GJR

Fall 2010 • Volume 40 Number 319 • $7.00

St. Louis Journalism Review Presents:

G TEWAY J O UR NALISM REVIEW

St. Louis Gets A Beacon for Online Journalism

by Margaret Wolf Freivogel • Page 14

MinnPost Takes Journalism to the People

by Joel Kramer • Page 16

Daley Departure Tells a Lot About the Media

by John McCarron • Page 6

SJR Spotlight An Outsider’s Vision of the Arch is Ignored

by Roy Malone • Page 27

gatewayjr.org

New Media Rising: Journalism in a Changing Online Landscape

Page 2 • Gateway Journalism Review • Fall 2010

G TEWAY W J O U R N A LI S M R EVI ESJR An

Charles Klotzer Founder William A. Babcock Editor Roy Malone St. Louis Editor Mallory Henkelman Creative Director

P ublication b

William Freivogel Publisher Scott Lambert Managing Editor Jennifer Butcher Development Director Vicki Kreher Business Consultant

Fall 2010 • Vol. 40 No. 319 • $7.00 This Issue:

New Media Rising:

14 • S t. Louis Gets A Beacon for Online Journalism

by Margaret Wolf Freivogel

16 • MinnPost Takes Journalism to the People

by Joel Kramer

18 • N onprofit Newsrooms Provide Outlet for Journalists

by Brant Houston

20 • Patch, the Rapidian Provide Different Ends to Hyperlocal

by Scott Lambert

Wenjing Xie Marketing Director

Sam Robinson Advertising/Distribution

Jason Allen Editorial Cartoonist

Steve Edwards Cover Artist/Cartoonist

23 • Juan Williams - The Macro View

Michael Rzeznik Web Assistant

24 • Juan Williams - The Micro View

Diana Soliwon Web Designer

Journalism in a Changing Online Landscape

22 • Q & A with Michele McLellan

by William A. Babcock

by William H. Freivogel

Board of Advisers: Frank Absher, Jim Kirchherr, Lisa Bedian, Ed Bishop, Tammy Merrett, David Corrigan, Michael Murray, Rita Csapo-Sweet, Steve Perron, Eileen Duggan, Joe Pollack, Michael D. Sorkin, David P. Garino, Rick Stoff, Ted Gest, Fred Sweet, William Greenblatt, Lynn Venhaus, Daniel Hellinger, Robert A. Cohn, Michael E. Kahn, John P. Dubinsky, Gerald Early, Paul Schoomer, Dr. Moisy Shopper, Ray Hartmann, Ken Solomon Published by School of Journalism College of Mass Communication and Media Arts Dean: Gary Kolb School of Journalism Director: William H. Freivogel

Features 6 • Daley Departure Tells a Lot About the Media

by John McCarron

8 • Is Journalism Going to the Dogs?

by Steve Hallock

10 • NPR Distorts Citizens United Decision

by William Freivogel

11 • Changing the Spokesman-Ethics Code

by Rebecca Tallent

Gateway Journalism Review Mail Code 6601 1100 Lincoln Drive Communications Building 1236 Carbondale, IL 62901 To Subscribe: 618-453-0122 gatewayjr.org/subscribe

Subscription rates: $25 (4 issues).

Foreign subscriptions higher depending upon country.

SJR Spotlight 26 • Pistor ’s Eyes Provide Impetus for a N ose for News

by Roy Malone

27 • O utsider ’s Vision of Arch is Ignored

by Roy Malone

30 • Eco Arch: Right Project in the Right Place The Gateway Journalism Review GJR (USPS 738-450 ISSN: 0036-2973) is published quarterly, by Southern Illinois University Carbondale, School of Journalism, College of Mass Communication and Media Arts, a non-profit entity.

The office of publication is SIUC School of Journalism, 1100 Lincoln Drive, Mail Code 6601, Carbondale, IL 62901 Periodical postage paid at Carbondale, IL and additional mailing offices. Please enclose stamped, selfaddressed envelope with manuscript.

Copyright © 2010 by the Gateway Journalism Review. Indexed in the Alternative Press Index. Allow one month for address changes.

POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to Gateway Journalism Review William Freivogel School of Journalism 1100 Lincoln Drive, Mail Code 6601 Carbondale, IL 62901.

by Charles L. Klotzer

31 • Journalism of Yesteryear

Every Issue 35 • Letters to the Editor 36 • M edia Notes

Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 3

Letter from the Editor Forty years ago Charles Klotzer fathered a new journalism review.

Concern about the state of journalism certainly was in the water at that time as Columbia Journalism Review and Washington Journalism Review (later renamed American Journalism Review) also were born respectively in 1961 and 1977.

These journalism reviews were strikingly different from one another with CJR focusing much of its attention on New York City’s fertile media breeding ground, and AJR keeping a close eye on political journalism emanating from the nation’s capital and SJR eyeing the media – especially the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – in the Gateway City with a particularly narrow lens.

Such journalism reviews (more have sprung up from time to time in the United States and around the globe) have been important tools in America’s media accountability toolbox, alongside ethics codes, ombudsmen, news councils, media critics and public/civic journalism initiatives. While the Constitution of the United States gives the media the legal right to regularly muck-up, often with legal impunity, we the people have the responsibility to encourage the media to provide a healthy fare in its marketplace of ideas.

To this end, SJR has regularly prodded the media in St. Louis to set a nourishing news, information, marketing, public relations and advertising table for its citizens – healthful journalism commentary writ large, as it were. But the public’s media palate has expanded where “mass media” have become at the same time more massive, hyperlocal, social, international and electronically accessible, to the point where even defining what – or who – a journalist is has become nearly impossible.

Addressing such mass media changes, providing its ever-expanding audience with practical, useful analysis and remaining financially in the black is indeed a tall order for any journalism review. To meet this challenge, SJR is taking a number of steps, including:

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• C hanging its name to Gateway Journalism Review, indicating that the Gateway City remains an integral part of an ever-growing and changing journalism and mass media scene.

• E xpanding its geographical reach to encompass a Midwest that stretches from Ohio to Oklahoma and from North Dakota to Arkansas – and beyond.

• L ocating its production center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, thus enabling GJR to draw upon the considerable student and faculty resources of SIUC’s College of Mass Communication and Media Arts’ School of Journalism.

• P ublishing GJR on a quarterly basis, thus reducing printing and delivery costs while at the same time making it possible to enhance the quality and length of each print magazine issue AND • P ublishing online with content that can change and be updated on a daily basis, thus better informing current readers and attracting a growing new audience.

Is this a tall order? You betcha, as they say in Minnesota, a state now well within GJR’s new orbit, and as you can see from our story on the Twin Cities’ MinnPost.com. Are we excited – and a bit scared?

Yep, as they say in my native Ohio. Do we promise to do our very best to provide you with a responsible print and online publication? Yes, as they say across an expanded Midwest – and beyond.

So welcome to Gateway Journalism Review (gatewayjr.org). We look forward to hearing from you.

William A. Babcock, Editor

Letter from the Publisher Persistent. Above all else, Charles Klotzer is persistent.

If he hadn’t been, the St. Louis Journalism Review never would have made it to its 40th birthday or its new home in the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

It’s not surprising that Charles is persistent. His family was among the last Jews to escape Berlin in 1939.

Quotas to the West were filled, so Klotzer escaped to the east, arriving in Shanghai where he attended high school.

After arriving in the United States, Klotzer took a job as a reporter for Paul Simon, then editor of the Troy, Ill. newspaper. Residents would sometimes come by the newspaper office, Klotzer recalled years later, to see what a Jew looked like. Klotzer later supported Sen. Simon for president.

In 1970, Charles and his wife Rose began publishing the St. Louis Journalism Review. I went to work for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the next year and soon found myself in a living room with Charles and others planning early issues.

I was gratified when Charles agreed to publish a story I had written about the cozy connection between a St. Louis judge and the publisher of the Globe-Democrat, G. Duncan Bauman. I reported that Bauman had been the beneficiary of guardian ad litem appointments from the court. The Post-Dispatch didn’t want to criticize the publisher of the other paper in town, so it was left to Charles to print it.

Still, SJR often annoyed me. When I was in the Washington Bureau of the Post-Dispatch I got annoyed enough to call up Charles and insist he take my name off the masthead. Later, when I wrote endorsement editorials, it steamed me that SJR criticized me for endorsing conservative Rep. Todd Akin in races against Democratic incompetents.

Of course, SJR wouldn’t have been doing its work if it weren’t annoying Post-Dispatch editors like myself.

Post-Dispatch editor William Woo commented once that he often felt like SJR was sitting in the room watching what he did as editor.

Now we are starting a new era at SJR.

It begins

with the birth of a new magazine, the Gateway Journalism Review. Why Gateway? Because we want to remember that the roots of the review will always be in St. Louis, but also that St. Louis is the gateway to a broader Midwest. We will expand our focus to 16 Midwest states and beyond, while retaining our gaze on St. Louis media events.

My job is to make sure that the Gateway Journalism Review and St. Louis Journalism Review prosper. I also have taken on the responsibility of ensuring the editorial independence of the publication.

To help ensure that independence, I will recuse myself from any coverage of the St. Louis Beacon, the new online publication that my wife edits and to which I contribute. I cautioned against making the Beacon the cover of the first edition of GJR, but the editor and staff did what editors and staffs often do to publishers – they ignored me.

The editor is William Babcock, our professor of media ethics who worked for the Christian Science Monitor and had worked in and headed journalism programs from Minnesota to California. Babcock has deep roots in the Midwest, having grown up near Cleveland, graduated from Principia College in Elsah, Ill., gotten his Ph.D. from SIUC and headed the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota. Assisting Babcock are three talented graduate students, Scott Lambert, himself a veteran sports writer back at SIUC to get his Ph.D., Jennifer Butcher, who founded a news student magazine on our campus, and Sandra “Sam” Robinson, who owned her own newspaper in Kansas.

The cover of our first issue is a reminder of the new media landscape that is emerging. A vibrant journalism review is crucial to this new environment where video posted online can lead to a young student jumping off a bridge and where anonymous postings to web sites shed more heat than light on public life.

It is the role of a journalism review to make sure that news organizations don’t forget the ethical standards of professional journalism in their headlong rush into the future.

We owe it to Charles to continue to pursue this job of media criticism with the tenacity he has shown for the past four decades.

William Freivogel, Publisher Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 5

Features Daley Departure Tells Readers a Lot About the Media B y J o hn M c C arron The Chicago Tribune’s banner headline on Tuesday, Sept. 7, the day Mayor Richard M. Daley announced he would not seek a record seventh term, read: “City wants $1 billion more for O’Hare Plan.”

This signaled two things, one obvious, the other less so … but worth exploring for it helps explain why Daley is calling it quits after 21 years in office.

First and obvious, it shows the Trib didn’t have a clue Daley was about to pull the plug. No embarrassment there. Neither did the Chicago Sun-Times nor any of the TV or radio news shops that cover City Hall day-to-day. There were no leaks, no exclusives, not even an unattributed hint in a gossip column.

Of course there weren’t. Relations between Rich Daley and the Chicago media have grown testy bordering on antagonistic. By the time he and his family decided “It’s time,” the mayor and his staff literally had no favorite scribes with whom to dish.

At his press conference that morning, after making his formal announcement, Daley grinned in seeming delight that he put one over on the press corps, several of whom were caught by surprise, arriving late, scrambling to catch up.

Which brings up the other telling aspect of that Tribune banner story, the one about the mayor seeking more city bonds to continue expansion of the Midwest’s busiest airport.

“Like a poker player who has gone all in on a bet that

Page 6 • Gateway Journalism Review • Fall 2010

is too big to lose,” it began, the Daley administration needs $1 billion in bonds to ”buy time and keep the project going” while it tries “to persuade the airport’s two largest tenants, American and United airlines, to sign on.”

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Even Michael Sneed, the SunTimes’ in-the-know columnist who can charm pearls from an oyster, was so unaware as to be starting an outof-town vacation on that post-Labor Day Tuesday. She later admitted hearing the news from a bellman at an Arizona resort hotel.

Relations between Rich Daley and the Chicago media have grown testy bordering on antagonistic.

Features

There are several reasons Daley is hanging it up.

But among them, surely, is the mayor no longer gets the benefit of the doubt. That says something about our journalism, not just in Chicago, but across a nation where taxpayers are rattling tea cups about the dumb or venal stuff their governments are reportedly doing.

The fact is, Chicago, under Mayor Richard Michael Daley, has performed considerably better than most big northern cities. The dramatic population losses of the 70s and 80s have been stanched; major corporate headquarters have been recruited (Boeing) to all but offset those lost to consolidation (Amoco) or flight (Sears Roebuck); downtown is revitalized and so many college kids, yuppies and empty-nesters have moved in that, by itself, it would rank among the state’s largest cities.

Out-of-town media, not surprisingly, have been wowed by Daley’s performance. A few years ago Time magazine rated him the best of the “best” big city mayors; the conservative and internationally circulated Economist, in a lengthy evaluation, found Daley’s city “has succeeded better in reversing decline than anyone else.”

The local prints, however, have waxed cynical in their evaluations of “Mayor Short Shanks” – a derision coined by the most cynical of all – Tribune columnist John Kass.

Columnists will be columnists, but even the news desks now approach stories about City Hall as though it’s mainly about patronage and self-interest, who’s getting the fat contracts and cushy city jobs. Example: All the while Daley’s most successful city beautification project—Millennium Park—was rising on the lakefront where once was a dormant rail yard, the big running story was about cracks discovered in concrete support pylons … and that the project was running well in excess of its original $150 million cost estimate.

(The cracks were fixed, and the park’s ultimate cost, though double early estimates, was more than offset by corporate contributions—such as the Frank Gehry-designed stage and the reflective kidney bean—

as well as by the jolt the spectacular new park gave to downtown property values and tourism.)

This isn’t to say Daley should be beyond criticism.

It’s good the newspapers exposed sweetheart city deals for hired trucks and wrought iron fencing. It’s good they exposed an illegally rigged patronage hiring system and questionable loans by city pension funds to real estate development involving Daley relatives and friends.

It’s a problem, though, when young reporters assigned to cover the vast and complex workings of local government approach the task like so many wannabe Mike Roykos, the wonderfully wry columnist who argued the city’s Latin motto should be changed from “Urbs in horto” to “Ubi est mea?” … as in where’s mine?

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...Even the news desks now approach stories about City Hall as though it’s mainly about patronage and self-interest.

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It was a well-reported story, to be sure, but it had that hide-your-wallet-here-comes-Daley tone now typical of most City Hall news coverage. “We the taxpayers may end up having to foot the bill if the airlines don’t want the extra capacity,” one dependably anti-Daley alderman was quoted as saying, neatly summarizing the story’s skeptical bent.

No journalist wants to come across as naïve. But just as people need to understand the complexities of public issues to function intelligently as citizens, so must journalists understand that cynicism is no substitute for understanding.

Chicago needs to expand O’Hare. The project is key to the city’s—and maybe even the Midwest’s— aspirations as a global economic player. Rich Daley isn’t perfect, but he “gets” such big stuff … stuff like O’Hare’s potential to be our region’s over-the-Pole gateway to China.

Pray his departure inspires Chicago journalists to get the big stuff also, rather than just getting Daley.

A 40-year veteran of Chicago media, John McCarron now teaches, consults and writes freelance on urban affairs.

G TEWAY J O U R N ALI S M R E VI E W

In the know... in the now. gatewayjr.org Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 7

Features Is Journalism Going to the Dogs?

Opinion Piece B y S teve H a llock

But another factor is in play, one that can be attributed to basic supply-and-demand functions taught in introductory economics courses. Owners and managers of traditional media should take a hard look at their “product” — as news has come to be called — to discern if it is supplying not only what the consumers demand, but what they need. An argument can be made that beyond fulfilling the public’s lust for celebrity, sports and sensational crimes — it is not.

The mainstream media have forsaken the watchdog role in favor of what media analysts call the attack dog role. Except for the occasional watchdog story: exposure of illegal government wiretapping of citizens’ cell phones, of torture of federal prisoners during terrorist-related interrogation, of corporate foul-ups such as massive oil spills or dangerous automobiles the mainstream media seldom play the traditional role of watchdog. Instead, the mainstream media favor a new role; that of guard dog. Media analysts Clarice N. Olien, George A. Donohue and Phillip J. Tichenor defined the role years ago as a guard dog on behalf of “groups having the power and influence to create and command their own security systems.”

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Newspaper and media experts have spent decades analyzing the decline of old-fashioned journalism and have identified the following problems: changing audience habits and consumers plugging into the Internet and new/alternative media to obtain information and to communicate. This contributed to the crumbling of the advertising-supported model of traditional journalism as ad dollars and circulation have migrated to the Internet.

Where do people get their news?

If the mainstream media don’t rely on their traditional role of watchdog, do they lose their credibility? Other sources will step in to fill this role.

During last year’s G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, I analyzed coverage by local and national press to ascertain how agendas of the media compared to the official agendas of the summit’s participating governments and to those of the thousands of activists and protesters who marched, demonstrated and rioted during the summit. I also tracked the sources the newspapers used.

The analysis documented that official sources dominated newspaper coverage of summit events, from the doings of government officials behind closed doors to the cultural and social functions and the staged and impromptu marches and protests on the streets. Designated spokespeople of agencies and organizations — including those representing protest or dissent groups — government representatives and law enforcement officials accounted for 71 percent of all sources in the summit coverage of the three national newspapers. Non-official sources comprised just 24 percent. This chasm was even wider among the national newspapers, on which the majority of the nation’s news consumers relied.

These findings affirm what media critics have contended about the modern media for some time, that news, in the words of Olien, Donohue and Tichenor,

Features “is primarily about those at, or near, the top of the power hierarchies and those low in the hierarchies who threaten the top. . . Media organizations and news gathering routines reinforce this power orientation, through selection of sources that are available, efficient and authoritative.”

Mainstream media cover official sources. Those seeking news from the viewpoint of the unofficial and dissident sources were left largely on their own, to Internet blogs and to the alternative press for more thorough reporting.

Indeed, the coverage of Pittsburgh’s City Paper — a free weekly popular among the city’s cultural, college and younger crowd — was starkly different not only from the national press but from the two Pittsburgh dailies in terms of framing and sourcing.

Its front-page color photos of helmeted gun-toting police, a gas-mask-wearing observer and marching monks focused on the police-state regime the city had become during the summit and that the national press largely ignored, briefed or buried. This included vehicle traffic channeled away from downtown, protesters corralled and controlled with gas and loud audio devices, and the requirement for permits even to march and gather in the streets. The story inside told of the protests and arrests from the viewpoint of those detained and those observing, using official sources for some information but also as counterpoint information contradicted by the primary sources of the reportage — those affected by and participating in the activities.

This begs the question: Why didn’t mainstream media report this? How does this affect mainstream media’s credibility?

The readership that the traditional press needs to reach, the demand that it is failing to supply, is slipping away to alternative media that include weekly newspapers and Internet blogs. These are the forums where the common citizens gather and discuss the agendas governments and policy-makers set and big media reports.

And this is occurring at a time when a vibrant and challenging daily press is vital.

Newspapers and media companies seeking to broaden or reclaim their franchise need to reconnect with the citizens who comprise the populist mood of the nation. They should go to public health clinics and wait in line along with the patients to report firsthand on the treatment doled out to citizens in those

venues. They should emulate the method of Barbara Ehrenreich; take minimum-wage jobs and report on working conditions. They should rent an apartment in the ghetto and write about living conditions there.

This is the kind of reporting muckraking journalists did in the early 20th century, before the monied interests bought out the muckraking magazines.

We’re finding bits of that reportage again in online newspapers where stories rely on individual reporters.

The few remaining mainstream independent media voices today are part of, rather than apart from, the culture they oversee. They rely on collegeeducated, middle-class reporters and correspondents who live and barbecue out in the suburbs to report on news agendas that have been narrowed to official government proclamations and choreographed events, and sports and celebrity news.

The result, to echo the findings of the Kerner Commission’s 1968 investigation of press coverage of ghetto riots, is a perception by the public at large that media organizations are instruments of the predominant power structure — a finding that remains valid today about a reporting structure that leaves a whole lot of citizens without a powerful media voice.

This could explain why the media receives such low credibility ratings, why so many young people prefer to get their news from The Daily Show or Steven Colbert, or why conservative talk radio has done such a good job at painting the press as liberal while conservative ownership rakes in billions.

The consequences of this nearly century-long shift in agendas and story framing away from the masses and toward the power brokers are all negative. This trend leads to increased and sometimes violent protest activity because loud voices can more easily command media and government attention. It leads to lopsided, unbalanced reporting on issues that need probing, contextual and behind-the-scene storytelling.

Most important, it leads to decreased credibility due, ironically, to reporting methods designed to ensure credibility. Ultimately, it leads to a democracy that suffers because of a citizenry that has become disconnected from its elected officials and unelected guard dogs.

Steve Hallock, a longtime newspaper writer and editor, is director of graduate studies for the School of Communication at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Penn.

Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 9

Features NPR Distorts Citizens United Decision W i l l i am F reivogel Conventional wisdom is taking hold in the news media and the political arena that the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United decision has opened the floodgates to big, secret money donations to conservative Republican candidates.

Legal experts say conventional wisdom is misleading and overstated. Even before Citizens United, corporations could make unlimited corporate contributions to advocacy groups.

“Citizens United has become a whipping boy for criticism of money in politics,” wrote Bruce La Pierre, a Washington University Law School professor and expert on campaign finance law. “Many doors were left wide open before Citizens United and corporations and wealthy individuals were taking advantage of them.

Citizens United’s door is not particularly attractive to most corporations. So corporations are using other vehicles to support candidates - other vehicles available before Citizens United.”

In Citizens United, the court ruled 5-4 that corporations could use unlimited treasury funds to purchase ads advocating the election of a particular candidate in the days leading up to an election. The court tossed out a provision of the McCain-Feingold law that had barred those expenditures, concluding the law violated the corporation’s First Amendment rights.

But even before Citizens United, corporations were able to make unlimited contributions of treasury funds to advocacy groups that placed issue ads criticizing a candidate for a stand on an issue. The court ruled in 2006 that a not-for-profit Wisconsin corporation opposing abortion could run ads criticizing Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., in the period just before the election. The only change that Citizens United made was to allow such ads to advocate specifically for the election or defeat of a candidate.

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Legal experts say conventional wisdom is misleading and overstated.

President Barack Obama and campaign finance reform groups like Democracy 21 have been highly critical of Citizens United. Much mainstream media coverage of big contributions by groups associated

Page 10 • Gateway Journalism Review • Fall 2010

with Karl Rove, the GOP operative, picked up the refrain, asserting that Citizens United opened the door to big, undisclosed contributions to Rove’s groups, which have in turn spent the money on Senate races like the one in Missouri. On NPR and other public radio programs the misleading references to Citizens United were almost a daily feature in the days running up to the election.

During his State of the Union speech, shortly after the January decision, Obama blasted the Supreme Court, with some of its justices in attendance, for having “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections.” He repeated this claim during the recent campaign, maintaining that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was using foreign contributions to fund political ads against Democrats, a charge the chamber denies.

Critics say the president overstated his case.

Columbia University Law Professor Henry Paul Monaghan said this to Adam Liptak in Columbia University Law Magazine: “Citizens United is very far from a radical departure from existing precedent or an act of judicial usurpation. The court has been unfairly excoriated by the media, and members of the court treated rather poorly by Obama during his State of the Union address.”

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, also points to the exaggeration of Citizens United in an article in the Yale Law & Policy Review. He wrote: “Perceived corporate power has spurred a recent populist backlash, on both political left and political right. In this atmosphere, the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, granting corporations the right to spend directly on express political advocacy, has become the target of particularly heated critique . . . although the decision was a bold stroke in many ways, its impact on the scope of permissible campaign finance regulation is far less substantial than commonly assumed.”

David Roland, a lawyer at the Show-Me Institute, wrote in an email that “it would be an oversimplication to suggest that the Supreme Court’s decision accounts for all of the additional political spending this year.” But he added, that Citizens United has had a

Features Richard L. Hasen, the Loyola law professor who writes the Election Law blog, argues that Citizens United with other factors has contributed to this year’s large anonymous political expenditures. In an article in Slate last month, he wrote that Citizens United, “as well as a combination of lower court cases, Federal Election Commission action, and byzantine tax rules has led to record spending on this election and the least amount of disclosure of its sources since Watergate.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority decision in Citizens United left the door open to Congress passing a law requiring disclosure of corporate contributions, but Republicans blocked a bill to do that.

Much of the big money this year is being funneled through 501(c)4 groups to limit disclosure.

Rove’s Crossroads GPS group, which is advertising in major Senate races, is a 501(c)4 group. It doesn’t need to disclose its donors, but it also must make sure that it spends the bulk of its money on issues.

The ad involving Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan is a good example. Lawyers say it can be considered an issue ad, rather than a political ad advocating her defeat. Instead of using words like elect or defeat, its criticism of her support of Obama’s health

law concludes with the words, “Tell Carnahan to get in touch with Missourians and support the health-care challenge.”

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psychological impact of alleviating “the concerns that many organizations had about the potential for running afoul of the laws.”

The court has been unfairly excoriated by the media...

Democracy 21, the campaign finance group, has filed a complaint with the IRS claiming that Rove’s group “is operating in violation of its tax status because it has a primary purpose of participating in political campaigns in support of, or in opposition to, candidates for public office.”

Roger A. Greenbaum, a California lawyer, said that the importance of Citizens United may be less its practical impact and more what it says about the Supreme Court.

“I wonder if the problem is not so much the substantive change effected by Citizens United,” he wrote in an email, “as the underlying crudity of the exercise of power by the majority to which Justice Anthony Kennedy was enlisted. The developments that worry me most . . .are those brought out by Justice John Paul Stevens in his Citizens United dissent: that the Roberts-ScaliaAlito-Thomas faction is rash and activist in its determination to alter constitutional law, belying its claim to wear the mantle of judicial restraint.”

Changing the Spokesman-Review’s Ethics Code R eb e cca Ta llent Between 2005 and 2006, the Spokesman-Review experienced a firestorm of ethical criticism from its readers and the journalism community. In addition to the normal ethical challenges facing a daily metropolitan newspaper, Editor Steve A. Smith said the paper went through the troubling investigation of Spokane Mayor Jim West on abuse of power charges in 2005 that also involved alleged sexual relationships with young men.

In the West series, some people complained the newspaper used entrapment or unethical means to gather the data, creating a major controversy for the paper.

In addition, the newspaper’s publisher, Stacy Cowles, was embroiled in a controversy involving his

purchase of city property through the Cowles’ Co. for the creation of a new parking garage for the upscale shopping center in downtown Spokane called River Park Square (RPS).

New social media technology was also racing into the newsroom. In 2006 Smith said he was bothered by readers’ blogging on his paper’s Web site. Ethically, he asked himself, can bloggers and others who submit comments and opinion to the newspaper be brought under the company’s ethics code to prevent legal or ethical problems?

That question, along with other issues which surfaced during 2005-2006, started a change in the Spokesman’s newsroom ethics code. The changes, many of which reflected the lessons learned in the West and

Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 11

Features Because of issues such as the West story and RPS, Smith said he wanted all persons who worked in the Spokesman’s newsroom not only to read the code, but to sign a memo stating they had read and understood this code, and the penalty for violating it could be as severe as termination.

The Spokesman-Review is one of the few locally family-owned newspapers of its size in the United States. In August 2006, when work began on the new code, the paper was listed as 108th in the United States by the Core Based Statistical Area (as determined by the federal Office of Management and Budget) in terms of size. The company’s last ethics code revision was in 2001 and did not include new technology.

Creation of the new code of ethics was eventually broken into two separate parts. The initial section, led by the paper’s editorial page editor Doug Floyd, consisted of 10 people from the newsroom who began by looking at the existing code. After the work began, Floyd said, “At some point, it became apparent that a more thorough job was called for.”

Also in 2006, the newspaper asked its ombudsman, Gordon Jackson, a journalism professor at Whitworth University in Spokane, to work with Smith to develop the plan for creating the new code. Smith brought in a team from the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and the American Press Institute to start a discussion on excellence in news reporting and how to translate that into ethical decision-making.

A draft was readied and printed both in the newspaper and online for readers to review and make comments. Then the team went back to refine the document, Floyd said.

Although the team sent drafts to all employees asking for input, some staff members said they did not read them. Former copy desk editor Richard Miller said he paid little attention to drafts of the new code.

“Even the final version didn’t have much impact on the copy desk,” he said. “Most of the copy desk’s work is production-oriented, and that doesn’t involve the kinds of issues addressed by the code.”

In January, 2008, the Spokesman-Review began organizing a series of three town hall-style meetings to gather public comment. Smith said 22 people came to the meetings in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho,

Page 12 • Gateway Journalism Review • Fall 2010

noting the severe weather that year probably did inhibit some people from traveling. Smith said the comments were overwhelmingly favorable, with a few critics complaining the code did not go far enough or expressed belief it would be ignored by the paper’s management.

The result was a 20-page document that covers 32 separate entries, from accuracy to blogging, stereotyping, freelance work, fairness, attributing works of others and the Web.

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RPS controversies, brought about what the crafters said is a new comprehensive code.

We were ethical before the code was adopted

In the forward, Smith highlighted the importance of new technology: “This code revision, for the first time, takes into account ethical land mines presented by our online journalism, including blogs. The code makes a strong statement about the newsroom’s independence from special interests and, importantly, its independence from the newspaper’s owners when covering their activities and business interests.”

Prior to implementation, Smith and Jackson said they were both concerned about blogging by newspaper staff members and readers. The new code outlines basic responsibilities of bloggers using the Spokesman-Review-hosted sites, and lists ethical issues of concern to employees who may host a personal blog or write on an outside blog.

The 2008 code states: “The laws of libel, defamation and privacy apply to staff-written or produced blogs in the same way they apply to the print edition.” Citizen bloggers also are cautioned to write in good taste, avoid profanity or offensive material and to be mindful of photographs or graphs that may violate copyright or be in poor taste. Non-journalist bloggers who attach links to other websites are told that links to a site with adult or offensive content must first be approved by the paper’s editor or managing editor.

In addition, the code cautions employees who write personal blogs they should be careful not to “threaten our credibility and objectivity. Reporters should not write ‘personally’ about issues they cover professionally. All staff members must avoid partisan political statements or positions, including the endorsement of candidates or ballot measures. In short, all rules relating to political activity and conflicts of interest apply to personal blogs.”

Features Because technology changes rapidly, the team addressed future technology under the Web section, calling for the same rules and guidelines to apply to new innovations. The code also recognized differences in defamation and privacy in third-party postings on blogs sponsored by the newspaper. In addition, it gives editors the authority to block or pull posts dealing with issues of privacy, obscenity, defamatory content or personal attacks.

The Spokesman-Review employs a number of freelance writers, primarily for the outlying areas in its Voices section, many of whom, Graham said, do not have training as journalists. During the code creation, an incident happened with one such free-lance writer, in which the correspondent invented most of her column, an act which was not caught by the editors. Because of this and other prospective problems, the code team added a section to address the specific responsibilities of editors when dealing with writers who may not be trained journalists. This section requires editors to ensure the correspondents are in compliance with the new code.

The new code details specific requirements of the news staff under 28 various reporting categories. These follow the same guidelines as many other codes of ethics, including the Society of Professional Journalists’ code.

On May 1, 2008, the Spokesman-Review officially began using the new code of ethics, placing the entire document in the newspaper and on-line for the readers to see on May 4, 2008. Immediately, a few readers who are regular critics of the newspaper - complained and called the new code a hoax. However, Smith, thenmanaging editor Graham and others defended it as a viable document that is as much for the readers’ benefit as the reporters’.

Smith also invited readers with complaints to contact the newspaper’s ombudsman and said the paper’s philosophy of transparency, online and in person, gives readers additional ways of calling attention to ethical lapses by the newspaper.

But five months later, Smith was gone, having resigned as editor, citing the publisher’s order to reduce the newsroom staff by nearly a quarter. Today, Graham said the entire news staff continues to be obligated the terms of the newspaper’s code of ethics.

Graham added that he uses the code of ethics daily, but said many of the news staff also apply personal ethical considerations with or without a code.

“We were ethical before the code was adopted,” Graham said.

Both Graham and Floyd said there are times as editors when they will automatically defer to the new code of ethics. Graham said it is usually when a possible conflict of interest is questioned; Floyd said from his perspective on the editorial page it is when the Cowles Co. interests are interwoven with public issues about which he editorializes. Neither editor said there is any difference in use or implementation of the code of ethics by the newsroom after the staff reduction in 2008.

Originally scheduled as a six-month project, it took 20 months for the Spokesman-Review to develop and implement a new code of ethics. The detailed final code is comprehensive and allows for future technology to be included, and responses from most of the news staff who answered the questionnaire found they do not believe staff reductions have resulted in any lessening of the code’s impact on news.

Not that this is a perfect code. The length and detail can be unwieldy for some reporters and editors when they want a quick answer. But it is a code that takes multiple issues into account, and the team apparently worked to make it all-inclusive so the different departments within the newsroom do not think they are excluded.

When discussing the code a year after implementation, the editors of the Spokesman-Review said they are committed to the new product and want to keep it as a viable part of their newsroom. Because of the expansive nature of this code, it is likely the editors will be able to maintain the integrity of the current code through both technological changes and shifts in newsroom personnel numbers and delivery systems for a few years ahead.

The Spokesman-Review’s Code of Ethics can be found online at www.spokesmanreview.com/about/ ethicscode/ Rebecca Tallent is an assistant professor at the University of Idaho.

G TEWAY J OU R NA L I S M R E V I E W

What a great gift! Give a subscription, get a discount. gatewayjr.org Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 13

New Media Rising St. Louis Gets A Beacon for Online Journalism M argaret W o l f F reivogel

Can it really be almost three years since we launched the St. Louis Beacon?

Seems like only a few keystrokes ago when associate editor Bob Duffy, general manager Nicole Hollway and I sat down at borrowed tables in KETC’s building, opened our laptops, and our non-profit regional news organization became reality.

Yet so much has changed. Back then, serious online journalism was widely regarded as an oxymoron.

Today, serious independent news sites have multiplied, and nonprofit news organizations are widely regarded as essential to the future of journalism.

In our first three years, Beacon reporters delivered on our promise to provide news that matters to St. Louisans. That includes Jo Mannies’ reporting on politics, Robert Joiner on health, Dale Singer on

Page 14 • Gateway Journalism Review • Fall 2010

education, Mary Delach Leonard on the economy and Kristen Hare on race and immigration, to single out some of the topics we cover. Together, these reporters and more tackled our region’s most sensitive issue in an extraordinary yearlong project called Race, Frankly.

Now, we’re excited to be adding a Washington correspondent Rob Koenig, who will bolster our already robust coverage of issues and politics and who will also appear on St. Louis Public Radio in a new collaboration. Koenig is a native St. Louisan and veteran of Washington reporting having worked in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Washington Bureau two decades ago. The Washington job is one of four jobs we advertised this fall – a sign of confidence in our work and our future and a contrast to the cuts still afflicting most newsrooms.

Moving beyond our startup phase, we are ready

New Media Rising

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to dig in for long-term growth and improvement — Trust is essential for our building a news organization that is both excellent and economically sustainable. Most people currently journalistic mission. think of the Beacon as a Web site (www.stlbeacon.org) or perhaps as an online newspaper. But the vision we to connect the dots among developments, to present have in mind is more innovative. various perspectives on issues and to check assertions We want to serve the public’s needs as journalists against reality. have always done — providing facts, context, analysis The breathless tone so prevalent on most news Web and ways to discuss what it all means. But in doing so, sites can command attention and drive traffic – to a we want to take full advantage of tools that were not point. But a steady diet of mayhem and McNews does previously available or not used to their full potential. not meet people’s very real need to understand the Instead of just a Web site, we see our job as building an challenges and opportunities they face. By focusing on engine of engagement that uses journalism, technology, significant issues and perceptive coverage, the Beacon events and partnerships to arm St. Louisans with aims to give St. Louisans what they need to improve understanding they need to make good decisions. their own lives and the collective life of our region.

On the business side, our goal of economic In the process, we’re building trust — trust that the sustainability requires a similar shift in perspective.

Beacon will be fair, interesting, useful and worthy of In most news organizations, revenue flows from attention. Trust is essential for our journalistic mission. advertising. The emphasis is on drawing a large And by understanding people’s needs and serving audience while holding newsroom costs down — a them well, we’ll also build the foundation for earning combination that makes it easy to understand why crime revenue that will sustain our work. news and celebrity gossip get so much attention.

But the Beacon’s business model grows from the conviction that our most important assets are the excellence of our work and the quality of our engagement with those we serve. To cheapen our content would threaten both our journalistic mission and our bottom line:

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2. Meet people where they are.

Conventional wisdom holds that online news organizations must drive huge amounts of traffic and hold users on site as long as possible. The Beacon wants to meet you where you are in ways you find convenient and useful.

We connect with some area residents through email, Facebook and Twitter. Some people come to our To cheapen our content would events but rarely find us online. And some find our threaten both our journalistic work through partnerships with other organizations, including appearances by Beacon reporters on radio mission and our bottom line. and television. If people never come to our Web site but benefit from our work, then that helps fulfill our In today’s tumultuous media world, these thoughts mission. about the fundamental nature of our work set the Beacon To see how all this works, look at our Race, Frankly apart — from most traditional media organizations and even from many fellow journalistic innovators. At the project. In addition to extensive reporting on our Web Beacon, we believe that wisdom lies in turning much site, we used social media for alerts and discussions. of conventional wisdom on its head. Here are three One month’s coverage – about Kirkwood’s efforts to come to grips with racial issues – was printed and important ways. distributed free around that community thanks to our partnership with Southern Illinois University 1.

Emphasize quality over quantity.

Carbondale.

Conventional wisdom holds that online journalism thrives by providing more, faster. But you can’t slake We initiated a series of barroom conversations, still a reader’s thirst for knowledge with a fire hose of ongoing, where people discuss race in a surprisingly disconnected tidbits. Of course, the Beacon likes to relaxed atmosphere. Partnering with the Missouri report things first. But our goal is more understanding, History Museum, we co-sponsored films, skits and not just more information. That means taking time other events to draw attention to the issue. And when

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Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 15

New Media Rising a national exhibition on race came to the museum, Missionary Baptist church to a discussion of St. Louis our reporting became the audio tour, adding local architecture at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. The festival perspective. delivered — literally — on the Beacon’s goal of looking at the region from multiple perspectives.

Race, Frankly also benefited immensely from our Public Insight Network, a tool that helps us broaden Five years from now we expect our business model our base of sources. We use the PIN to ask people will differ significantly from the typical nonprofit what they know and what they want to know. More organization and also from existing public broadcasting than 1,500 people have signed up to become sources organizations. through the PIN for the Beacon and KETC-Channel 9, our partner in the project.

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Good journalism is essential for a thriving region.

While our Web site is currently the primary way we distribute our work, it is only one way. Through technology improvements now in the works we hope Following the road less traveled comes naturally to make it easier for users to find what interests them.

We also hope to enhance ways to help people discover to the Beacon. Our organization includes an unusual combination of assets — seasoned reporting, digital things of interest they did not know to search for. savvy and business discipline. Our board adds experience and extraordinary commitment to the 3. Diversify revenue sources.

Conventional wisdom holds that most nonprofits welfare of our region. Most important to launching get 80 percent of their funding from 20 percent of their this entrepreneurial adventure has been support from donors. At the Beacon, generous St. Louis donors and civic-minded St. Louisans. They understand that good foundations have provided much of our seed funding. journalism is essential for a thriving region and have But we know large donations can’t sustain us forever. stepped up to make things happen.

In the future, we’ll look to multiple revenue sources.

That will include support from a larger number of small donors. It also will include sponsors and advertisers interested in finding new ways to reach audiences with information that will interest them.

Perhaps that understanding is the legacy of another St. Louisan. More than a century ago, Joseph Pulitzer invented the modern newspaper. We’re excited that St. Louisans can be in the forefront again as together we invent a new kind of news organization to deliver the excellence people here expect and deserve.

Events like the Beacon Festival will continue to showcase special treasures of our region. The festival, Margaret Wolf Freivogel is the founding editor of nine events in eight July days, featured a variety of the St. Louis Beacon and a founding board member of the performances and talks in unusual locations, from Investigative News Network. a visit to hear a gospel choir at New Sunnymount

M i n n Po s t Ta k e s J o u r n a l i s m t o t h e Pe o p l e J o el K ra mer Early in 2007 the two newspapers in the Twin Cities made separate announcements that resulted in the buyouts of more than 100 journalists — whose jobs were not being replaced. It was the leading edge of the storm and it caused anxiety in the Twin Cities community.

In government, the arts, the nonprofit community and even business, people who did not always like what reporters wrote about them nevertheless feared the consequences for the community of having far fewer reporters keeping tabs.

I had been out of the newspaper business since 1998

Page 16 • Gateway Journalism Review • Fall 2010

when the Cowles family sold the Star Tribune — where I was publisher — to McClatchy. But after consulting with many people in town, I saw the opportunity to experiment with a new model for sustaining highquality regional public affairs journalism, online-only and nonprofit. My wife, Laurie, shared my enthusiasm, so we co-founded MinnPost, with about $1.1 million of donations from five Minnesota families (including ours) and the Knight Foundation.

MinnPost celebrated its third birthday on Nov. 8.

We have more than 200,000 unique visitors a month,

New Media Rising

We have about a dozen regular professional reporters, working with four editors, to cover state and regional politics, media, Washington from a regional perspective, the arts, science, education, health, business, urban development and a bit of sports; we also offer a daily op-ed known as Community Voices, and we feature the work of one community blogger each day from our stable of about 50. We publish selected national and international stories from the Christian Science Monitor and Global Post.

MinnPost picks its spots, covering stories where we feel we can add to the community’s knowledge and understanding. Our readers are sophisticated and they relish the high quality of analysis our experienced reporters provide. Our journalists, who have the freedom to write with authority rather than “objectivity,” say they are doing some of the best work of their careers.

Thousands of readers comment on our stories, and the quality of the comments, in general, is quite high — thanks, in part, to our policy of requiring commenters to register with and use their real names and our prepublication screening of all comments by a team of volunteer moderators.

We believe that the key to our success is the intensity of our audience’s engagement. Readers who visit more often are more likely to donate. An engaged audience of civic-minded Minnesotans is attractive to many advertisers and sponsors, who will pay more than commodity-level advertising rates to connect with them. We seek new technological tools to engage audiences, but also take advantage of old-fashioned face-to-face contact.

The biggest challenge an online news enterprise faces is building sustainable revenue streams. Two national and four local foundations have generously supported MinnPost, but I believe there is simply not enough foundation money out there to foot most of the bills for the expensive work of professional journalists covering communities. Accordingly, our focus is on

increasing our revenue from membership, events, sponsorship and advertising, and I’m happy to say we’ve been increasing in every one of those categories, every year.

Along the way, I have tried to help the Investigative News Network get off the ground, and I’ve spoken to countless people who were starting – or thinking of starting – enterprises like MinnPost in their towns.

Most didn’t have the startup money to make a go of it. The St. Louis Beacon did, and I’m thrilled to see its progress.

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but a number that matters more, I think, is Quantcast data showing that we average more than 40,000 people who visit the site at least twice a month. More than 2,100 people have become paying members – donating to us as they would to public radio or public television.

And this year, for the first time, we expect to show a modest surplus on expenses of about $1.2 million, with revenues coming mainly from members, sponsors, advertisers and foundations.

The biggest challenge an online news enterprise faces is building sustainable revenue streams.

Bringing in enough money is hard and not for the faint of heart. But at MinnPost, we never forget to have fun. It’s part of our culture and our brand. Our annual benefit, MinnRoast, attracted more than 700 people this April to a Gridiron-style show of skits and musical numbers making gentle fun of politicians and media people in Minnesota.

We won a national fund-raising contest sponsored by an online philanthropy engine, Razoo — for which we created a video explaining what we would NOT do with the prize money if we won.

Our current awareness-building effort (our first promotional spending since the time we launched) is a political campaign-style guerrilla marketing effort, built around a slogan that acknowledges the importance to our readers of one our competitors, Minnesota Public Radio: “I listen to MPR, but I read MinnPost.com.” As part of the campaign, we dolled up our 10-year-old Subaru Forester into a MinnPostmobile, and my wife and I now spend our spare time (hah!) figuring where we can park it so thousands of people will see it.

I’m confident that we are figuring out how to sustain MinnPost as a small journalism shop. David Carr, writing about MinnPost recently in the New York Times, said our finances resembled those of a successful taco stand. But there are many more stories to tell, many more talented journalists out there eager to help us tell them and many more serious Minnesota news consumers to reach. So our challenge for the next few years is to become, at least, a much bigger taco stand.

Joel Kramer is CEO and Editor, MinnPost.com.

Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 17

New Media Rising Nonprofit Newsrooms Provide Outlet for Journalists B ran t H ou ston Last year more than 20 nonprofit journalism organizations gathered in New York and issued a declaration of purpose and formed a network to share resources, stories and business ideas.

It was a moment symbolizing an extraordinary moment in U.S. journalism – a moment in which it was recognized that nonprofit newsrooms are here to stay and will be a major factor in preserving and improving watchdog and community journalism.

Over the past three years the number of nonprofit newsrooms in the U.S. has skyrocketed as advertising dollars plummeted, news coverage shrunk and newspapers laid off thousands of journalists.

But experienced reporters decided they were not done and beginning journalists were eager to create something new. They were ready to replace the pessimism in the mainstream media with experimentation, risk and optimism.

The result has been an array of organizations that vary in size, coverage, budget and structure. Some nonprofits have begun with only two people and no funding. Some are two or more decades old with staffs of 20 of more and budgets of $5 million to $10 million.

Some cover national and international issues and some cover a city.

They also vary in independence. There are nonprofit organizations that are independent 501(c) 3 charitable organizations that stand alone such as MinnPost.com, the Texas Tribune or the Voice of San Diego.

Others are 501 (c) 3 organizations that have agreements with public universities and are actually housed at universities. Among those is the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Wisconsin and the Watchdog Institute at San Diego State University.

Then there are other ventures that are actually parts of private universities and reside within colleges of mass communication and journalism or other departments. They include the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University and the Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting at Columbia University.

Page 18 • Gateway Journalism Review • Fall 2010

All the nonprofits primarily distribute their work on their Web sites and through established newspaper and broadcast companies that many of the nonprofit journalists worked for that have become an outsourcing model.

But a new trend is merging that is far more collaborative. The nonprofit newsrooms are beginning to work more often with PBS and NPR stations, both local and national. The stations are seeking more content, especially local, and the nonprofit newsrooms are seeking greater distribution of their work through collaborations in addition to providing free content to for-profit companies.

Many nonprofits are in discussions with local PBS or NPR stations about taking office space at the stations.

The St. Louis Beacon is already located in a PBS station as is the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network in Denver.

Meanwhile, the consortium of nonprofit news organizations formed last year has grown into the Investigative News Network (INN), which now has 45 member organizations and is adding more monthly.

(Full disclosure: I am the chair of the board of directors of INN.) The network is developing cost efficiencies by sharing administrative tasks, pooling resources and getting group discounts. It also is promoting editorial collaborations among the members to do high impact stories they could not do alone. (See campus sexual assault stories – www.publicintegrity.org/projects/ entry/1847/). The network also is developing better technology strategies and working on syndication of stories for revenues.

The key issue for everyone is the word of the year: “Sustainability.”

There is a wide recognition that not all the new and old nonprofits can survive off the generous contributions from national donors like the Knight Foundation, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Open Society Institute and the McCormick Foundation.

Nor can individual donors like Buzz Woolley of the Voice of San Diego, John Thornton of the Texas Tribune or the Sandler family – which has put up tens of millions of dollars for ProPublica – be the final answer.

New Media Rising

From many discussions at numerous conferences, the consensus is that the nonprofits must find ways to sustain themselves with non-grant revenue at a time when long-time for-profit newsrooms have been losing the battle to do so.

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The key issue for everyone is the word of the year: ‘Sustainability’

Newsrooms are seeking to generate diverse revenue streams through tried and true nonprofit strategies such as donations, sponsorships and memberships in the PBS and NPR model. They also are seeking individual donations for particular stories without violating ethical standards – sometimes a tricky proposition. But newsrooms also are looking at taking on advertising dollars, doing special projects for fees, setting up side investigative and research businesses, syndication to local and regional media outlets or doing training for journalists and the public.

A key element for the smaller nonprofits is community and regional support. Without local support for the editorial content they produce, they can’t survive. The sources of revenue, whether

donations or sponsorships or sales, will simply dry up and national foundations are highly unlikely to fund an organization that the community does not back.

For the larger nonprofits, the challenge is equally difficult. They must supplement their donations by building a wider audience that will pay for the news through syndication and partnerships with large media companies.

There will be nonprofit newsrooms that fail because of the lack of support or having enough business savvy.

Or they will fail because of the typical small nonprofit burnout syndrome caused by a combination of having to do reporting, administration and fundraising.

But most have as good a chance of any other venture because they are they have embraced digital techniques and the online world. They are not weighed down by tradition, printing presses and high overhead. They can be nimble and change.

Most of all, they are passionate and dedicated about what they are doing and not the money – which is why journalism has always survived.

Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 19

New Media Rising Patch, The Rapidian: Different Ends to Hyperlocal Spectrum S co tt L a mber t

As the first anniversary of The Rapidian, Grand Rapids Michigan’s hyperlocal newspaper, drew near, publisher Laurie Cirivello wrote that there is no official definition for the term hyperlocal.

possibly have. You used to go to your paper to find out what was going on everywhere. You can’t do that now, not with the Internet. Newspapers found themselves competing with the New York Times and CNN.”

But hyperlocal is a word that has permeated newsrooms and the media landscape for the last two years. So what is hyperlocal?

Hyperlocal is hard to define, but Web sites are popping up everywhere and with completely different business plans and goals. Sites such as The Rapidian are not-for-profit, depend on grant money and citizen ownership. They don’t use traditional journalists and believe they exist to provide citizens of their city a view of their city that they can’t get from traditional media.

“Hyperlocal is a movement,” Cirivello said. “It’s a renewed focus on the importance of small stories in a geographical region and the acknowledgement that readers can be both consumers and providers of that information.”

Sounds simple, but there’s another definition.

“I would describe it as the community, the roots of the community,” Brian Feldt, editor at the new Bolingbrook, Ill., Patch.com site said. “Obviously at first glance you think village board, the board meetings, but hyperlocal is going past that.”

To what extent? Is hyperlocal nothing more than a new buzzword for old-fashioned journalism -- a harking back to a time when “housewives” sent in copy ranging from school lunch programs to PTA meetings?

Remember the old axiom that states that all news is local, is that what hyperlocal is?

“Yes,” Cirivello said. “Personally, I think that’s the only competitive advantage [that] local media can

Page 20 • Gateway Journalism Review • Fall 2010

On the other hand, Patch.com is backed by AOL: The company exists to make a profit and believes that the best way to achieve that profit is by bringing in traditional journalists, embedding them in the community they serve and providing professional journalism for small or suburban communities.

Here’s a look at two different hyperlocal sites and how they operate:

The Rapidian The Rapidian turned one-year-old on Sept. 15, 2010.

That doesn’t mean the people who run The Rapidian are brand new.

“We are a community media center,” Cirivello said. “We’re 30 years old. We started with public radio, television, non-profit media and technical support

New Media Rising organization for our community.”

Patch – Bolingbrook, Ill.

Then the economy took a bite out of the local media.

Feldt is a recent graduate of the University of Illinois at Springfield where he received a master’s in Public Affairs Reporting. He got his undergraduate degree from SIUC. His career path is similar to that of many recent college graduates who find themselves working at smaller community daily newspapers or operations like Patch.

“The newspaper shrunk and we were affected,” Cirivello said. “And the Knight Foundation had a program that offered matching funds for communities.”

Cirivello and her group went to work to build The Rapidian. A key ally for them was the local media.

“We never put ourselves out there as an alternative to traditional media,” Cirivello said. “We had meetings with all the media organizations and told them we were going to build this thing and asked them if there were things we could do that would provide help and not just competition. We took that open approach from day one. And we’ve got some real champions from the traditional media for our organization.”

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The economy took a bite out of the local media.

Not everyone though.

“I do remember one television that said if it were news, we’d already know about it,” Cirivello said.

The result has been a site that emphasizes the events that happen in Grand Rapids. The emphasis is on the communities that exist within Grand Rapids.

“We work with a lot of lower income communities and folks who are marginalized for many problems,” Cirivello said. “You go to one neighborhood and the only time they get mentioned is if someone got shot or had a house burn down and we don’t get a lot of news about them from other points of view.”

The Rapidian won’t win any awards for hardhitting journalism. They don’t have many traditional journalists and don’t plan on hiring any soon.

“Will we be hiring reporters? I don’t know; at this point we’re not,” Cirivello said. “But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need the Grand Rapids Press. I think it’s going to be the difference between a math tutor and a master teacher.

“You can be a tutor without being a professional teacher.”

“It was a job getting out of school,” Feldt said.

“I stumbled out of school and I went through the interview process, got hired and then went through training.”

The interview process was like any interview process. The training consisted of Feldt learning how to work the software necessary to run the Patch site in Bolingbrook and an overview of the Patch philosophy, which is get the local news for your community and give the community a chance to answer back. Feldt quickly became convinced of the future of Patch.

“The thing is, Patch does things I think will work,” he said.

Feldt believes Patch.com is unique. It’s bringing old-fashioned journalism to communities with a new way of presenting that information.

“There’s more energy, more belief in the product that we’re pushing here,” Feldt said. “In a small daily you have a smaller population. At Patch, we have a positive energy and a positive vibe. The newness and uniqueness sets it apart.”

The journalism is community journalism. Feldt covers everything from school board and city council meetings to middle school sports and community events.

“The other day I was at a middle school softball game and then later that night I was at a local wine tasting event,” Feldt said. “It was a good chance to get to know a lot of people who didn’t work in an official capacity.

“We’re still new. We still run into people who don’t know exactly what Patch is.”

Patch is popping up everywhere in suburban Chicago. The idea is to blanket the suburbs with journalists who will cover what’s happening inside that specific community.

Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 21

New Media Rising “People want to see what’s happening in their town,” Feldt said. “People look forward to it.”

Providing trained journalists gives Patch.com an edge, Feldt says.

“Being professional journalists gives us credibility,” Feldt said. “We have the professional standards and ethics that we live up to and that helps us work in each community we work in.”

Competing views Both of these types of online publications have pros and cons. Rapidian’s approach is grassroots and uses those in the community, but it doesn’t need true journalists. At the same time, the Patch.com model uses traditional media but it comes with a corporate tag.

“I’m skeptical about that working,” Cirivello said.

“They say they’re deploying editors from across the

country, but it’s run out of New York. The Rapidian is locally owned and I’m hopeful that people are smart enough to know that it’s not local.”

Feldt disagrees.

“I’m the Bolingbrook local editor,” Feldt said. “I control and manage the site and the daily operations.

I am working a local beat. I’m not doing anything in New York or LA, I’m not doing anything other than Bolingbrook, Illinois.”

Cirivello has some advice on how to build a hyperlocal.

“The first thing you do is not try to build it and hope the community will come,” she said. “We involved people and stakeholders right up front. And the community did take ownership right away.”

Q & A with Michele McLellan When examining the trends in online newspapers and the impact they’re making, one must first try to figure out exactly what type of site is important for study. What is the online newspaper universe?

Luckily, someone has been paying attention to that question. Michele McLellan, a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow at the University of Missouri, spent the last year studying the universe of new online startup sites. Her study contains many different sites that give us a strong idea of what’s in the online universe www. rjionline.org/projects/mcellan/stories/community-news-sites/index.php. Her insights provide a look into a new world of journalism.

GJR: Can you explain your project?

McLellan: “I started working on the project about a year ago. I had the RJI Reynolds fellowship that started in September (2009). I was actually starting to look at civic engagement online. I was looking at how other fields are using digital media to engage citizens. Around November I decided to take a look at the journalism landscape.

“What I found was that a number of organizations made lists of local news sites and blogs that are perfectly good lists. Those lists became subjects of research but it tends to look at these lists through

a newspaper-like prism and finds that the vast majority of these sites are wanting; they aren’t following the paths of regular journalism.

“I actually thought it would be a small thing to do along with the civic engagement work. I started by thinking we’d have about 30 or 40 [sites] and then I got pounded by people who were letting me know they had a site too. The point of the project was to see what the promising leading edge of the field was. What’s going there. What do the sites look like, what are these folks saying that they’re learning and what do they need?

“These organizations are small but they’re very important.”

Page 22 • Gateway Journalism Review • Fall 2010

GJR: Is this the future of journalism?

McLellan: “There are many futures of journalism. This is one part of the future of journalism. There are many diverse parts that may be the future of journalism. Newspapers - many newspapers - are part of the future of journalism. They may be smaller but they’ll be a part of journalism. NPR may be a part of local journalism. They want to be a part of it. And certainly these online community journalists are a part. Unlike traditional media, they are doing a better job of connecting with their community than are many traditional newspapers.”

New Media Rising GJR: Can you define hyperlocal?

GJR: the term A lot of this sounds like the journalism that small newspapers have been doing for a very long McLellan: “I tend to avoid the term time. Is there much of a difference hyperlocal. I think the term in how small papers and these sites hyperlocal has become kind work? of meaningless. People define hyperlocal so many ways that it has become a sort of useless word.

I think, in a sense what I term as microlocal is one sense. Microlocal and maybe hyperlocal is extremely granular local news. It’s events, it’s business openings and closings.

It’s also what the city council did but it concentrates on the granular aspects of local news.”

GJR: Where does Patch fit into this landscape?

McLellan: “A lot of people are asking that question. Patch has the potential to be very beneficial to small communities that don’t have a local news source. It has the potential to be destructive where perhaps an independent local news site is trying to make a beginning and Patch may have more money to make an inroad. What if AOL, Patch takes root in different communities and drives out some local sites and then AOL decides to go in a different direction? I’m not saying that’s going to happen and I’m intrigued

by Patch. It’s an interesting, kind of difficult time right now.”

McLellan: “I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but I think that small daily newspapers, either daily or weekly, speak to the same needs as some of these small starters are using.”

GJR: Some journalists may look at some of these sites and question their newsworthiness. They may question the content of these sites.

Does this matter?

McLellan: “I don’t think it matters how the journalists look at these sites.

It matters how the public looks at these sites and whether they enjoy the material on them.

“We published a survey where we found that users of these sites found them to be more credible and trustworthy than their regular news sites. Many traditional journalists dismiss these sites as not as good as what they were doing, but somehow these sites are developing as more useful and more trustworthy than traditional news media between the people they were serving.

“It’s a conundrum. We think our standards and craft as journalists

make us more credible but it’s not. Is there something about the closeness of these sites, with their community and their willingness to engage with them, make them more trustworthy than relying on the craft of journalism to be more credible? It’s interesting to contemplate. Besides, many of these sites are being run by journalists.”

GJR: So will there be one type of these online news sites that becomes the norm?

McLellan: “There is not going to be one type. It’s not going to be one size fits all. I think they’re all part of the potential picture. To say there’s one type, it’s just not going to work this way. It all depends on the community.

GJR: Community seems to be the important word in this discussion.

Will the community dictate the type of journalism?

McLellan: “I think that’ an important question. What are the needs of the community and what’s the best way to meet them?”

Juan Williams - The Macro View W i l l i am A. B a bcock To fire or not to fire, that is the question. And recently it seems as if an increasing number of news organizations are deciding to pull the plug on journalists who have voiced their own opinions outside the walls of their employers’ corporations.

White House correspondent Helen Thomas said Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine,” CNN host

Rick Sanchez called Jon Stewart a “bigot” and, most recently, NPR news analyst Juan Williams said people in Muslim garb made him feel “nervous” when he was on an airplane. After their respective comments, these media personalities were summarily shown the door. Whether or not what they said was egregious, politically incorrect, intemperate, in bad taste or of the whatever-many-of-us-think-but seldom-say variety is

Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 23

New Media Rising not really the case. Nor is the political import of their commentary the issue, as determining what is and is not an appropriate conservative or liberal utterance depends in large part on whether those casting plaudits or stones are Republicans or Democrats.

As the Christian Science Monitor’s Patrik Jonsson said on Oct. 21, Williams’ Oct. 20 firing “…sends a puzzling message to reporters who are laboring under increasing demands to share their personality and opinion while at the same time abiding by ethics rules.” (www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/1021/JuanWilliams-fired-pitfalls-of-the-insta-opinion-age) So what should a journalist be at liberty to say in his or her off hours when moonlighting, commenting for another medium, Twittering, when on Facebook, when blogging or tech talking?

Addressing this question is particularly difficult when the media have become so contentious, wearing their political biases on their corporate sleeves. When self-righteous fringe political activists egg on narrowminded fringe politicians, it’s all too easy for journalists to be lured into the resulting partisan mud-fights.

Such political theater can boost media ratings and audience share. In such a combustible mix, news organizations are reluctant to rein in journalists who can report on and add color to stories. And with the proliferation of blogs and bloggers, the public is increasingly more comfortable with and demanding of personal, first person news accounts. The resultant “journalism of identity” encourages news audiences to focus on news personalities and their opinions as much as — and sometimes more than — they do on

the news itself.

While financially strapped news media organizations encourage and bask in the notoriety of such personal reporting and commentary from the colorful creatures they have created, fed and cared for, they can be oblivious to their journalistic progeny as it proliferates and grows more powerful.

Is it any wonder that a journalist reared in such a freewheeling media environment should think the right to free speech is unlimited? Or that a media corporation might overreact when its high-profile journalist opines?

All of which brings us back to Juan Williams.

National Public Radio has, for a number of years, basked in the glow of its talented, articulate and opinionated African American analyst. While occasionally embarrassed by his commentary, NPR nevertheless found it preferable — and perhaps profitable — to tolerate its star rather than to seriously reprimand him.

So what was it about what Williams said on Fox News that constituted the straw that finally broke NPR’s back? If where he said it (on Fox) was a problem for NPR, why had public radio seen fit to allow him to be a part of Fox in the first place, and for so many years?

And finally, what’s worse: a journalist saying something that ranges between boorish to insensitive, or an organization knowingly creating the environment where such commentary is increasingly commonplace?

Juan Williams - The Micro View W i l l i am H. F reivogel News organizations have the right - the responsibility even – to discipline or fire reporters who violate professional ethical standards. But NPR reacted too hastily and too drastically when it fired news analyst Juan Williams for comments he made about Muslims.

There is no easy yardstick for determining when reporters deserve to be fired for comments. News organizations must exercise reasoned judgment in making the decision. Central to that reasoned judgment is whether the comment, taken in context, shows animus toward a particular group of people.

Applying the contextual yardstick, CNN was

Page 24 • Gateway Journalism Review • Fall 2010

right to fire Rick Sanchez for his blatantly anti-Semitic comments earlier this year about Jews controlling the media. Hearst was right to nudge the venerable Helen Thomas into retirement for her offensive statement that Jews should get out of Palestine and go back to Germany and Poland. Similarly, MSNBC, confronted by unhappy advertisers, was right to get rid of Don Imus back in 2007 when he called black members of Rutgers’ successful women’s basketball team “nappyheaded hos.”

Juan Williams’ comment was of a completely different order. In response to a provocative question from Fox’s conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly, Williams said this: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot.

New Media Rising You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

The comment sparked hundreds of protests to NPR and got Williams fired. Critics have a point when they say it reflected anti-religious bias. Mightn’t a white commentator have been fired if he had said blacks in Afros and African garb make him nervous?

But it is important to read Williams’ comment in the broader context. Less than a minute later, in the same conversation, Williams challenged O’Reilly for dangerous rhetoric painting Muslims with too broad a brush.

“Wait a second though. Hold on,” he said to O’Reilly. “If you say Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals, very obnoxious, you don’t say first and foremost we got a problem with Christians, that’s crazy . . . Bill, Here’s the caution point.

The other day in New York some guy cuts a Muslim cabbie’s neck and says he’s attacking him or you think about the protests at the mosque near Ground Zero . . . I’m saying we don’t want in America people to have their rights violated . . . because they hear rhetoric from Bill O’Reilly and they act crazy.”

Taken together, the comment does not reflect the kind of animus that was evident in the comments by Sanchez, Thomas or Imus.

Sanchez’s tone and words were blatantly antiSemitic. He ridiculed the idea that Jews might be considered a minority. “Very powerless people,” he snickered. “. . . He’s (Stewart’s) such a minority, I mean, you know [sarcastically]. . . Please, what are you kidding? . . . I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they – the people in this country who are Jewish -- are an oppressed minority? Yeah. [sarcastically].”

Thomas, a wonderful woman, sank into the gutter when she expressed views indistinguishable from Hamas’s, calling on Jews to leave Palestine and go back to German and Poland. Granted, Thomas has been making conservatives mad for years with her free expression of liberal views. But this comment was especially offensive, seeming to ignore the murder of

six million Jews in Germany and Poland during her lifetime. If this did not reflect animus, it was at least willful ignorance.

Vivian Schiller, the NPR CEO who fired Williams, is a sharp newswoman with an intelligent vision of the future of NPR. But she admits she mishandled the firing. For one thing, NPR did not explain immediately that Williams had been warned previously for other comments he had made on Fox. In 2009, for example, he told O’Reilly that Michelle Obama had “this Stokely Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going... If she starts talking . . . her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I’m the victim. If that stuff starts to coming out, people will go bananas and she’ll go from being the new Jackie O. to being something of an albatross.”

NPR maintained that that the recent and older statements to O’Reilly violated NPR’s policy against reporters and analysts stating opinions.

NPR’s attempt to enforce journalistic standards of fairness and objectivity are worthy ones. But how would one differentiate Williams’ comment from the frequent commentaries from Scott Simon or the late, great Daniel Schorr on Saturdays?

Critics of NPR, and even Williams himself, say that he was fired because of political correctness. Opinions expressed by Simon and Schorr usually were in line with liberal orthodoxy, while Williams’ comments challenged liberals.

But I don’t like the term political correctness. Too often it is used to dress up and dignify speech that is actually racist or sexist - such as Sanchez’s comments.

One thing is certain about the Williams episode - the firing did not violate his free speech rights, despite Sarah Palin’s tweet to the contrary. Only the government can violate the First Amendment and NPR is not the government just because it receives a small percentage of its funding from the government.

In the end, while the law permits the firing, NPR should have had the good judgment not exercise this prerogative.

G TEWAY J O U R N ALISM R E VIE W

Subscribe now. Be informed. gatewayjr.org Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 25

SJR Spotlight

SJR

The St. Louis Journalism Review A supplement of Gateway Journalism Review Published continuously since 1970

Pistor ’s Eyes Provide Impetus for a Nose for News R oy M a lone

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SJR Spotlight Post-Dispatch reporter Nick Pistor broke a story about corrosion in the Gateway Arch. The gleaming stainless steel monument, at age 45, was rusting.

Pistor had driven by the Arch in January and noticed gray streaks on the legs. It didn’t look good, but it was raining so he attributed the streaks to the weather. In July, he was stopped at a light in front of the Arch and looked up to see whether the streaks were visible in the bright sunlight. They were, but they appeared orange.

The next day Pistor examined the Arch on foot. He asked a security guard what was going on with the surface and the security guard indicated that a study of it had been done a few years earlier, but he didn’t know what was found.

The reporter went online and found a reference in an engineer’s resume to an “Arch Corrosion investigation.” The National Park Service didn’t have a copy, but Pistor learned that the Arch has a document library. The corrosion report was on file there. The report detailed severe corrosion and staining. He

reviewed it for 40 minutes before the library closed for the day.

When Pistor returned the next day, an assistant to the Arch superintendent said he would not be allowed to see the document again because of national security.

He continued to lobby for the document’s release and wrote a story, “Gateway Arch Shows Its Age,” based on the notes he took during that initial visit.

Two weeks later, the National Park Service released the corrosion report and Pistor wrote a follow up. The first story made newscasts and newspapers across the country. In his follow-up story, he wrote about how the water had apparently emanated from inside the Arch (condensation?), not from the outside. He described how water had collected at the base of the north leg and workers used mops to wipe it up. ``It was a perfect example of a reporter noticing that something didn’t seem quite right and asking questions,’’ said Jean Buchanan, a Post editor in charge of investigative projects, in a memo to the Post staff.

An Outsider ’s Vision of the Arch is Ignored Opinion Piece R oy M a lone

Since the Gateway Arch was completed in 1965 tourists and area residents have grown accustomed to seeing the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, opposite the Arch, as a wasteland of sorts. The bareness is in stark contrast to the grandeur and beauty of the Arch and the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial park on the St. Louis bank.

From the windows atop the Arch you see East St. Louis.The forsaken acreage, when it is eventually developed, has the potential of spawning billions of dollars worth of development and turning St. Louis’ backyard eyesore into ``one great composition,’’’ in the words of Arch designer Eero Saarinen.

So, why hasn’t something happened during these past 45 years? Why haven’t government officials, civic leaders and the news media championed the cause of getting the National Park Service to expand the park and develop the east side so that it could help both East St. Louis and St. Louis prosper?

The river knifes through two states that don’t cooperate with each other. Too, the site is near a flood zone. Other problems, some going as far back as the 1917 race riot in East St. Louis contribute to the lack of cooperation.

The Post-Dispatch crusaded for smoke abatement in 1939 and for ``Progress Or Decay’’ in eliminating city slums in the early 1950’s. The current Post-Dispatch editorial page supported development of the east side of the Arch but has not run an editorial campaign.

News accounts and editorials about a recent competition to select a plan to renovate the Arch grounds, to make them more accessible to the public and add amenities, got ample play in the Post and the other media in town. The cost for the makeover is expected to exceed $300 million, to be done in five years and paid for with private and public funds. But plans for the east side of the Arch took a back seat to plans for the Missouri portion of the park.

Eco Arch Plan There are many who want to see the Arch grounds expanded to the east side. Perhaps no one has been so persistent about it than Saunders ``Sandy’’ Schultz, a sculptor and landscape designer who has worked on many national and international projects. For more than 26 years he has been pressing to get his ``Eco Arch’’ design considered for the Illinois bank.

Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 27

SJR Spotlight Schultz has been joined in the effort by Ted Wofford, a noted St. Louis architect. They haven’t had much success, but they’re not giving up. ``We’ve been pretty much ignored,’’ Wofford said. ``The key is for the Park Service to establish the park by securing the land.’’ He said it’s time for leaders on both sides of the river to collaborate and think about the region. ``East St. Louis is desperate and dying . . . this is the most valuable land in the Midwest with the view it has. Why give the real estate to the birds?’’ Wofford said.

people.’’ He has worked with top architects on design projects in 34 states and such places as Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Moscow. He has taught at many universities including Harvard, Columbia, Penn State and Texas A&M. Michael Webb, a professor at Columbia University School of Architecture, told Schultz he has ``a voice seldom heard today, that of an idealist and dreamer speaking alone in a world of fashion mongers and pragmatists. You give new currency to the term visionary.’’

Wofford said the media, as well as St. Louis community leaders, have ``by and large treated the east side as if it doesn’t exist. The role of the media should be to stimulate serious discussion . . . This is the opportunity for something to happen. It takes a concentrated campaign. You can’t have an article every 12 years and expect something to happen.’’

Critics are less generous. Schultz’s idea for the Illinois side of the arch is dismissed by the professional community.

Schultz said: ``I’ve been called naïve by many

Schultz and Wofford have had little support from the St. Louis establishment, but Schultz said that’s not unusual. ``Many cities want to hire someone from out of town to do projects . . . You can’t be a prophet in your home town.’’

Still, he works to gain support for his plan to create an ecological expanse – the size of 20 football fields – in the shape of the Arch, but larger and lying down. It would rise gently from the riverfront, would have fountains near the bank and be a grassy natural amphitheater. Underneath would be theaters, a museum and restaurants. Surrounding it would be a stream with bridges and a ring of shops, offices, restaurants, hotels and residences. Technology involved would promote environmental awareness; hence the name Eco Arch. Schultz says East St. Louisans can have their hopes lifted when economic development begins. And he wants to pay tribute to the Native Americans who long ago lived in the area and created what is known as Cahokia mounds.

The Casino Queen gambling site could stay but the huge ``Gateway Geyser’’ fountain, established by the late Malcolm W. Martin, might have to be moved to a better site, Schultz said. Robert Burley, who was Saarinen’s designer-in-charge for the Arch, said the Eco Arch idea has ``genuine merit . . . East St. Louis is really front-row-center for one of the great urban spectacles in the United States – only the seats have been missing!’’

Saarinen’s daughter, Susan Saarinen, is a landscape architect in Colorado. She said in an e-mail the recent competition to redesign the Arch grounds was not an open competition. ``My father would never been allowed to compete in this latest competition. Only large firms capable of fast-tracking this project were invited . . . I hope the city fathers in

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SJR Spotlight

Getting Support One of Schultz’s pursuits is to round up support from Illinois politicians to have Park Services stake out the beginning core of development for the east side.

Congress passed a bill in 1992 authorizing expansion of the park to 100 acres on the Illinois side, but nothing has followed except that the Park Service recently proposed a site mostly south of the Arch’s centerline for future development.

Alvin Parks, mayor of East St. Louis, wrote a letter in April to Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior, in support of the Eco Arch concept. But Parks said the site the Park Service has recommended ``is wrong in its location and shape; thus nothing of any real and lasting value can be created at that site.’’ Parks’ letter was signed by several other elected officials in Illinois, including U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, who is originally from East Louis.

Last year Durbin wrote to Tom Bradley, Superintendent of the JNEM, saying he backed the Eco Arch concept by Schultz and Wofford for a multi-use park, which could be used for a variety of educational and cultural activities ``including a beautiful vista symbolizing the unity of the two cities at the gateway to the west.’’ Durbin said the proposal ``would be a vital economic development tool for a seriously depressed area.’’

Durbin supported the inclusion of the Eco Arch design in this year’s competition as a way of giving local sculptors and designers a fair chance to compete, said his press secretary, Christina Mulka, and he plans to work with colleagues in Congress from both states, and other government officials, in ``turning the Arch into a world-class tourist attraction.’’ Durbin has told Illinois officials he would help raise funds to assist in the relocation of the grain elevator, which has long been the dominant feature across from the Arch.

“

You really have to question its reality.

On June 7, 2009, a long story by Post-Dispatch writer Jake Wagman on the Arch grounds competition mentioned the Echo Arch plan near the bottom. It described Supt. Bradley as ``not a fan of Eco Arch, saying `You really have to question its reality.’’’

Over the years, there has been limited news coverage on developing the east side. But the competition to improve the Arch grounds has caused some recent interest. On Aug. 31, 2009, Eddie Roth, a Post editorial writer, quoted Salazar, the Interior Secretary, as saying the ``park study should help figure out how we can connect up this side of the river to East St. louis as well.’’ Roth then wrote: ``The time has come for the Metro East to receive its rightful due – out of fairness and for the sake of the region . . . (and) that Illinois finally shares in Mr. Saarinen’s dream.’’

Schultz said he and Wofford may not be around to see their idea, or anyone else’s, come to fruition. But they would like to see Park Services start the expansion to the east bank. Schultz said such projects take a long time and would have to be done in phases. He noted that even after Saarinen won the competition in 1947 to design and build the Arch, ``he still had to sell it to leaders in St. Louis.’’

When the memorial to Thomas Jefferson was authorized by President Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression, it was seen as a way to put people to work.

Charles Harris, former dean of the Graduate School of Design and Landscape Architecture at Harvard, recently tried to buoy up the hopes of Schultz and Wofford.

“

“

Wofford said he and Schultz had a plan to connect downtown St. Louis with the Arch grounds via a pedestrian bridge over Memorial Drive, rather than having to wait for a stoplight. But they couldn’t enter the competition because they were not with a large firm. Schultz says the five-year deadline set for the improvements is too short and disagrees with the recommendation that future development on the Illinois bank should be south of the Arch’s centerline.

“

West St. Louis maintain their commitment to connect to East St. Louis. This should have been done in the first place.’’

Schultz said such projects take a long time...

Harris said of the competition: ``There is really little shown for the east bank. That is good news . . . take cheer that the winner did not destroy the possibility of realizing a much better future for the East St. Louis bank . . . am I right or wrong to see a light at the end of your long tunnel.’’

Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 29

SJR Spotlight Eco Arch: ‘Right Project in the Right Place’ Opinion Piece C harle s L. K lot zer These comments should not be discounted by my admiration for Saunders Schultz. Schultz is a sculptor, artist and renowned landscape architect with works all over the globe, including St. Louis. He is one of the founding fathers of architectural art in an environmental context and he is a long-time acquaintance.

More than 26 years ago he started working on his Eco Arch concept, creating, designing, refining and putting on paper how to revitalize not only the Arch grounds in downtown St. Louis, but also rejuvenate East St Louis.

The St. Louis media have largely ignored his ideas, except for a feature article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch 15 years ago, and mention of him in 2009 at the bottom of a story on possible expansion of the Arch grounds to the Illinois side of the Mississippi River.

Not a part of the social, commercial or political elites in this hub of Mid-America, Schultz’s vision may remain just that as the powers that be have made their choice in the recent competition for renovating the Arch grounds and adding tourist attractions.

Schultz, working with architect Ted Wofford, doesn’t admit defeat. He claims the battle has just begun. U.S. Sen. Richard J. Durbin endorsed his Eco Arch creation. This year, Durbin recommended that Schultz’s work be considered in the competition, but only large firms were allowed to compete.

Schultz’s Web site (www.saundersschultz.com) includes supportive letters, among others, from 17 architects who worked with Eero Saarinen, designer of the Arch.

St. Louis-based interests may find that the Eco Arch concept is primarily relevant to the Illinois side of the Mississippi. In response, Schultz writes on his website, “The Eco Arch will beautify and correctly develop the area along the eastern riverfront in axial proportion and scale to Saarinen’s existing monument.

In this way, the Mississippi river will cease to cut the two cities apart and unite St. Louis with East St. Louis at long last.”

When it was announced that the National Park Service required that reshaping the Arch grounds by the winner of the competition be completed by 2015,

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Schultz felt that this was an unrealistic time frame.

FDR, he says, signed the bill to create the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park in 1935. It took three decades for the Gateway Arch to be completed.

Over the years, Schultz has been aggressively pushing for his concept. He tried to communicate with U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Acting Director of the National Park Service Dan Week and later Director Jon Jarvic, Acting Director of the Midwest Region David N. Given and Superintendent Thomas Bradley. Bradley was the only one willing to meet with him.

The story in the Post-Dispatch in June 2009, described Bradley as ``not a fan of the Eco Arch, saying `You really have to question its reality.’’

Jake Wagman’s story noted the plan would require relocation of a grain elevator, railroad and the geyser built by Malcolm Martin, a St. Louis lawyer who championed development of the east side of the river bank. Wofford estimates that procuring and landscaping the land would cost a couple of hundred million dollars, which he describes as “peanuts.”

U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill also declined to meet with Schultz, suggesting he meet with her aide. But the aide never arranged a meeting.

This writer is capable neither of judging the comparable merits of the entries submitted nor of Schultz’s Eco Arch.

However, reviewing the drawings, the accompanying text explaining what motivated the concept and the regional impact it would have, particularly in rejuvenating East St. Louis, I suggest that it deserved and deserves more attention, particularly by the press, than it was granted.

Bradley probably considers the cost, the allencompassing scope, and its orientation for the Illinois side will make the Eco Arch unlikely to be built.

Sen. Durbin feels differently. A spokesman for Durbin said he supported the inclusion of the Eco Arch plan in the design competition as a way of giving local sculptors and designers a fair chance to compete. (The five competing firms were all from other cities.)

SJR Spotlight Even Eero Saarinen would not have been allowed to compete as only big firms were invited, said his daughter, Susan Saarinen, an architect herself. She said St. Louis’ city fathers should work to connect the Arch grounds with East Louis. ``This should have been done in the first place,’’ she said.

An architect who worked with Schultz, the late Roger Fritz, said of the Eco Arch plan: ``It’s the right project, in the right place and at the right time.’’

Journalism of Yesteryear Bogart Quotes Pulitzer in ``Deadline – USA’’

By Eric Mink Journalism wallows in one existential crisis after another. Take your pick: Internet technology is killing the news profession; the Great Recession is suffocating a business model already on life support; concentration of ownership is destroying media’s vital competitive drive; the ethical vacuum around Fox News’ success is sucking the lifeblood out of honorable news presentation.

How startling, then, to discover not only a measure of reassurance about all this, but also some genuine wisdom in a 58-year-old Hollywood movie. You can’t find 1952’s Deadline – USA. It is not out on home video, DVD or VHS. Amazon, Netflix, Blockbuster, Red Box – forget it.

Cable’s Turner Classic Movies has a print in its archives. The movie, written and directed by Richard Brooks, doesn’t turn up much, though it was replayed recently on TCM. Ethel Barrymore delivered a gleaming supporting performance in Deadline – USA, as Margaret Garrison, widow of the founder and owner of The Day, a great metropolitan newspaper in trouble.

Garrison’s distressed staff is led by managing editor Ed Hutcheson, played by an alternately sulking and furious Humphrey Bogart.

I managed to get hold of a reasonably decent copy last year and was stunned at how much I’d forgotten in the decades since I’d last seen it – years before I’d ever worked for a newspaper.

The film is littered, of course, with newsroom markers that would have given it authenticity in 1952 but are long dead: clacking typewriters and wire service teletype machines, pneumatic tubes coughing pasted-up stories from copy desks to the composing room floor and back, headsets on re-write men taking phoned-in notes from reporters and turning them into finished stories.

There is also no shortage of familiar newsroom stereotypes – a “tough-broad” female reporter among them – fast talkers and, after hours, lots of alcohol at the local bar. There’s emotional pull in the movie’s two interlocking stories: First, Garrison’s two daughters want to cash out their inheritance by selling The Day to a competitor who will shut it down. Their mother (Barrymore) doesn’t want to sell, but she’s outvoted.

At the same time, a well-connected hood is rigging elections, robbing the city blind and bumping off people with impunity. But he makes a big mistake when he has a snoopy reporter for The Day severely beaten up.

That fires up Hutcheson, who also sees aggressive coverage as a way to generate enough public interest and pressure to kill the sale of the paper.

Bogart’s Hutcheson delivers most of the impassioned passages about the news profession and why it’s important. Remarkably, they still resonate today, notwithstanding the industry obits we see and read almost daily: “The Day is more than a building,” Hutcheson says during a court hearing into the validity of the sales contract for the paper. “It’s people. It’s 1,500 men and women whose skill, heart, brains and experience make a great newspaper possible. We don’t own one stick of furniture in this company, but we, along with the 290,000 people who read this paper, have a vital interest in whether it lives or dies.”

People still hunger for the news, and society still needs it. The real threat to the news profession, then, lies with frightened corporate executives who lack a commitment to what they’re supposed to manage, and who lack the skill, sensitivity, intelligence and experience of the people who work for them.

Early in the film, Hutcheson tries to shame Mrs. Garrison into defying her daughters. In the company’s board room, Hutcheson invokes the newspaper’s

Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 31

SJR Spotlight founding principles and points to a framed copy of its first edition hanging on the wall. Then he begins to recite, from memory, the statement published on the front page of that paper:

The nation was on the tail end of the Depression, and 82 percent of households had radios. Television was still being developed. Radio’s programming was part of what is now called its “Golden Age.”

“This paper will fight for progress and reform, will never be satisfied merely with printing the news, will never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory wealth or predatory poverty.”

Here in St. Louis, in September of 1938, KMOX put local station owners and managers on the air in a roundtable discussion to talk about the business.

When I heard Bogart deliver those lines, an electrical jolt coursed through my spine. I had seen them before. I had read them before – at least, words very close to them. They have appeared on the editorial page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where I worked for 21 years, since they were uttered in 1907 by owner Joseph Pulitzer when he retired. They are affixed in hammered metal letters to the marble walls in the lobby of the Post building. The exact passage reads as follows: “I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”

From 1907 to 1952 to 2010, the tools and techniques of news gathering and distribution have changed multiple times, and they’ll change again. The way to gain the trust, loyalty and patronage of news consumers hasn’t changed at all.

Eric Mink most recently was the op-ed editor of the Post-Dispatch. He previously covered television and media for the Post and the New York Daily News. He now teaches film as an adjunct professor at Webster University in St. Louis. This column appeared earlier in the online magazine of TVWorth Watching.

The Radio Facsimile Never Caught On

By Frank Absher In the 1930’s, radio was soaring in popularity. But in 1938, when St. Louis radio station managers were asked to predict radio’s future, they got it all wrong.

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Merle Jones of KMOX was quick to note just how much radio contributed to the local economy. Just 10 years prior, he noted, the city’s largest station employed 20 people. In a decade, the situation had changed dramatically. The smallest station employed 35 full-time workers and the largest had 120 full-timers and another 50-75 air staff members on call. KMOX had an annual payroll then of over $400,000.

Local stations were also making a mark nationally.

Hundreds of local programs were being run over the four major radio networks, which was seen as a way of promoting St. Louis as a progressive city.

So things were going well. But when they were asked about radio’s future, none could foresee the coming world war and the part Edward R. Murrow and his peers would play in making radio a necessity in every home in the nation. Instead, they focused on a new technical development: radio facsimile.

The Facsimile Experiment George Burbach of KSD said his station was ready to begin testing the new system of news delivery within the next 30 days. The system involved using radio waves to send special facsimile versions of the Post-Dispatch into the homes of subscribers.

Initially, Burbach said, testing would be limited to a few receivers in the city and county. The special radio receiver contained a clock but no frequency dial.

Owners would set the clock to turn on the machine at a certain time in the very early morning hours, and the news would begin printing out. It was a slow process, requiring several minutes per page, but radio people and Post management were excited about the possibilities.

For the paper, it meant readers would receive their copy in the morning, which would compete with the Globe-Democrat. For radio stations, it meant respectability that up to that point had been called into question.

That’s because the so-called “Press-Radio War,”

SJR Spotlight which pitted newspapers against radio stations, had shut radio out of many aspects of the news delivery business. Newspaper owners had successfully banned broadcasters from the Congressional press galleries and had forbidden the Associated Press from selling its service to radio stations.

If radio could provide a printed news summary, it could get around many restrictions.

William West, then-manager of WTMV, said his station had already applied for a facsimile license and was planning to apply for a license for television as soon as possible.

Facsimile news officially began in St. Louis December 7, 1938. In that world premier, 15 homes received a special, abbreviated edition of the day’s PostDispatch, with the transmission beginning at 2:00 a.m. and usually taking around two hours to complete.

But the “wow factor” of facsimile was limited, and the system never really caught on. The “experiment” died after two years. By that time, all ears were tuned to the live reports from Europe, describing a developing war. The U.S. didn’t want to be a part of it, but many citizens still had relatives living in Europe, and live reports on radio trumped newspaper reports.

In 1941, after Pearl Harbor, all technical development in broadcasting was suspended and radio became an even stronger medium in the dissemination of news.

Sydney Schanberg and his Reporting: How The Weak Are Treated

By George Salamon There was a time when you could say with a straight face that “journalism is the first draft of history.” Today it is, quite often, the last word in gossip, ideological spinnng and personal attacks. And that is why a journalist the caliber of Sydney Schanberg may be a journalism anachronism, but a noble one worth revering.

Half a century ago The New York Times hired the 25-year-old Schanberg, fresh from two years with the US Army. Twenty-six years later, after he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Schanberg clashed with his bosses over what he wrote about New York City and had his column taken away, causing him to quit.

Describing that event in The Village Voice, Pete

Hamill called the paper’s treatment of Schanberg “unspeakably shabby.” Today, Schanberg is less harsh: “They didn’t behave like Menschen,” he says with a chuckle, using the Yiddish word for “human beings.”

The treatment of human beings, especially of the weak by those with power, has been at the core of Schanberg’s reporting. For three decades after the end of World War II, his kind of reporting was praised and imitated. After his departure from the Times, he told a Washington University audience in St. Louis, in September 1985 , that the Times now “shifts with fashion,” casting aside reporters who are outsiders, those who ignore and defy popular politics and fashions.

Reporting From Cambodia In a dispatch filed in December, 1974, he related how a departing American ambassador in Cambodia told a news conference that the war ``had lost all meaning.’’ Schanberg’s next sentence laconically added: ``No meaning has been discovered in the year since.”

The dispatch continued: ``The war has already killed and wounded at least 600,000 people and turned more than half the population of seven million into weary, hungry refugees.”

One survivor testified decades later: “The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days . . . Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers were all for the Khmer Rouge.”

The U.S. dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Cambodia, more than we unloaded on Japan in World War II. (Cambodia is about the size of Missouri).

The Communist-led insurgents, or Khmer Rouge, numbered 4,000 in 1970. Three years later, their ranks had swelled to 60,000.

Schanberg reported on the suffering of the helpless.

In January 1975, as the Khmer Rouge was tightening its net around the capital he wrote, “every 15 minutes or so a shell screams down and explodes... and another half dozen people are killed or wounded . . . bodies are everywhere.’’

Schanberg got out of Cambodia, as did the family of his friend, interpreter and photographer, Dith Pran.

But Pran spent more than three years in Pol Pot’s labor/reeducation/concentration camps before the Vietnamese invasion at the end of 1978 overthrew

Fall 2010 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 33

SJR Spotlight

the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Pran escaped to Thailand and then to the United States, where he landed a job with the Times. Schanberg had written about him in the paper’s magazine in 1980 and the story inspired the 1984 movie, The Killing Fields.

``Afflict The Comfortable’’ That’s what newspapers are supposed to do, ``comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Crusading papers, tough editors, and tenacious reporters did a lot of that, and their muckraking helped expose serious problems. But when Schanberg returned from Cambodia, much of his paper’s readership was no longer in the mood for big causes. The movements of the 1960’s - for women’s liberation, civil rights and nuclear disarmament - had played themselves out. The engineers of the disaster in Southeast Asia were gone from the corridors of power.

It was “Morning again in America,” as President Reagan proclaimed. It sounded, to quite a few of his fellow citizens, like “it was money again in America.”

And the race to grab as big a share of it as possible was on. But what about those trampled in the stampede?

Like the Cambodians, trampled in the big powers’ war for more, they were mostly ignored or forgotten. But not

by Schanberg. As the newly appointed metropolitan editor, he focused on ``the homeless, the injured, the casualties of the indifference and greed of big builders, bankers and other pillars of the Establishment,” as Pete Hamill summed it up.

Anthony Lukas coined the term “Afghanistanization” in journalism, which allows reporters to focus on corruption and evil and suffering far away, but not close to home. The paper’s then Executive Editor. A.M. Rosenthal, wanted more coverage of the “golden people, the sparkling people,” Schanberg says. “He liked to hang out with them. I wanted to write about what was hidden underneath the city’s system. I fought with him almost daily.”

Rosenthal is reported to have called Schanberg “St. Francis” and referred to him as the paper’s “resident Commie.”

Schanberg went to Rosenthal and told him he didn’t relish the daily battles and that he didn’t want to be metropolitan editor any longer. They gave him the op-ed column, “New York.” Schanberg says: “I still don’t know why they did it. What did they think I was going to write about?”

In his columns, from 1981 to 1985, he wrote about how unfair the distribution of state aid was to school

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districts in poor areas. He told about how builders in NYC were allowed to ignore safety codes: “Developers abhor sidewalk sheds as they do all safety requirements that might delay the completion or opening of their buildings,” he wrote in May of 1983. Pedestrians could get killed. And as he did so often in his foreign reporting, he plunked in why that was so: “It’s got something to do with money.”

Stepping On Big Toes In one interview, Schanberg explained that the Times had no qualms about dealing with subjects like corruption in a place like the Philippines. But in his columns, he was dealing with other kinds of corruption as well, “corruption of the spirit and of behavior . . .

We get a little more skittish about it locally than we do overseas.”

And why is that? “The closer you may step on toes, the closer the toes get to the headquarters of the journalistic organization, the more loudly are the protests registered and the more loudly are they heard.” Schanberg, the bosses decided, had ``dirtied his own nest.’

His next nests were Newsday, and then the Village Voice. He did good work for both, including solid media criticism for the Voice. He continued to focus on topics that make many of today’s publishers and editors uncomfortable. For him, good reporting is finding what’s underneath. A great example for him is the Boston Globe’s investigative series on sexual abuse by Catholic priests, for which the paper won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003. “And they did that in one of the most Catholic towns in America,” he adds. “That took guts.”

Schanberg, at 76, is still dealing with with topics no mainstream papers want to touch. He wrote lengthy articles on the POWs left behind in Vietnam. Penthouse, The American Conservative (launched by Pat Buchanan), and Nation Institute (teamed with the The Nation) ran with the stories, but Schanberg’s former employer and other major dailies turned him down. He recently published a book titled, ``Beyond The Killing Fields,’’ a compilation of his wartime reporting and the issue of POW’s.

Writing about the unwillingness of the big media to print the POW story, Boston University professor of history Andrew Bacevich observed: “The feeble public response elicited by Sydney Schanberg’s reporting on the fate of American POWs testifies to our steely determination to ignore whatever we find unwelcome

Every Issue or inconvenient.”

Schanberg tried to put a dent into that determination in his 26 years as a Times man and in his work after that. It got him a Pulitzer and it killed his column. The times and the Times have changed, but Schanberg has remained true to his calling.

George Salamon, who intereviewed Schanberg for this story, taught college German literature and held writing positions at the St. Louis Business Journal and General Dynamics.

Ed Moose dies

By Joe Pollack

Ed Moose fell in love with the saloon business in Gaslight Square, married it in San Francisco and became that city’s premier host to athletes and journalists, bon vivants of all ages, social standing and economic position and, basically, anyone who liked to drink, eat and talk. Moose died Aug. 12 in San Francisco, where he had lived since leaving St. Louis in 1961.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Moose, 81, suffered a fractured ankle in June, and after several surgeries, developed a staph infection. Mary Etta Presti Moose, also a St. Louisan and his wife of 45 years, survives. The Beacon ran a nice reminiscence by Judith Robinson from an old feature story; the Post-Dispatch,

its loyalty to St. Louisans and its institutional memory about a split-second long, ignored the event.

Moose, a tall, husky (some called him fat), pinkcheeked guy who never seemed to forget a face or a name, personified hospitality to thousands of customers at the Washington Square Bar & Grill.

Moose worked at several jobs in St. Louis, including the St. Louis University alumni office, in a couple of city hall positions and as a social worker.

On a business trip to San Francisco, Moose discovered advantages – good weather and better saloons – so he relocated.

St. Louis reporters who knew Moose and Deitsch from the Gaslight Square days, would visit on their travels, and San Francisco reporters joined them. Herb Caen, Stan Delaplane, Ron Fimrite, Charles McCabe and other famed West Coast bylines hung out there.

Moose and Deitsch sold the Washington Square Bar & Grill in 1990 and ostensibly retired. But three years later, Moose saw a property across Washington Park from the Washbag and opened it as Moose’s. Deitsch was an inactive partner who still kept his regular seat at the bar until he died in 2002.

Moose’s drew a media crowd, including Tom Brokaw, Walter Cronkite, Daniel Schorr and many others. Moose sold it in 2005. On the day after he died,

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Every Issue Media Notes MEDIA AWARDS KETC (Channel 9) The station received six Emmy Award nominations from the Mid-America chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) for programs of community engagement. Staff members who received nominations include Jim Kirchherr, Ruth Ezell, Tino Wallenda, Anne-Marie Berger and Brian Holder. Martin Duggan was inducted into the NATAS Mid-America Silver Circle at the Emmy Awards ceremony on Oct. 9 for serving as host of the Donnybrook program for 23 years.

Missouri Press Association The Association will induct five people into its Newspaper Hall of Fame in the literacy category. They are the late R.L. “Si” Colborn, Harold Ellinghouse, Jo Hoffman, the late Donald W. Reynolds and Robert M. Wilson.

St. Louis American The National Newspaper Association named the St. Louis American the “First African-American Newspaper in the Nation”. In addition, The Suburban Newspapers of America named the paper the “First Weekly Newspaper” in North America. Journalism department faculty of Loyola University-Chicago School of Communications judged the competition. The American was the only independently owned paper to receive an award.

Weidenbaum Center Catherine Rampel, economics editor at www.nytimes.com and editor of the Times’ Economix blog, received the first annual Weidenbaum Center Award for Evidence-Based Journalism.

St. Louis Bar Foundation Edward Roth, St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Mary Leonard, St. Louis Beacon; and Donald Suggs, St. Louis American

Press Club at Metropolitan St. Louis Media person of the year: Mike Shannon, Cardinals broadcaster Meritorious Service: Jeremy Kohler, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Lifetime Achievement: Margaret Wolf Freivogel, St. Louis Beacon

Missouri Bar Edward Roth, St. Louis Post-Dispatch William Freivogel, St. Louis Beacon Maria Altman, St. Louis Public Radio

Page 36 • Gateway Journalism Review • Fall 2010

Every Issue AD/PR AWARDS Common Ground Public Relations The agency received two annual Bronze Quill awards from the International Association of Business Communicators.

Dillards Inc. Jerry Talamantes, director of special events and public relations, received the 2010 Plaza Frontenac Fashion Achievement Awards.

The Vandiver Group, Inc. The agency was named Best Public Relations Firm in St. Louis by St. Louis Small Business Monthly readers in the publication’s annual Best In Business 2010 issue.

Labor Tribune The St. Louis/Southern Illinois Labor Tribune recently won awards in the annual contest of labor journalism held by the International Labor Communications Association. A first place award cited Kevin Madden for a series of articles on the toxic mobile homes that were showing up in Jefferson County after the Katrina disaster in New Orleans. The Labor Tribune also won a third place award in the category of General Excellence for state publications.

IN MEMORIAM Tim Hogan , 76, died July 11 in Hemet, Ca. He was a former reporter for the Globe-Democrat and then

public relations director for the Missouri Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. He was a former president of the St. Louis Press Club.

Taffy Wilber , 85, died Aug. 2 in Sarasota, Fla. She was the wife of the late Del Wilber, who was a catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. She had a career in radio, public relations and community service.

Larry Fiquette , 84, died Sept. 4. He was a longtime editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, handling the

Sunday Pictures magazine and then the Dollar/Sense consumer section. From 1990 until his retirement in 1995, he was the paper’s Readers Advocate.

Patricia Sue Watkins , died Sept. 5. She was a graphic designer for KMOV-TV for more than 27 years.

Edward Schaefer , 71, died Sept. 14. He was a longtime Associated Press staffer in St. Louis who retired in

1999.

George Stroud, 81 , died Oct. 3. He was a longtime editor at the Post-Dispatch for copy, wire news, and

makeup.

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