “Can you tell me what happened in Tiananmen?”

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 21

Features

Bankruptcy: Lee Enterprises follows an American business tradition D avi d L a nder How would Joseph Pulitzer, founder of the St. Louis PostDispatch in 1879, respond to news that the newspaper’s current parent company, Lee Enterprises, Inc., on Dec. 12, 2011, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection?

listed $1.15 billion in assets and $994.5 million in liabilities, as of Sept. 25, and noted it had secured agreements with most of its creditors and expected the company to emerge from bankruptcy in 60 days or fewer.

It is safe to assume that Pulitzer knew that with every shift of an industrial paradigm, bankruptcy filings can mount up as high as the piles of pennies young children donated in Pulitzer’s campaign to fund installation of the Statue of Liberty in 1885. His newspapers in St. Louis and New York covered paradigm shifts as railroads outmoded wagon trains, electricity replaced gas lamps and old technology companies began to unravel.

“Our ability to operate as a going concern is dependent on our ability to obtain approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the refinancing plan approved by creditors and to generate cash flows and maintain liquidity sufficient to service our debt,” the company said in a statement.

Lee Enterprises of Davenport, Iowa, acquired Pulitzer, Inc., owner of the Post-Dispatch and other media properties, in 2005. The St. Louis daily became the flagship in a Lee publishing empire of more than 50 small- and middlemarket U.S. newspapers. That $1.46 billion acquisition was enabled almost entirely by bank debt. The deal occurred after the “Dot.com bust” of the 1990s, but on the leading edge of a digital media typhoon that empowered today’s increasing influence of online newspapers, magazines, web TV and social networking that dominating business and consumer communications while offering dynamic, new advertising options.

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Bankruptcy is an American business tradition, particularly in times of industrial change. While not necessarily the most welcome of business customs, the reorganization of a company’s debt has enabled many organizations to emerge from fiscal disaster better-equipped to survive another day and often prosper over the long haul. This is evident among U.S. industries ranging from airlines to automobiles, building materials and, yes, even newspaper companies.

Lee’s acquisition debt load was another millstone around its neck.

As the Post-Dispatch reported, this “pre-packaged” refinancing plan will increase Lee’s higher interest payment to an average of 9.2 percent interest rate on its debt versus 5.1 percent currently. Lee said it can meet the interest level while also paying down its principal. Its newspapers generate an operating profit, the company says. Yet in recent years Lee has “suffered from declining circulation and advertising revenue brought on both by the sluggish economy and the migration of advertising revenue and readers to the Internet.”

Because of changes in publishing industries — and the resulting riptide — Lee Enterprises’ Chapter 11 filing is another reminder that American newspapers need the same kind of bankruptcy solution that has shored up other troubled U.S. industries. For example, Chapter 11 reorganizations have: • Helped large companies such as Johns Manville (whose origins date to before Joseph Pulitzer’s day) recover from the effects of accumulated business mistakes of the past.

Some observers today comment that Lee bought Pulitzer just as the tsunami of a new industrial paradigm was transitioning from print-based publishing, with its reliance on production employees, unions, vendors and distributors, to digital publishing and its lightning-fast, 24-7 worldwide communications advantages. Within a few years, Lee got swept up in a kind of publishing riptide, as did other newspaper companies, as a result in part to rising paper costs, higher fuel costs for delivery trucks and skyrocketing insurance benefit premiums for employees. Lee’s acquisition debt load was another millstone around its neck.

• Given companies time to revamp union contracts and, sometimes, offer union employees ownership stakes in the companies, creating new business momentum.

On Dec. 12, the Post-Dispatch reported that Lee had filed for Chapter 11 protection as part of a debt refinancing plan it had successfully negotiated with creditors. In its filing, Lee

• Allowed companies with excessive debt to be sold in efficient auction processes that would not have been possible outside of bankruptcy.

• Reduced massive debt among scores of large businesses and corporations by enabling a restructuring of corporate organizations and transforming creditors into shareholders by paying debt with stock.

Continued on Page 31

Page 22 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

Features

Journalism students become investigative reporters B ran t H ouston The idea was direct and clear: Illinois university and college professors who work with students on investigative reporting would form a network to share ideas and experiences and collaborate on stories.

Urbana-Champaign (which coordinates the effort), SIUC, Columbia College in Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, Ball State University, University of Missouri and the University of Iowa. There are plans to include more institutions.

First proposed by Bill Freivogel, director of the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale in spring 2010, the idea has grown into a network of Midwest university professors and students from six states about to complete the first phase of their initial project. The project focuses on the increased pressure on the mental health treatment on campuses and the shortcomings of that treatment.

Faculty and students at Wisconsin, Illinois, SIUC, Ball State and Missouri have stories slated for February ranging from investigations into a shortage of college counselors, long waiting times for counseling sessions, an increase in the severity of symptoms students are showing and a lack of resources for issues of veterans returning to college.

Columbia College in Chicago has published its findings on the Chicago Talks website, http://www.chicagotalks. org/2011/12/22/few-cook-county-colleges-universitiesfollowing-states-campus-security-act/ and in the Chicago section of the New York Times.

The faculty and students found the state of Illinois failed to follow through on recommendations to improve campus security after the shootings at Northern Illinois University in 2008.

SIUC has posted its initial video stories at http://vimeo. com/34037166 This package includes stories that find students increasingly are coming to college with more severe mental illnesses.

The package also examines the quality of counseling services. Key to the establishment of the network — now known as the Investigative Journalism Education Consortium (IJEC), http://ijec.org — is a grant of $75,000 from the Robert M. McCormick Foundation in Chicago.

The grant provides funds for a part-time project coordinator, Website development, meetings among participants and travel for project work.

The idea for a network and the first meeting were a natural outcome of the new spirit of collaboration among university, nonprofit and commercial media across the nation.

One successful example of faculty and student investigative projects has been The News 21 project funded by Carnegie Corp. and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. That initiative, based at Arizona State University, brings selected students from across the country to work on a major project over the summer after doing research in the spring.

The News 21 Project http://news21.com/about/ has produced stories about transportation and food safety, with both projects published not only on the website, but also in the Washington Post.

Continued on Page 31

The current members of the consortium are the University of Illinois at

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 23

Features

Silicon Valley wins round one in SOPA fight

W i l l i am H. F reivogel

Earlier this winter, Silicon Valley’s Internet powerhouses outcommunicated Hollywood, stopped Internet piracy bills pushed by the big studios and even prodded the Republican presidential candidates and President Barack Obama to agree on something — that Hollywood’s Internet piracy bills threatened the innovation of the web.

Traditionally, Silicon Valley has been reluctant to play by Washington’s rules. Microsoft did not build a major Washington presence until the late 1990s when it faced a big anti-trust suit. But, the industry demonstrated its power through a concerted campaign of shutting down some sites and posting notices on others about the industry’s opposition to the Internet piracy bills.

U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., was one of those members of Congress withdrawing support from the legislation. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., came out in opposition to the bill.

Just about everyone agrees that foreign Internet sites are pirating U.S. movies and TV shows. The industry puts big dollar signs on the problem, claiming that it costs 373,000 jobs a year and $16 billion in revenue. To solve the problem, Hollywood helped draft the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect Intellectual Property Act in the Senate.

Both bills were moving along smartly through the fall and early winter. Media critics questioned whether TV news organizations had avoided critical coverage because parent organizations of such companies as Fox favored passage of the legislation.

Under current law, Internet companies generally are not legally responsible for third-party content posted on their sites by users. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides that if the owner of intellectual property thinks that it has been posted on an Internet site, the owner can file a takedown notice demanding that the content be removed from the site. If the website does not respond to a valid request, it opens itself to legal liability.

Supporters of the bills maintained that they merely target foreign criminals and websites created with no purpose other than to pirate U.S. media content.

Because of this legal regimen, Internet companies don’t have to screen user-generated content before it is posted.

This is crucial, they say, to the Internet’s explosive growth.

There is no way that a company like Craigslist or Google’s YouTube or Facebook could review all third-party content before it was posted.

Critics say that the bills threaten to upend the architecture of the web and the legal rules that have fostered it.

But under SOPA and PIPA, the attorney general or private companies could obtain court orders against foreign content Continued on Page 32

Page 24 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

Features

Keeping Jewish Light burning E i l een P. D ugga n enterprise reporting, obituaries, columns, gossip, a calendar, crossword puzzles and social announcements. There are special sections and the quarterly Oy! magazine, each with a different focus and available in print only.

“I like the breadth of the paper,” said playwright Joan Lipkin, artistic director of That Uppity Theatre Company and the DisAbility Project. “It has significant relevance through its local and national and world news. None of those things are really covered consistently or adequately through other local news outlets.”

Last summer, the Light, historically a free weekly mailed to donors of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis, rolled out a paid subscription program. The response was unexpectedly positive, said Larry Levin, publisher and chief executive officer of the Light. A former real estate attorney, Levin joined the Light in June 2008. Before asking readers to pay for a paper that had always been free, Levin and the board made sure to improve the product substantially, including a total redesign with more full-color photos and graphics.

Like most print news publications, the St. Louis Jewish Light, a 64-year-old weekly, has run into the reality of the 21st century: declining readership, declining revenue and online competition. To meet the challenges, the Jewish Light’s board of trustees and staff have made substantial changes to the paper’s content, distribution and revenue sources over the past few years.

The Jewish Light’s content runs the gamut of local, national and international news, op-ed, features, arts coverage,

First, Levin hired Editor Ellen Futterman, a 25-year veteran of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Futterman has introduced a number of new features including her “News and Schmooze” column; annual fall and summer arts, Earth Day and college sections; investigative reports; and grant-funded special projects.

In 2010 the paper’s outdated website was replaced with a colorful, interactive site. The site, stljewishlight.com, carries the weekly print edition as well as web-specific content such as video interviews with prominent newsmakers.

The redesigned website won an award from the American Jewish Press Association in June 2011. One of the regular web features is “Cohnipedia,” a column by Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Robert A. Cohn, who “retired” in 2004. Cohnipedia — its moniker a nod to Cohn’s legendary encyclopedic knowledge of St. Louis Jewish history — tackles a timely topic beginning in the print edition. Then readers are directed to the website to finish the story. Cohn also has come to appreciate having an excellent editor aboard.

Continued on Page 32

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 25

Features

Deadline Artists: I never thought I’d agree with Peggy Noonan about anything, until I picked up a copy of “Deadline Artists,” and saw her comment on the cover, “An indispensable anthology of an American art form — a broad and brilliantly chosen compilation . . . and a real feast. I couldn’t put it down.”

Neither could I, except for the times I wanted to fling it across the room, appalled over the unforgivably sloppy editing, frustrated by misspellings, ready to scream as the dropped words changed the meaning or ruined the rhythm. It seems when the original columns were copied for this collection, errors were made and not corrected. I know copy editors are almost extinct and that proofreaders are non-existent, but this is grotesque.

Still, there’s far more good than bad, and dipping in and out of this wonderful book took me back to my boyhood, when I first became familiar with William Allen White, Grantland Rice, Robert J. Casey, Ernie Pyle, Heywood Broun and Westbrook Pegler.

A Pegler column from 1936 yanked me back to 1954, when I was doing research in old newspaper and magazine columns.

Pegler, later a reactionary curmudgeon, was covering the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen when he wrote “An Apology.” Pegler turned out a piece pointing out the large number of German soldiers in the Alpine village, which drew a formal protest from Hitler’s government.

Pegler’s response was, “. . . I can only plead that I was honestly mistaken and a victim of my own ignorance. Those weren’t troops at all, but merely peace-loving German workmen in their native dress. . .” There were no further protests.

The book, edited by John Avlon, Jesse Angelo and Errol Louis, has 167 pieces by 104 writers, almost all of them written for newspapers. With a small handful of exceptions, all were written for daily newspapers with deadline pressures. They are divided into 10 general areas, loose enough for the editors to select their favorites.

Through the years, as a journalist myself, I knew some of the writers represented here, and to see bylines of Molly Ivins, Art Buchwald, Herb Caen, Wells

Page 26 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns R ev i ewed by J o e P olla ck

Twombly, Red Smith, Mike Royko, Shirley Povich and others brought back fond memories of afternoons in press boxes and nights in taverns. Writing a column gives a person a sense of freedom, an erroneous sense of importance, a chance to look foolish beyond friends and family, an opportunity to play with words and, if lucky, to leave a few of them out there for folks to read and remember. In no particular order, a handful of favorites: Mary McGrory, Washington Star, 1954: “Mr. Welch came to Washington to defend the Army. But he had his finest hour defending a friend.”

Art Hoppe, San Francisco Chronicle, 1971: “The radio this morning said the Allied invasion of Laos had bogged down.

Without thinking, I nodded and said, ‘Good.’ And having said it, I realized the bitter truth. Now I root against my own country.”

George F. Will, Washington Post, 1986: “The optimistic statement, ‘George Bush is not as silly as he frequently seems’ now seems comparable to Mark Twain’s statement that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. Bush’s recent New York performance suggests that although the 1988 nomination is his to lose, he has a gift for doing things like that.”

Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, 2004: “I am sure there is a special place in heaven reserved for those who have never used the F-word. I will never get near that place.

Nor, apparently, will Dick Cheney.”

Continued on Page 34

“Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns” Edited by: John P. Avlon, Jesse Angelo, Errol Louis Publisher: Overlook Hardcover: $29.95, 432 pages

Features

Flap with CJR C hares L. K lotze r

The self-assertive role of journalism reviews is to discover and publicize shortcomings in the media. By and large, they have done an excellent job and the consumers of the media have benefited. One should expect the same standard would be applied to the reviews themselves.

Thus when the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) noted that the St. Louis Journalism Review, among other reviews, had folded (Nov/Dec 2011, p.14) it took me by surprise.

In an editorial, CJR commented on its accomplishments, the threat of its non-solvency and survival, adding the note, “But before draining that glass, pour some out for others — MORE; Buncombe; Thorn, Press On; The Unsatisfied Man; Brill’s Content; the Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Oregon, and Hawai journalism reviews — that didn’t make it..”

This came as a surprise to me. SJR just celebrated its 40th Anniversary and the transfer of the journal to Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) School of Journalism at a gala featuring Russ Mitchell and Bob Woodward and attended by about 200 of the local media elite.

In response, this writer explained to CJR that the changes merely enlarged the role of SJR, but did not mean that it folded. To my astonishment, CJR accepted none of these explanations. Long-term readers of SJR will remember — probably CJR does not — that once before, in 1995, SJR was relocated to Webster University under a new editor and publisher. The transfer did not mean SJR had folded. After about 10 years Webster decided it could not continue to subsidize the publication and after some search, SJR found open arms at SIUC. The following exchange of messages explains it all.

Message from Klotzer to C JR: Congratulations on your 50th Anniversary. But I was disappointed in your erroneous statement on page 14 that the St. Louis Journalism Review (SJR) — among others regional reviews — “didn’t make it.” Just recently, St. Louis celebrated the 40th Anniversary of SJR with a Gala event.

The Chicago Journalism Review (CJR) was the first of the local journalism reviews that sprang up around the ‘70s

after the Chicago media misled the public calling the disturbances at the 1968 Democratic convention a “student riot” when the Chicago reporters knew it was a “police riot.” Some of the local reporters were beaten up by the police as well. Under the leadership of Ron Dorfman and other Chicago reporters, they organized the Chicago Journalism Review. Some of us in St. Louis realized that St. Louis deserves a similar venue and in September 1970 the first issue appeared. Since then SJR received 29 national and local awards. Following CJR and SJR, local journalism reviews sprung up throughout the country, close to 30 at the height of this movement. Typical of volunteer efforts, they all faded after a few years, making SJR the lone survivor.

Yes, the survival of SJR was threatened many times.

However, the commitment of its readers, writers and contributors helped us to overcome these difficulties. We found a very appropriate and willing partner in the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

SJR was transferred to SIUC last year thanks to the labors of Dean Gary Kolb and William Freivogel, director of the School of Journalism. We also agreed to add the name Gateway Journalism Review to reflect our ambitions to expand coverage to a 16-state area in the Midwest.

What was particularly puzzling about your editorial comment was that SJR has been and is a recipient of the Columbia Journalism Review over these many years.

A review of your subscriber list would have avoided that misstatement.

Response from C JR Editor Mike Hoyt: Hi Charles and thank you.

But we’re not sure we agree that we have anything to correct. From your “About Page”: “Gateway Journalism Review critically analyzes the mass media in the Midwest stretching from Ohio to Oklahoma and from North Dakota to Arkansas – and beyond.”

We understand that Gateway has its roots in the St. Louis publication, but as we understand it from Gateway’s website, it has a different mission, a different institutional home, a different funding model, and most importantly, a different name than SLJR. We are glad that St. Louis press criticism is part of Gateway’s mission, and we salute both the old publication and the new one.

Continued on Page 34

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 27

Features Arkansas case shows dilemma of juries and social media Continued from Page 4

Among other Midwestern states, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin all have amended their criminal and civil jury instructions in similar manner.

The Arkansas Supreme Court expressed its clear concern in the Dimas-Martinez case and suggested measures more drastic than admonitions may need to be taken: [W]e take this opportunity to recognize the wide array of possible juror misconduct that might result when jurors have unrestricted access to their mobile phones during a trial. Most mobile phones now allow instant access to a myriad of information. Not only can jurors access Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites, but they can also access news sites that might have information about a case. There is also the possibility that a juror could conduct research about many aspects of a case. Thus, we refer to the Supreme Court Committee on Criminal Practice and the Supreme Court Committee on Civil Practice for consideration of the question of whether jurors’ access to mobile phones should be limited during a trial.

Of course, one problem with such bans is that they are not effective once the jury goes home for the day. Another is that they are often unevenly applied. For example, when the federal courthouse in New York City proposed a total ban on electronic devices, lawyers’ groups sought an exemption from the rules. More recently, a new rule on electronic devices recently adopted by the local courts in the District of Columbia purports to ban all use of electronic devices in courtrooms, but then adds exemptions for people like prose litigants (with court permission); attorneys; probation officers; social workers in court on official business; and reporters (again, only with court permission).

While the jurors in the Dimas-Martinez murder trial were told not to tweet about the trial, it does not appear, based on the admonitions repeated in the Arkansas Supreme Court’s decision, that they were told why they should not do so. This is despite the fact that the state’s model jury instructions for criminal cases includes a lengthy discussion of the subject: After stating that “You must decide this case only on the evidence presented in the courtroom,” the model instruction, Ark. Model Jury Instr., Civil 101 (Dec. 2010), states: All of us are depending on you to follow these rules, so that there will be a fair and lawful resolution to this case. The parties have entrusted their case to you and to no other person or entity. If you become aware of any violation of these rules you must notify court personnel of the violation.

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research the case. The jury instructions also explain “the reason for these restrictions is to ensure that your decision is based only on the evidence presented during trial and court’s instructions on the law.” Ind. Patt. Jury Instrs., Crim., Instr. 1.01.

such bans . . . are not effective once the jury goes home for the day.

Such full explanations of the possible consequences of jurors tweeting, texting and using other social media and the Internet during trial are probably going to be the only way the courts will be able to deal with this growing issue.

Futile attempts to keep the electronic equipment out of the courthouse, or adopting unrealistic rules limiting their use, is not going to put the electronic genie back in the bottle.

Eric P. Robinson is the deputy director of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Courts and Media at the University of Nevada, Reno.

He blogs for Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and on his own blog, www.bloglawonline.com.

Supreme Court copyright decision may not injure symphonies Continued from Page 5

Even if the 1994 law were consistent with Congress’ copyright power, it violated the First Amendment, Golan argued, by removing works from the public domain. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the six-justice majority, rejected both arguments. She noted that the first

Page 28 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

Congress had extended copyright protection to works that had not previously had copyright protection.

She also noted that the law puts Prokofiev’s works on the same footing as those of American composers of the same

Features era, such as Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein. The public domain is not a “category of constitutional significance,” Ginsburg wrote. Congress has broad power to extend the reach of copyright as long as it does not abuse its power, she wrote.

Ginsburg said that the public access to creative expression is protected in part by the continued recognition of the distinction between ideas and expression. Copyright protects an individual’s expression but cannot keep the public from using an idea expressed.

Alan Howard, a First Amendment expert at Saint Louis University Law School, explained in an email: “If you believe that the First Amendment guarantee of free speech at its core is about protecting ideas, opinions, information, then Golan and indeed copyright law as such does not pose a central threat to free speech.”

Howard agreed “something is lost by forcing an individual to pay others to use their expression…. That loss does count for something for free speech clause purposes — especially if in the past the expression was in the public domain and now it has been removed from the public domain for a period of time.

“But again what is taken out of the public domain is one person’s use for free of another person’s expression and not

one’s use of another’s ideas, opinions, facts… I don’t see Golan as a case where the issue implicated what I see as the core concerns of the free speech clause — government censorship of ideas, opinions or information.”

O’Leary of Opera Theatre said that the royalties paid for operas run from 4 to 10 percent of gross ticket receipts.

He added that he has “the greatest respect for the whole intention of intellectual property law. If you think back to the history of music, you realize that Mozart could not earn a living because there was no copyright protection and, therefore, the only way he could earn more money was to write something new, even though his works were being performed.

“Having said that,” he added, “the idea that a work could be in the public domain and then go back into copyright protection does make you worry that someone might abuse this idea and create unnecessarily protective copyright protections around works long since in the public domain.

But we’ll have to see how it plays out.”

This story was first published in the St. Louis Beacon.

William H. Freivogel is director of the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a professor at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.

Covering Campaigns: National media move on while local media remain

Continued from Page 7

For Yepsen, the long-time dean of political reporters in Iowa, the biggest fear was getting beaten by the national media on his home turf.

“That’s the thing that worries you the most, is waking up one morning and seeing that CNN or MSNBC beat you to a story or had a story that you thought you should have,” Yepsen said. “That’s what you don’t like.”

At the same time, the Iowa media have a few advantages over the national media.

“We have access,” Yepsen said. “A lot of the national media have been doing this for a while and they know what happens and where to go, and that helps them. But the day after the caucus they’re gone and we’re still here, covering the same people. The Iowa reporters always had pretty good access.”

car with a presidential hopeful and drive around to meet the residents of Iowa. Gone are the days when journalists could sit in the kitchen while candidates talked to people in their living rooms.

“The sheer size of these events has changed the nature of these events,” Yepsen said.

In every campaign there are stories of events where media outnumbered the actual voters. And now there are primary tourists and caucus tourists who just want to see what’s going on. But for those who cover the race, it’s a lot of work and a lot of politicking. And once it’s over, they feel a loss.

“I don’t know if it’s an empty feeling, but you’re exhausted,” Yepsen said. “I would spend the better part of a year and a half focusing on the story. Once it’s over you feel a sense of relief and you feel a little let down.”

The Iowa people also know the people who live in the state.

That creates another advantage. Yepsen is quick to point out that not all Iowans are farmers. They’re conservative, but not ultra conservative. And they travel in bad weather.

Yepsen compared the feeling to what former political journalist Mary McGrory said of covering campaigns: “The only thing worse than covering a campaign is not having a campaign to cover.”

Yepsen also talked about the changes the media made on the caucuses. Gone are the days when he could hop into the

Scott Lambert is the managing editor of the Gateway Journalism Review. He worked as a sports journalist and editor for 13 years.

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 29

Features

Who is Covering the Farm Bill?

2012 farm bill legislation. This article was only found after a very thorough search; it was hardly the norm.

In the vast majority of the articles one can see the same discussion on what the original wire article deemed to be the primary point of contention in the 2012 farm bill — the debate between direct payment subsidies verses increased crop insurance subsidies for shallow-loss protection. A Farm Bureau spokesperson was the primary source on the value of increased crop insurance subsidies. Some media outlets would change up the quotes from the national source, with quotes from a Farm Bureau official in their own state.

Granted, the debate on which subsidy distribution method is the most effective in aiding farmers is important. Direct payments account for $5 billion a year in the current $288 billion farm bill that was passed in 2008 and expires in September 2012. It is estimated the direct subsidies could cost as much as $10.2 billion a year as part of the proposed 2012 farm bill.

An allotment of $51 billion of a bill with a price tag just over $260 billion is worth considerable national discussion. Where is the discussion about the distribution of the remaining $210 billion? It seems media fell for a shell game and had attention diverted to one issue and failed to cover the broader implications of the proposed farm bill. Issues such as subsidies to the ethanol and sugar industries, clean water and sustainability programs, and state-based projects funded by the farm bill have received little attention. State-based projects alone account for over $15 billion in the farm bill.

The few original articles found in the search were mostly from websites for alternative agriculture associations such as the Texas based DailyYonder.com or Hobby Farms hosted in California. A handful of Midwest radio and television stations had news briefs posted online. These articles primarily covered events hosted in the area by high-level elected officials.

Several included quotes from the state’s U.S. Senator, Dept. of Agriculture spokesperson, or as mentioned before, a state level Farm Bureau representative.

The lack of local coverage in Kansas and Oklahoma was particularly interesting due to agriculture’s prominence in the economy of those states. Furthermore, these states are home to two of the key Congressional agriculture committee members: Pat Roberts (R), Kansas, and Frank Lucas (R), Oklahoma.

Roberts, the ranking member of the Senate agriculture committee, and Lucas, the chair of the House agriculture committee, along with Debbie Stabenow (D), Michigan, chair of the Senate agriculture committee, have been three of the most cited sources on the 2012 farm bill.

It would seem sensible, not to mention easier, for a journalist in Kansas or Oklahoma to call Senator Roberts or Representative Lucas’ local offices and get details specific to those states. Or perhaps a better story would be to ask about the unusual timing

Page 30 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

Continued from Page 9

of the formation of a joint PAC between the two lawmakers, whose only apparent connection is through the farm bill and agriculture committee work.

An analysis of the purpose for the formation of the LucasRoberts Victory Committee in October of this year, just prior to the ramp up of farm bill lobbying and discussion could be illuminating. Or even the fact that according to the filing forms obtained from the FEC website, the fundraising committee is not being administered by Lucas-Roberts supporters in either Oklahoma or Kansas, but rather a professional PAC management firm in Florida.

The current farm bill accounts for over $57 billion a year in the national budget. The proposed 2012 version would cost over $52 billion a year. The substantial price tag on this legislation, along with current discussions about so many systemic agriculture and food production issues in the U.S. should warrant considerable discussion on a national level.

The economic and environmental impact of the agriculture industry on state and local policies should have farm bill coverage included in lead stories across the Midwest.

Unfortunately, that simply is not the case.

Journalists in the Midwest need to acknowledge an obligation to cover the 2012 farm bill and other agriculture news from a local perspective. A person would be hard pressed to find a Midwest newsroom that does not contain a journalist with considerable agriculture knowledge from either direct involvement in agriculture or from living in a region in which agriculture is a primary industry.

Moreover, the abundance of local sources that can discuss the local impact of agriculture legislation is unsurpassed in Midwest states. While Mr. Babcock, the agriculture economist from Iowa State, is undoubtedly quite knowledgeable about farm bill affects, are there not dozens of universities with robust agriculture programs in the Midwest from which alternative views and additional information could be gathered?

Could the Gadsen Times article be used as an example and interview producers from communities? Understanding that many of the 2012 farm bill details have not yet been made public, a series of articles outlining how programs and subsidies from the 2008 farm bill have affected local farmers would be quite valuable.

The agriculture industry in the U.S. affects all people: urban, rural, farmer and consumer. National, regional and local viewpoints are needed in agriculture debates. Journalists from the Midwest need to stop letting those from large, metropolitan media outlets set the tone and agenda of agriculture coverage.

Sam Robinson is a Ph D candidate at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her research areas are regional media and agriculture communications.

Features

Bankruptcy: Lee Enterprises follows an American business tradition

Clearly, the U.S. newspaper industry is evolving as Americans increasingly obtain their news from Internet portals and handy digital tools, not the least of which are cell phones. Today, print newspaper readership is decreasing, fewer people under age 50 are signing up as new subscribers and advertisers are shifting to digital media — including newspaper websites and blogs — is escalating fast. Some newspaper companies have been successful in navigating this change, such as in Philadelphia, where a new media company was formed after the parent company of two leading dailies entered bankruptcy, while many others have not. In recent years, once-powerful daily newspapers across the nation, such as the Cincinnati Post, Honolulu Advertiser, Oakland Tribune and Rocky Mountain News, have met their last deadline.

Continued from Page 31

The good news is that Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganizations have helped the U.S. steel industry, the asbestos industry, airline industry, auto industry and others build bridges for companies that are forward-thinking and efficient. Chapter 11 will float Lee Enterprises out of the riptide of potential default and postpone its day of reckoning. One key for Lee will be whether its management, employees, unions and vendors can adapt to changing circumstances in this dizzying digital world and with business models that can be profitable in the new industrial models of high-powered online media platforms.

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Lee’s filing during the same month as American Airlines’ parent company AMR Corporation announced it would enter bankruptcy is a reminder that nearly every other historic U.S. air carrier, including United and Delta, has used bankruptcy to keep flying during troubled times by shedding costly labor contracts, reducing debt with new financial agreements and generating positive cash flow, or to merge with stronger players. Likewise, the Obama administration’s success in stabilizing the auto industry would not have been possible without a Chapter 11 process.

Clearly, the U.S. newspaper industry is evolving.

Chapter 11 does give ailing newspapers and other industries time to address needful changes. The outcomes — virtually impossible to predict right now — will depend on the quality of future management and healthy doses of good luck.

David A. Lander is Co-Chair of the Business Bankruptcy Practice Group at Gallop, a St. Louis law firm. Mr. Lander was recently reappointed to serve a second, three-year term on the Advisory Committee on Bankruptcy Rules.

Journalism students become investigative reporters IJEC organizers saw many Midwest regional stories that deserve attention as mainstream news staffs are reduced.

They also wanted to make sure students were getting practical experience at a time when internships also are being eliminated. And they wanted to set up an ongoing collaboration that runs throughout the year and over all the semesters. Among the challenges of doing such collaborations is bridging work from semester to semester.

The consortium discovered that stories might be near completion at the end of a semester but the stories would need work in the next semester by the same students or new students brought into a project.

And the consortium found additional challenges in the faculty members’ different types of classes and their personal schedules and class schedules. In two cases, faculty participants could not begin work on the mental health project until this winter semester because of class schedules and other duties. In another case, a set of stories had to be published in December, ahead of other participants’ stories, because a faculty member was going on sabbatical this winter. Thus, instead of all results coming out on one day or one week, investigations now roll out over a period of time. The advantage of this is that findings and knowledge accumulate over time and new stories built

on top of archived stories.

Continued from Page 23

Each of the institutions can publish or air stories with local media partners and also post their stories on the IJEC website. Most of the universities’ faculties have ongoing working relationships with public or commercial media in their areas and in some cases are already working with local NPR or PBS stations. For example, SIUC’s School of Journalism has a relationship with the St. Louis Beacon, a successful nonprofit online news organization in St. Louis.

Other proposed story projects will include examinations of criminal justice systems and environment and energy issues. The consortium also will carry out its educational mission of sharing resources by posting investigative reporting syllabi, links to training materials and seminars and by establishing an active Facebook page and Twitter account.

Brant Houston is the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois and a co-founder of the Investigative Journalism Education Consortium. He also chairs the Investigative News Network, which is composed of 60 nonprofits newsrooms in North America, and is co-author of The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook.

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 31

Features

Silicon valley wins round one in SOPA fight Continued from Page 24

pirates to require U.S. Internet sites to block access to the foreign websites. The bills also would force the cut off of electronic payments and advertising to the sites.

One difficulty with this procedure is that the court orders mostly would be issued in non-adversarial court hearings.

All that would be required to establish jurisdiction in a U.S. court would be the existence of a web address. As a result, most firms against whom court orders would be issued would not be represented in court.

This could run afoul of the First Amendment law because the U.S. Supreme Court has not allowed expression, such as movies, to be blocked without full judicial proceedings.

Internet companies also claim that the requirement that certain Internet addresses be blocked would imperil the infrastructure of the Internet including the domain name system.

Internet firms argue that the current laws are working well. Google testified that it received 5 million takedown

notices, mostly for YouTube, in 2011 and took down 75 percent of the material. They also point to the growth of paid sites for movies and music such as iTunes, Netflix and Amazon.

Studios, they argue, should spend less time hunting down copyright violators and more time innovating new ways of selling content for small payments like those on iTunes.

One alternative approach, backed by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., is to use the U.S. International Trade Commission to investigate intellectual property complaints and to use federal tariff laws for enforcement.

This story was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.

William H. Freivogel is director of the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a professor at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.

Keeping Jewish Light Burning Continued from Page 25

“Ellen has brought in editorial discipline,” he said. “I had been kind of spoiled for 35 and a half years, where nobody really touched my copy.”

Even before joining the Light in 1969, Cohn had been editor of Student Life at Washington University and The Writ, the student paper of the university’s school of law, where he earned a law degree.

“So when I stopped being editor, I realized I benefited a lot from Ellen being a very good and judicious editor,” Cohn said.

Since the Light is a not-for-profit organization, financing has always been a challenge. Born in 1947 as the “St. Louis Light,” the public relations arm of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis, the paper was funded mostly by the Federation. In March 1963, a group of highpowered community leaders decided the paper should have its own identity, and the St. Louis Jewish Light emerged.

From 1963 to 1969, the paper could still be perceived to be the Federation’s PR arm because it was run by the Federation’s PR chief, Jeff Fisher (not to be confused with the new St. Louis Rams head coach). When Fisher moved away in 1969, Cohn, then an assistant to St. Louis County Supervisor Lawrence K. Roos,

Page 32 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2012

was recruited to be the editor. After Cohn’s handover in 2004 to a new chief executive officer/publisher, there was a brief period of staff and leadership changes. By the time Levin came in, the financial situation was changing rapidly.

After much planning, the trustees notified subscribers that paid subscriptions would begin in summer 2011.

“We had some skeptics who said it won’t work in this day and age,” said Levin, who also has experience in not-forprofit administration. “Because we proved first that we were trying to substantially improve content and provide

Features more content, I think people trusted us and believed us.”

A 52-week subscription costs $36 for Federation donors.

Discounts are available for senior citizens, students and first-time Federation donors.

Subscribers also may donate to “Spread the Light,” a special fund to help cover subscriptions for low-income readers. The current printed circulation is approximately 10,000 with an estimated 18,000 to 20,000 readers.

The website had 35,000 page views December 2011.

About 70 to 80 percent of the paper’s budget comes from advertising and 7 percent currently comes from the Federation, he said. Another new income source has made it possible to improve the paper’s content. “We have been much more aggressive about getting grants to help us fund good journalism,” Futterman said.

A grant from the Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis funded a 2010 series on hate crimes that the Light ran in cooperation with the online St. Louis Beacon and St. Louis Public Radio (KWMU-FM).

“The Faces of Hate” featured a two-week series of 15 stories that appeared in both the Light and the Beacon. The series won an award from the National Jewish Press Association.

“We choose consciously to focus on some areas of social justice that we think resonate with the Jewish community,” Levin said.

Another grant funds “Can We Talk,” an ongoing quarterly series that explores a specific topic in depth through articles, an editorial, community opinions and a panel discussion open to the entire community, Jewish and otherwise.

The series is a joint project with the Jewish Community Center and the Jewish Community Relations Council.

The next “Can We Talk” (set for March 19) was how the Jewish community cares for people with mental illness and developmental disabilities.

“We’ve tried to meld our journalistic responsibility with our collaborative responsibility within the community,” Levin said. “Because resources are precious, we want to make sure they go as far as they can toward very important topics.

One of those important topics is Israel, and readers have differing opinions.

“The Light has consistently supported a two-state solution of Israel and a Palestinian state, as long as the security and safety of both can be assured,” Levin said. “There are a huge number of opinions about issues surrounding Israel, and we do our utmost to publish a wide variety of perspectives from locals and from other voices in the United States, overseas and Israel itself.”

Joan Lipkin is one reader who appreciates coverage of such topics. “I think it is important to understand the culture of a community in which you live,” she said. “The Light has run so many excellent features — everything from Jews and the Civil War, to the coverage of Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ ``Death of Klinghoffer’’ to the annual ‘Unsung Heroes’ magazine. It is a complicated time to be a Jew and to try to sort through the complexity of issues in the Middle East.

The Light helps to ground me in my Jewish identity, both on a local and wider level.”

With only 15 people on staff, seven of them full-time, the Light is a “lean machine,” Futterman says. She does much of the writing, along with Cohn and free-lancer Dave Baugher, who briefly served as editor before Futterman arrived. She has brought on a bevy of free-lancers with wellknown bylines including Eric Mink, Patricia Corrigan and Cliff Froehlich. Levin and Cohn write the editorials, which are then approved by an editorial committee consisting of members of the Board of Trustees. Plans for the continued evolution of the Light include a new focus in 2012 on “Israel Alive,” featuring stories on the cultural life of Israel, unrelated to war or politics.

“The Jewish Light will continue to serve the community, both in print and online,” said Cohn. “I think there’s a need for the print edition at least for the next 10 or 20 years and I hope beyond.”

Eileen P. Duggan is a free-lance writer/editor and a publications specialist in St. Louis.

Winter 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 33

Features Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns Continued from Page 26

Red Smith, New York Herald Tribune, 1951: “Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead.

Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.”

Dave Barry, Local Daily News, 1981: “I argue very well.

Ask any of my remaining friends.”

Molly Ivins, Dallas Times-Herald, 1987: “When in the course of human events one is called upon to explain Lubbock art, the oxymoron, to San Francisco, the city of sophisticates, one might well take a dive.”

Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press, 2000: “One night. One town. One bullet. One kid.”

Eugene Patterson, Atlanta Constitution, 1963: “A Negro

John Leonard, New York Times, 1977: “My father sang tenor, drank rye and died young.”

Flap with CJR Continued from Page 27

Rebuttal from Klotzer to C JR Editor Hoyt: You are wrong. Please review any of the issues of the journal, you will find on top: “The St. Louis Journalism Review Presents:” Roy Malone, a veteran investigative St. Louis reporter, as before, is in charge of St. Louis regional items. Other editors are in charge of other departments. Yes, after consultation with everybody, it was agreed to add the name Gateway Journalism Review that it would reflect a wider circulation.

At the St. Louis Journalism Review we were delighted that SIUC would take over SJR. Indeed, the transfer agreement stipulates that the name will be retained. However, after discussions with marketing people and others, it was decided to add the name Gateway.

As an outsider, your perception fails to appreciate that we all welcome the expansion, it does not reflect cessation of one journal and start of a new journal. At today’s meeting of a media literacy association, I mentioned your error and everybody moaned and laughed.

Your evaluation is very superficial. Although you may not want to correct your misstatement, only the key people involved, such as Dean Gary Kolb, Director William Freivogel and this writer, are the people who will decide whether SJR/GJR is still alive.

Following CJR’s offer to publish a letter-to-the-editor, we provided a letter making the above points, which was published, with CJR adding this response: “It is good news that the spirit of the St. Louis Journalism Review lives on under a different name, business model, institutional host, and mission. For those reasons, we chose not to run a correction but are happy that we could provide our readers with more of the story.”

CJR’s comment once again ignores the substance of my comments above. It must be difficult to admit an error.

Charles L. Klotzer is the founder of the St. Louis Journalism Review.

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