NewsAche

Deader than dead

2011-06-21T21:21:00.002-05:00

The cuts across Gannett are hideously deep today, including about a dozen from the Enquirer newsroom -- many solid, experienced people who truly loved the business. I don't care whether you're publishing a newspaper or making donuts, if you don't employ people who care about the product, it won't be worth anyone's time and effort to consume. I'll read, sometimes, what the Enquirer gives me for free, but I'll be damned if Gannett ever gets another nickel out of me.

The Enquirer loses relevance with each staff reduction. Newspapers are in a self-inflicted death spiral. To the people who have been cut, all I can say is God bless, be calm, breathe deeply and you'll find a way to make a living that has meaning for your lives. To the people left behind, for chrissakes, find another job. To the corporate pigs and dim yes-men who try to tell the communities they serve that their newspapers will get better and more focused when the newsrooms are less polluted by experienced and passionate newspeople, I want you to look your children in the eye and explain to them what you did today. It's a terrible thing. I hope you fucking choke on your bonuses and President's Rings.

Terrible

2009-07-08T15:02:00.003-05:00

There are gut-wrenching changes at the Enquirer today. I have briefly come out of retirement to post this, if only to make a thread available for people to discuss the workers who've lost their jobs. This is also this thread at Gannettoid.com. Best wishes to all.

So long

2008-09-24T13:32:00.005-05:00

Farewell to these good people on their last day at the Enquirer:

Betty Barnett
Jim Borgman
Marty Eggerding
Ann Haas Ann Hicks
Allen Howard
Jim Knippenberg
Joy Kraft
Tony Lang
Margaret A. McGurk
Sara Pearce
Jennifer Schwertman
Alan Vonderhaar
William A. Weathers
John Wolfe

With this post I'm leaving the blogging business. And let me be clear: No one is silencing me. I'm just tired of it. The Enquirer is hopeless. Thank you for reading and commenting and supporting me.

Arrivederci

2008-09-03T08:42:00.004-05:00

Beginning Tuesday, newsroom -- excuse me -- information center employers were being informed on the acceptance of buyouts. There were 60 buyouts, more than the 50 asked for, and 15 in the newsroom. Jim Borgman is among those leaving. He was a giant in the newsroom, the best journalist in the Enquirer's employ, and it's telling that in the story the Enquirer published, his is the only name they felt was worth mentioning among those leaving.

There are other good people leaving. There are some unexpected decisions, and some who've been refused will not be happy. And, it's going to be shocking and upsetting just how badly this will affect the breadth and quality of the Enquirer's coverage.

Eeny meeny miny moe

2008-08-26T12:39:00.004-05:00

The buyout applications are in, and now the process of selecting those who will allowed to leave begins. The publisher wrote the troops Monday:

From: XXXX On Behalf Of Buchanan, Margaret
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 1:26 PM
To: Cincinnati-All1
Subject: Voluntary Severance Program update

To: All non-represented employees

From: Margaret Buchanan

The deadline for applications for voluntary severance packages has passed and we are beginning the process of determining those we will accept to meet The Enquirer's goals as part of a Gannett-wide staff reduction announced in recent weeks.

I realize it will be a tense two weeks until those involved are informed about the status of their applications. I understand how difficult this will be and I know that many may be disappointed if their applications are denied. But we need to get this done and move on.

The Operating Committee has been working with its managers and supervisors to help determine what positions we should keep and which we can afford not to replace. As stated before, we will do this based on position, job function and years of service. Our goal is to notify employees individually by September 5 as to whether they've been accepted or not.

It's been a trying time for all of us. But I appreciate your hard work throughout, and again encourage you to ask questions – of me, your manager and/or Human Resources.

Margaret

And Tom's addition:

From: Callinan, Tom
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 3:24 PM
To: CIN-News Users
Subject: FW: Voluntary Severance Program update

In addition to the publisher's note below, here is how the voluntary severance program will be handled in News and related content departments:

My job will be to focus on the positions we can re-assign or restructure around, not the individuals.

I will work with the publisher on which positions in which departments we may consider. Then, where there are multiple volunteers in a certain job category, Human Resources will determine the individuals who will qualify based on years of experience, nothing else.

Here are general guidelines I have established:

-- Our top priority will be respecting our First Amendment responsibility -- public interest reporting and civic engagement.

-- We must protect our local news gathering capabilities.

-- We must protect strategic initiatives, such as NKY and the Edge.

-- We must ensure that basic operations -- the ability to produce a timely and lively web site and well-edited newspaper -- are protected.

-- And we need to keep in mind the demands of an increasingly digital future.

Decisions will be made in the next two weeks. Meanwhile, I don't think it benefits anyone to speculate on what that means for the individuals involved and/or the departments they come from.

TC

Telling reporters and editors not to speculate is like telling birds not to fly. The Enquirer asked for 50 buyout candidates and the word is that many more than that applied. For the newsroom, it means that some people who would very much like to leave will not be allowed to take the buyout. Chances are they'll have to stick around for the Enquirer's bright future.

If you don't take the buyout, you'll have to attend more meetings with Tom

2008-08-24T20:41:00.004-05:00

The Enquirer tried to calm the newsroom by holding a series of meetings, to talk about what happens after the buyouts. Instead, boss Tom Callinan, in his inimitable way, screwed up the message and had to issue a clarification.

From: Callinan, Tom
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 1:40 PM
To: CIN-News Users
Subject: Training and new skills

In our conversations about life after the buyouts we have been talking a lot about the future need for diversifying our staff's skills for flexibility and collaboration in a tighter world.….some have misinterpreted that as a call for everyone to learn html, Excel and high-end Avid video … like by Friday or else.

I do not mean to send that message.

What I am trying to say that it will be helpful for our excellent copy editors to know a bit about basic design…our best designers to be able to pitch in on basic copy editing ….bureau reporters able to take a point and shoot to a remote assignment for a head shot … experienced reporters able to fill in for desk editors in emergencies (with differential of course) all to get more involved in basic understanding of linking and imbedding online and in blogs. That type of thing.

We will be assessing our current training and surveying the staff on what you all want and need. And I am hearing that we need to provide an array of training environments for a wide variety of learning styles -- from wikipedias and digital tutorials to group sessions and intense, personal hands-on experiences.

Meanwhile, here's something that Chris has been doing in an informal manner….and to be frank the attendance has been disappointing.

Please consider stopping by.

**** MINI ENQ A: ONLINE and YOU

Every Tuesday 10:30-11 a.m. and Thursday 4:30-5 p.m.

Not sure how to create a message thread on the new Cincinnati.Com? Do you have no clue what RSS is, or why you need it? A new weekly, informal, quick Q-and-A chat session may be just the help you need. Starting next Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon – and running for as long as we want – we'll be gathering in the 19th floor conference room at Elm to go over stuff like this. No pressure, no requirement to attend, no sign-up sheets, probably no food – just the opportunity to whittle away at the nagging stuff that might be keeping us from doing our best.****

And thanks to all for patience, understanding and participation in the discussions we've been having in small group sessions on Elm, Kentucky, Blue Ash, and Butler-Warren … day and night-side.

You are being listened to. I want all to help guide me in making the difficult decisions about how The Enquirer will manage any re-assigning and restructuring that may be needed in the coming months.

TC

How ridiculous. Callinan has pulled this stunt before, calling meetings and pretending that he values your input. The only thing this latest episode did was drive people to take the buyout.

Buyouts and Metromix

2008-08-19T07:38:00.004-05:00

There are many names floating around the newsroom, people who are known to be taking the buyout. I won't make those names public, because some of those people are on the fence. One or two have turned in the paperwork for the buyout and then changed their minds. It looks as though the copydesk and Life will be hit hard.

And the reality of what the newsroom will be like after the buyouts is starting to sink in. Rumors are swirling about where Hollis Towns is going, and Tom Callinan is holding meetings this week with newsroom employees about what happens next. He wrote to the staff: "Editors and I have talked about possible scenarios, but we really won't know what the future will hold until we see who is on the final list on Friday. Obviously we may not be able to accept all requests for the buyouts. But we know we will have to do some re-assigning and restructuring in the aftermath. ... I don't have a crystal ball and I can't predict or promise anything about the future in these changing and challenging times. But I will give you straight answers as best I can."

Meanwhile, Gannett is pushing a project called Metromix (press release here), a large web-based entertainment database. Each Gannett paper is expected to contribute hundreds of items to the database. The deadline is next week, but the Enquirer is well below its quota. So this week, Enquirer reporters are having to waste their time researching and filing items for Metromix. Gannett often says it doesn't interfere in local news coverage, but here's an example where they dictate to the local papers, who have to drop whatever they're doing and respond.

The Enqurier makes itself news

2008-08-15T09:16:00.003-05:00

The Enquirer finally reports on its own buyout offer, nearly two weeks after it first made the offer to employees and on the day the buyouts were originally supposed to be taken. The sudden attack of conscience comes because word leaked out that Gannett was looking to cut 1,000 jobs, and the rest of the industry press was reporting it. Much credit goes to Gannettblog, which has kept the pressure on. Word out of the Enquirer is that people are running for the exits, in all departments.

The axe cuts deeper

2008-08-08T12:54:00.002-05:00

Many functions of the Enquirer's Finance department are being outsourced to a central operation being set up by Gannett in Springfield, Mo.

TO: All Enquirer Media employees
FM: Margaret Buchanan

In meetings yesterday afternoon, all employees in the Finance department were informed that parts of our financial operations will be moved to two "national shared service centers" located in Indianapolis and Springfield , Mo.

The changes will primarily affect what we do in the areas of accounts payable, general ledger, credit and some aspects of cash accounting. Our Finance division will continue to locally support the organization in the areas advertising billing, circulation billing, payroll and financial analysis.

Because this will be a fairly long undertaking, it is difficult to know exactly how and when employees will be affected. Cincinnati will be among many Gannett sites moving these shared service centers in the next 6 months or more.

The timing of this announcement – during our Voluntary Severance Program – will provide additional options to affected employees. Severance, benefits continuation, job opening information, and employee assistance are among the options available to employees.

I just wanted to make you aware of what's happening.

We appreciate your cooperation. And if you have any questions about this, please feel free to ask me, Dave Wuertemberger in Finance, or Keith Bulling in HR.

Margaret

The email above doesn't say how many jobs will be cut. It's also not clear if the number being cut in Finance affects the 50 buyouts announced on Monday, but my guess is that these are in addition to the 50. Those people who are losing their jobs will find comfort in knowing that the newspaper they are leaving is poised for success.

The axe falls

2008-08-05T06:36:00.005-05:00

The Enquirer, which according to the letter below is poised to succeed in the future, will do so with fewer people around. Today the paper put out the word today that it would like 50 employees to volunteer for buyouts. They are being offered two weeks of severance for each year served, with health benefits during the severance period. That's not a great offer, but it's not as cheap as some might have expected. And, writes publisher Margaret Buchanan, "If this voluntary offer doesn’t result in a sufficient number of volunteers, or if in the future, economic conditions worsen, it may be necessary to consider layoffs."

From: XXXX, On Behalf Of Buchanan, Margaret
Sent: Monday, August 04, 2008 3:31 PM
To: Cincinnati-All1
Subject: Voluntary Severance Program

To: All non-represented employees

From: Margaret Buchanan

In the last few years, we have implemented a number of initiatives to help us compete in an ever-changing media landscape, and thanks to your hard work and initiative, we are poised to succeed in the future.

However, as I’m sure you’re aware, the economy has worsened in the last year. Despite putting in place many cost-control actions – including some reductions in staff and many non-payroll expense cuts – we find ourselves needing to cut expenses again.

To that end, we are offering a voluntary severance program. Here are some details about the program:
It is being offered to all active non-represented employees of Enquirer Media, excluding Operating Committee employees.

The company reserves the right to limit the number of volunteers accepted in order to maintain business operations.

The program offers two weeks of severance for every year of credited service – up to 52 weeks. This will be paid out the same way as regular payroll until the severance period is exhausted. During the severance period, health benefits will remain intact.

The offer is open until August 15.

We are looking for 50 volunteers overall.

If more than 50 volunteer, we will review whether we can expand the pool. Decisions about which volunteers will be accepted will be based on position, job function and years of service.
If this voluntary offer doesn’t result in a sufficient number of volunteers, or if in the future, economic conditions worsen, it may be necessary to consider layoffs.

Please see the attached Q&A for answers to frequently asked questions.

Eligible employees who are interested should contact Julie Sawyer in Human Resources at (513) 768-8216.

Employees who decide to volunteer should submit a request in writing (signed and dated) to Julie Sawyer in HR. The company will review the list of volunteers after August 15, make a determination and inform all volunteers who have been accepted. Separation dates will be set at that time.

Margaret

At least she didn't sign it, "Your pal, Margaret." What is her definition of "success"? The Enquirer is getting its ass kicked on the Bruce Ivins story. Compare their pathetic effort to what the New York Times has done. The latter is what reporting looks like. The former is an example of settling for "good enough" but it's really not good at all. The problem isn't the reporter's. It's the combination of too few people, too few resources and too little time creating a bland brew of low expectations.

And it will only get worse. The word of buyouts has unnerved the newsroom, and good people are looking for the exits. Members of the operating committee are exempted from the offer, so that means people who need to go, like Tom Callinan, probably won't.

UPDATE: The buyouts have been reported by the Business Courier, Editor & Publisher, CityBeat and Gannettblog, but not yet by the Enquirer itself.

UPDATE: The Enquirer has extended the deadline by a week.

Gas pains

2008-07-25T21:35:00.002-05:00

The Enquirer has breathlessly posted the final installment of its gas price analysis, which makes the following statements:

An Enquirer analysis of daily gas prices at 716 area stations in May and June, and interviews with dozens of dealers, consumers and experts, finds that competition is still the No. 1 factor influencing how prices are set.

And:

Retailers say they usually follow the leader when it comes to setting a daily price.

Competition means you challenge the leader, not follow it. Which is it? No secrets revealed here, as were promised. Is this the best that the Enquirer can do?

The descent from news

2008-06-23T14:44:00.003-05:00

In its heyday, the TV show Seinfeld devoted an arc to developing a show "about nothing." The Enquirer gives you a newspaper about nothing. It seems more and more of the stories in the Enquirer aren't news. Today's newspaper, for instance, gives you a story about rising food prices and its effect on horses. Compare that to the Columbus Dispatch, which on Sunday gave us a story about rising food prices and its effect on food banks -- in other words, food for people.

I am slack-jawed browsing the Enquirer's new terrible web site, looking for news. Graeter's gets new packaging; on the web site, the story is a cheap excuse to run a photo of three little girls licking ice cream cones. A story about a local company trying to stop domain name theft makes it to the front page.

I have been seeing non-news stories in the paper day after day. This is a newspaper that is short on staff, short on time and other resources, and sadly short on common sense. Gannett's revenue is shrinking, and though daily circulation at the Enquirer is up slightly since the Post shut down, Sunday circulation is down 10,000 from a year earlier. The dire state of the newsroom means no one should spend five minutes working on a story about Graeter's new packaging. The Enquirer editors seem unable to prioritize stories, and work on news that matters and report it in depth. Newspapers are faced with the choice between what they can do with limited resources, and what they should do. The Enquirer makes the wrong choice day after day, and it's costing them.

I defy any Enquirer editor to explain their news philosophy. I would reprint it here, without comment. I don't believe it exists.

The Enquirer's blogs

2008-06-18T14:26:00.003-05:00

Does anyone else think that the new blog platform sucks? The blogs are hard to find, hard to read, hard to use. I also get the feeling, from the smaller number of comments posted, that traffic is down. This is another example of something Gannett has done for the benefit of advertising that gives a big fuck-you to readers. And Gannett thinks it "gets" the Internet.

Is change coming?

2008-06-05T14:56:00.003-05:00

How do you describe individual Enquirer editors without using names? You could say "the crazy editor," but there would be several candidates. Same goes for "milquetoast" or "bully."

Let's go with "bully." One of the Enquirer's editor bullies is said to have interviewed for the executive editor position at Gannett's Fort Myers News-Press in Florida last Friday. There will be many people cheering for this bully's departure, but you have to ask, why would anybody hire him? First, he's a bully. Second, there is not a single thing that happened during his tenure that would impress anybody journalistically. The only thing he's good at is scowling and shouting, but those aren't really talents.

Wait, maybe we should say only good things about him so somebody hires him. He's large, and I think he can spell many words well.

UPDATE JULY 7: The News-Press decided to go in another direction.

Chiquita, again

2008-05-23T14:57:00.002-05:00

I read this and thought wow, neither the Enquirer nor anybody else within Gannett would have the guts to publish anything like this today. I had thought that 10 years later, the Chiquita mess really hadn't had a long-term impact on the Enquirer. It wasn't a hard-nosed paper before, and it wasn't afterward, so what was the effect?

Cincinnati Magazine set out to answer that question, but came back with something different. No readers were interviewed, none of the powers that be in the region were interviewed. The editor and the publisher were interviewed. What would Tom Callinan know about the effect of the Chiquita mess? First, he wasn't here at the time. Second, the journalistic tone he's set for the Enquirer shows he doesn't know much about journalism. You get President's Rings for pushing paper, not for putting people in jail.

After reading Cameron McWhirter's look back, it occurred to me that the Enquirer would never, ever write about itself in such terms. A hard-hitting series, the disavowal that didn't say the reporting was in error, the $10 million payment to the richest man in town, the felony conviction, the naming of previously unnamed sources -- the Chiquita affair was a major event in this town, of historical proportions. The Enquirer celebrates the anniversaries of lesser events with front-page treatment. Why not Chiquita? The Enquirer, sadly, can't be honest its present, about its circulation numbers and its business practices. Why would it be honest about its own past?

A few awards the Enquirer might win, but it's not enough

2008-05-11T10:02:00.003-05:00

The Enquirer has been informed it's won awards in the following Cleveland Press Club award categories:

General News-Single Story: Unprotected Child, Tormented Death
General News-Multiple Stories: Who Killed Marcus Fiesel?
Features-Personality Profile: Love Song to a Teacher
Public Service: Foreclosure's Fallout
Investigative: Prescription for Scandal
Business: A Fatal Flavor?
Sports: A World Apart
Analysis: A Unique Hub
Best in Ohio: Staff Reporter (two reporters)
Travel Writing: Instruments Can Create Discord on Trips
Best in Ohio: Cartooning

Awards will be announced in June. In the Cleveland Press Club awards, there are 66 categories in the Open Print and Daily Newspaper classes. The Enquirer is a winner in just 11 categories; they have two nominees in one category. They are not a winner in the Best Daily Newspaper category, or Best Section, or Editorial, or Criticism, or Columns. One entry is written by Chuck Martin, who is leaving the paper, and another by Jim McNair, who was let go.

State awards should be a slam dunk for good newspapers, and are most meaningful if you win your category. If you don't win, if you get a second or third or an honorable mention, they're almost meaningless. Assuming the Enquirer doesn't finish first in all these categories, it's a poor showing for a major metro daily.

Too late

2008-04-28T20:12:00.002-05:00

The good news for the Enquirer is: Circulation is up, about 3% to 212,369, from 206,320 a year ago.

The bad news is it's too late to reverse the slide in advertising. The industrywide decline is so bad that the Conference Board has decided to stop publishing its help-wanted index, which used monthly newspaper classified ad totals to gauge the strength of the labor market. The Conference Board began publishing the index in 1951. So much advertising has moved online, that newspaper totals are no longer the indicator they once were.

The Maupin coverage

2008-04-26T07:28:00.002-05:00

I'm not going to take the Enquirer to task for its coverage of the Matt Maupin funeral. Many people are asking why now, why is the Enquirer devoting so much space and resources to this when there have been local soldiers whose deaths didn't even rate the front age.

I've been critical in the past of the Enquirer's lack of interest in the war. It's the biggest journalistic sin this paper has committed in the recent past. For most of the past five years, you could read the front page of the Enquirer and not realize the country is at war. The Enquirer has to be one of the few major dailies in the country not to have sent a reporter to Iraq. The editorial board's attention to this was has been infrequent, immature, ill informed, cowardly and just wrong.

Is the Enquirer trying to make it up in one fell swoop, packing into a week the coverage they've failed to present in the past? Maybe. But set that aside.

Have any of the critics of the Maupin observance been to a single other funeral? In how many other cities across the nation has there been an opportunity like this, for ordinary citizens to stand with their hats on their hearts as the casket of a fallen soldier passed by? If there's one funeral President Bush should attend, it's this one.

If you're against the war or for it, don't pass up this opportunity to honor Matt and the 4,360 other brave Americans who've given their lives in this war. Go to the visitation or the ballpark, or watch it on TV, think of those Americans and ask, as an American citizen, if you've been as involved in this war as you should have been. I know I haven't.

They never learn

2008-04-23T14:37:00.003-05:00

The Enquirer has used each turn in the long and tired saga of the Banks development to boost downtown, and nearly every time it's had to reverse itself. On Nov. 2 the headline in the center of the page said "The Banks is a done deal." On January 15 the headline said, "The Banks hits a new snag," followed a week later by "Banks project might miss finance deadline." Headlines on editorials include "Banks is a dream worth holding" (June 15), "Get ready: Banks really happening" (September 8), "The Banks: Time to get it done" (September 25) and "Stop arguing, just build the Banks" (September 30), "Seal the deal on the Banks" (October 25), "Cooperation key to Banks approval" (November 2), and finally, "Fuckin' A, stop acting like pussies and build the goddam thing already" (November 9).

Okay, I made that last one up. It seemed to fit the Enquirer's comical progression, which shows how hard they try ignore political realities and boost downtown, only to be slapped back to earth by some inevitable petty disagreement. It shows how little Enquirer editors understand about business, finance, development and politics. Yes, ground has finally be broken, but personally, I'm going to hold my applause till I see the first bar open for business there.

The Enquirer's latest display of front-page naivety surrounds the Delta-Northwest merger and the fate of the hub at CVG. We have "Delta: CVG service may grow" (April 17), "Delta hub here may grow" (April 18) and the editorial "Delta merger may help hub here" the same day.

This morning the Enquirer gave us "CVG hub not guaranteed" and later, the news that Delta and Northwest together lost more than $10 billion in the first three months of the year. Delta and Northwest are very nearly bankrupt, getting hosed by high fuel prices, so it would seem prudent to exercise a little caution when proclaiming such optimism about the future of the hub here. Nothing is set in stone. The Enquirer and its editors looks foolish and naive for pumping up that news about the hub, and they look foolish again when they have to report the reality of the situation.

If you hope to save the newspaper, you have to be committed to the belief that a well-researched and well-presented truth is worth paying for. Want boosterism and a spun truth? That's what we have politicians for.

Their hidden news judgment

2008-04-20T09:07:00.004-05:00

I wasn't going to bother posting anything about today's installment of "Our Hidden Communities," until I saw the self-congratulatory rail across the bottom of pages E4 and E5 of the Forum section -- headshots and short biographies of the eight journalists who put the package together.

This is good journalism, but it's not great. The Enquirer's packaging would like you to think it's great. The influx of immigrants from Central and South America has going on for a long time, certainly more than a decade, but the Enquirer acts like it is only through their commitment of journalism that you, the reader, is learning about this. The story combines several themes that could be good stories on their own -- the impact of immigration on crime, or the impact of the raid on illegal workers at Koch Foods, the impact on schools, the immigration stances of local elected officials. For reasons barely evident to someone reading the story, the Enquirer combined these themes into one story, giving each of those themes short shrift. Once again, the Enquirer opts for the strategy that's a mile wide and an inch deep.

There's much about this presentation I don't understand. Why was the story limited to Butler County? Surely these effects are also being seen in Hamilton County and Boone County. Past Enquirer stories have mentioned extensions of Mexican organized crime. Why wasn't that covered in today's stories? I don't understand the online presentation. I can't find the printed version of the story online, only the Flash audio and video. I can't find the story connected from the Local page or the Forum page. If anyone finds it, please email me.

For all of 2007 I only found 11 stories in the Enquirer that dealt with the region's Hispanic population -- stories that didn't deal with specific crimes, food or festivals. It's less when you take out the two stories about the Butler County sheriff sending Mexico a bill for the cost of drug busts, and less still when you take out the stories about WLW's tasteless campaign.

Do those eight journalists deserve a medal for this? I'm sure the Enquirer meant well, but this is a token effort to cover all the ground it has neglected to cover in the past. A real newspaper would have someone covering Hispanic issues full time, not writing stories once in a while. The Enqurier needs to do much better, but they thought this was so good they had to publish the names, photos and biographies of the eight people who put this together. This shows you how low the bar is for "great" journalism at the Enquirer.

This speaks for itself

2008-04-09T16:01:00.002-05:00

This has been posted as a comment on the Pulitzer item. It is authentic, and I thought it should receive more prominence.

From: Buchanan, Margaret
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 2:12 PM
To: MCIN-News Users

We received a call from Gannett today that Cincinnati will be recognized as a Gold Medal Newspaper in the Best of Gannett awards to be announced Thursday. We don't have the judge's comments yet, but Phil Currie mentioned we were lauded for work on the data desk, suburban web sites, CincyMOMS and a strong commitment to public interest journalism, specifically coverage of foster care issues.

It will also be announced that Tom Callinan will be recognized with a President's Ring, for many of the same reasons as above.

Congratulations to Tom and the Local Information Center, as well as to all of you in other departments that also contributed to this type of success for the second straight year.

Margaret

Operators are waiting now to take your subscription orders.

More Pulitzers the Enquirer didn't win

2008-04-08T06:07:00.002-05:00

The Pulitzer Prizes for journalism were announced on Monday. The Washington Post won six, the New York Times two, and the Enquirer zero. Again.

Smaller papers weren't shut out. The Concord (N.H.) Monitor for feature photography, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for local reporting. The award for Milwaukee isn't as good as the Enquirer's Best of Gannett for local-local reporting, because the Enquirer's award is one more.

Other smaller papers were finalists: The Portland Oregonian, Sarasota (Fla.) Herald Tribune, the Bergen Record, the Rocky Mountain News, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. No award was given this year for editorial writing. Didn't the Enquirer submit its Marcus Fiesel work?

Even when they win an award, it's a joke

2008-04-06T14:34:00.005-05:00

The Best of Gannett awards were announced on Thursday. This is so pathetic ....

The Enquirer won three awards, and none for journalism. Nothing for public service, nothing for breaking news, nothing for investigations, nothing for freedom of information. There was one first-place award for innovation, a third place for "community conversation" and a third place for local-local news.

The innovation was the CinciNavigator. This is a good piece of work, but it's not an innovation. Other newspapers have been doing more with data for 10 years or longer. The Enquirer finally joins the party in 2007, and Gannett applauds. This just shows how far behind the curve Gannett is. While the news awards were judged by a panel of eight people who do not work for Gannett, the innovation awards were judged by three career Gannettoids.

The community conversation was about Brenda Nesselroad-Slaby and the death of her child in a hot car. First place and second place went to the Des Moines Register, for conversations about long-term care insurance for the elderly and the presidential primaries. Is the Gannett pool this shallow?

The phrase "local-local" is a mantra in Gannett and a joke everywhere else. What is local-local? It's somehow more local than local news, but not as local as local-local-local news. The Enquirer won its third-place local-local award for its coverage of Lakota high school's 50th anniversary, and the Lakota West marching band's trip to the Rose Bowl parade.

Not one Enquirer award was for anything that has made a difference in this community -- no ill was corrected, no taxpayer money saved, no public policy improved, no one put in jail. Nothing embodied in these awards fulfilled what Finley Peter Dunne said a hundred years ago should be the duty of journalists -- to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The Enquirer has never been hard hitting, and now it's actually winning awards for going even softer.

Daugherty's ignorance

2008-04-05T07:35:00.005-05:00

Imagine God offered you a deal: You can make $5 million a year, but there's a tradeoff. Everybody will know that you make $5 million a year.

Would you take it? Damn right you would.

That's a deal many professional athletes make. They just don't understand it, and neither does Paul Daugherty.

Today's column by Daugherty carries the headline "Fans' fascination with dollars makes no sense." It should instead read, "Fans' fascination with dollars makes no sense to Paul Daugherty."

This is a column written by someone who lives in a shell, a shell called the press box. A sportswriter is someone who, with a press pass and a phone call, can get into any sporting event any time for free. Even if they have to pay, a phone call to the team will get seats the team has set aside, and they'll be just great. Too many sportswriters never stand in line, never sit upstairs, never have to bear the high cost of taking a family of four to a major-league sporting event.

Daugherty asks the questions "Why do we need to know a ballplayer's salary? Why should anyone beyond the IRS care?" without giving it 90 seconds of thought. Player salaries are a bit of information that puts sports into perspective. There are plenty of people who see the salaries and don't care and buy tickets anyways. And there are many (former) fans who see those numbers, see how much grown men are paid to play children's games, decide the system is way out of whack, and stay away. That's their right. That's how intelligent adults make informed decisions, and it's the job of journalists to provide the data that informs our decisions. Would Daugherty argue those former fans would be happier if they didn't know how much athletes make?

Daugherty knows better than this. He needs to take a year off and attend only those events he spends his own money to attend. I question why the Enqurier allowed such an ill-conceived, pointless piece of crap like this to be published.

There lots of people in our society not only don't care about professional sports, but they reject its fantasyland elements, the way it has been corrupted by money. Sports sections are not written for those people, but sportswriters should at least respect that people can view the big picture and make their own decisions.

Stealing from employees

2008-04-02T12:46:00.004-05:00

The Enquirer has set the mileage rate for the quarter:

From: xxxx, xxxx On Behalf Of Buchanan, Margaret
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 11:10 AM
To: Cincinnati-All1
Subject: Gas Mileage Reimbursement

In August, 2005, we implemented a new gas mileage reimbursement plan for our non-represented employees. The plan is based on a sliding scale tied to gas prices in this market. We indicated we would review the rate at the end of each quarter and make changes, if necessary, at the beginning of January, April, July and October of each year.

Therefore, in keeping with this plan, and based on the "average local price index" for unleaded gas over the last three months

(see information at http://www.feulgaugereport.com), we have determined that gas mileage reimbursement will remain at the rate of

33 cents per mile for all business miles driven, effective March 31, 2008.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Dave Wuertemberger in Finance or Keith Bulling in HR.

Margaret Buchanan

See how they misspelled "fuelgaugereport.com"?

The rate of 33 cents a mile is worse than a joke; it's immoral. It means Gannett is subsidizing its business on the backs of employees. AAA says it costs 50.5 cents per mile to run a small sedan for 10,000 miles a year, or 37.4 cents at 20,000 miles per year. This is calculated for a new car in 2006, when gas was about 40 cents a gallon cheaper than it is today. The AAA's average for all kinds of cars is 62.1 cents per mile at 10,000 miles per year, almost twice what the Enquirer is paying.

UPDATE: To further harrass employees and makes them feel more like inmates, Gannett has embarked on an audit to make sure your kids are your kids. To claim anyone on health insurance, employees will have to submit proof, "copies of birth certificates, marriage licenses, adoption records or other documents," according to a letter from corporate HR. Every time you think Gannett is soulless, that they've reached new depths of stinginess, they take it one step further. Gannettblog has been following this closely. Do Gannett execs honestly believe this will help save the news business?

Blog reform on the way

2008-04-01T13:05:00.003-05:00

A month after my review of Enquirer blogs, the powers at the Enquirer announce they're taking a hard look at the stable of bloggers. Some will be sent to the glue factory.

Date: Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 6:26 AM
Subject: Sent to all users from Chris Graves

Blogs, blogging and our next steps

As we have talked about blogs and Pluck and social networks, we are taking a three-phrased approach in the beginning:

We have looked at our current staff blogs and made recommendations to:

1) Keep and improve.

2) Modify them.

3) Stop publishing them.

Most of these conversations have either happened or are in process.

The next phase will be

-- Follow up training sessions with our bloggers to improve blogs, either in tone, structure and/or technical tips. Mandy Jenkins will lead this effort.

And as we settle into the new tools (aka: Pluck) we will continue to:

-- Approve a select few new blogs based on the blog proposal that includes discussions with department heads and section editors. We need to think about who we hope to reach with a new blog. Ultimately, blogs will be approved by a committee of top editors.

-- Blogs will be monitored and assessed with feedback going back to bloggers and section editors as we continue to enhance and tweak our blogs and blogging efforts.

This process, as many things are in these days, will likely change and be modified as we march forward.

Questions? Thoughts? Send them along …

Chris

Pluck is a social networking platform used by media web sites.

Two thoughts:

"... as we continue to enhance and tweak our blogs and blogging efforts." I don't know where Graves gets the word "continue" from. Anyone whose been reading the Enquirer's blogs over the past six months would see there hasn't been any monitoring of the blogs at all. It doesn't look like anyone's paying attention at 312 Elm. There are vast differences in style and quality and editing. I hope the Enquirer can find a way to weed out the amateurishness of many of the blogs without snuffing out the personalities.
I am very encouraged that new blogs "will be approved by a committee of top editors."

Strikeout

2008-04-01T12:36:00.002-05:00

The Associated Press Sports Editors have announced this year's award winners. It's a contest with lots of winners, but the Enquirer doesn't get much.

In the Enquirer's class -- papers with circulation 100,000 to 250,000 -- there were 30 awards given for writing and 30 awards for sections. The Enquirer won no awards for writing or sections, coming away with three of 30 "honorable mentions" for writing and one of 30 honorable mentions for sections. There are also five awards for investigative sports reporting, and the Enquirer was shut out there, too. That's a decline from last year: In sections, the Enquirer won an award for best special section and two honorable mentions, and in writing, one award.

Overall, Sports is the best section in the Enquirer, and Sunday's baseball section was very good. This awards performance, though, is disappointing.

More awards the Enquirer didn't win

2008-03-27T15:31:00.003-05:00

The Society of American Business Editors and Writers announced winners on Thursday. Nothing for the Enquirer. The Cleveland Plain Dealer and Indianapolis Star were cited for general excellence.

The Enquirer should do better next year, when it will enter its blanket Ikea coverage.

And as we get into award season, I must repeat what I've said before: Prizes matter because you can't be good if you're not trying to be great. If you're great, you'll win prizes. If you're trying to be great, you'll get lucky and bag a few. If you're not winning any, it's a pretty good sign you're not trying to. And, state contests don't matter much. People who say readers don't care about prizes are probably right. But prizes are evidence of effort, and no prizes is a symptom of many things, none of them good.

The biggest metro area in Ohio is sort of in Kentucky and Indiana

2008-03-27T15:00:00.003-05:00

Lacking the ability to come up with real news, the Enquirer often falls back on parochialism and Cincinnati boosterism. Ikea comes to Cincinnati, it's a big deal. George Clooney comes to Maysville, it's huge on the front page.

I don't like today's Xavier story on the front page. It's a roundup of old facts packaged with a photo that's 60% out of focus, all of it published in support of tonight's game. But I'll forgive them for that, given the interest in the game. It would have been good, though, to have balanced that with real news on the front page.

The other story on the top of the front page is "Metro area now biggest in Ohio." The latest Census estimates say Cincinnati is now bigger than Cleveland. That's true, but not the "in Ohio" part.

The lead of Tony Lang's story acknowledges the problem:

The 15-county Cincinnati metropolitan area, which includes seven counties in Northern Kentucky and three in Southeast Indiana, now ranks as Ohio's largest metropolitan area. Census estimates released today show the area has overtaken metro Cleveland in total population the last two years.

That's right, out of 15 counties in the Cincinnati metropolitan area, 10 are not in Ohio. Those 10 counties contain about a half-million people, about a quarter of the region's population. The population of the five counties in Ohio is about 1.6 million, which is significantly less than the 2.1 million people in metro Cleveland, all of which is in Ohio.

In the end, the Enquirer doesn't bother to say why this is significant, and thus why the story is given such a prominent position on the front page. Only two people are quoted in the story. The chamber of commerce says it might lead to more federal dollars, but there's really no basis for that. He even manages to get the word "Ikea" into the story.

Get a report, interview two people, make front-page news. This is lazy, and it shows how little else is going on at the Enquirer.

More awards the Enquirer didn't win

2008-03-25T10:55:00.003-05:00

The annual awards from the Investigative Reporters and Editors group indicate no one was impressed by anything Enquirer. The Toledo Blade and Columbus Dispatch received honorable mentions.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer won a national award for coverage of trauma. That's an unusual award, but it shows the Plain Dealer's commitment to in-depth reporting.

Accountability begins at home

2008-03-19T22:53:00.004-05:00

On the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, the Enquirer editorial writers got indignant. They want answers from the Bush administration:

It's time to provide (Americans) an accurate, unvarnished view of the situation on the ground -- what quantifiable progress has been made economically and politically in Iraq, and how much more "progress" is needed before our role can be substantially reduced.
Americans also deserve to know the state of our military, how the commitment to Iraq affects its overall mission, and how long it can sustain such stresses.

The Bush adminstration hasn't provided those answers since 9/11. And the Enquirer editorial board believes the administration will do that now, because the Enquirer demands it? Right. You can read Wednesday's editorial top to bottom and still not know whether the editorial board believes the war continues to be worth fighting.

Let's go back to 2003, and see what the Enquirer had to say back then. Here's the editorial from March 20, 2003, after the initial invasion.

By the time you read this the deadline President Bush imposed on Saddam Hussein will have passed and the United States may be at war -- a war we believe to be a horrible necessity.

We believe the Iraqi regime poses a grave threat to the security of the region and to the United States. For 12 years he has refused to disarm, refused to cooperate fully with United Nations inspectors and refused to disavow the use of terrorist organizations. At the same time he has continued to develop chemical and biological weapons, weapons he was supposed to have abandoned after the Persian Gulf War.

Saddam is a tyrant of historic proportion. His is a heritage of barbaric cruelty to his neighbors and his own countrymen. Torture and rape have become tools of his government. After the Gulf War the U.N. tried to contain him with repeated resolutions. He has resisted those efforts by violating the no-fly zones and using oil revenues to supply his military rather than feed his people. The fact is that he cannot be permanently contained. He must be disarmed.
It is better to do it now than to wait until he has used his weapons directly, or supplied them to terrorist groups willing to use them in their own causes.

We wish it had not come to this point. It would have been better to have the members of the United Nations lined up at our side in this effort. It would have been better still for Saddam to have heeded the world's call for his disarmament. But now our nation is committed and we wish only for a swift and decisive conclusion to the conflict.

As Bush said Monday in his ultimatum to Saddam, we are at war with a regime, not with the Iraqi people. Our troops may roll over Saddam's forces with relative ease, but a real victory in Iraq will be the establishment of a government that can hold the diverse factions of the country together and serve as an example to other nations in the region. The sooner the conflict ends, the sooner that healing process can begin.

The Enquirer didn't bother to ask how long the war would last. They bought the administration's propaganda hook, line and sinker. And at the time, the Enquirer could only look at the positives. Here's the editorial from the next day, March 21, 2003:

We've been hearing about all the possible negative consequences that might come from a war with Iraq. It is time to look at the positives that are possible, even likely, to come out of this conflict.

After Afghanistan and now Iraq, the United States is showing Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and others that the United States is no paper tiger afraid to bite back.

The forcible disarming of Iraq signals that the United States will no longer wait, like an old-time boxer, for an opponent to take his best shot, but we will strike before an enemy can deal us a lethal blow.

War with Iraq can reduce by one the list of proven aggressor states with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

It can make terror states or terrorist-haven states slower to open their doors to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.

It can warn North Korea or others that we will not drift into a position of weakness where we can be neutralized by nuclear blackmail.

If U.S. advanced weaponry proves so superior, it could deter rogue states from venturing aggression or seeking nuclear weapons.

If the United States restrains this war with precision targeting, spares civilians and finds Iraq's undisclosed WMDs, it will go a long ways toward refuting protests.

It can free the United States and Britain from the costs of enforcing no-fly zones over Iraq for 12 years and from open-ended costs of containing Iraq's WMDs.

A liberated Iraq could help build the critical mass of self-governing states in the Mideast.
War crimes trials afterward can serve notice that officers or scientists who develop banned WMDs for hostile purposes will be punished to the maximum degree. They can also set the record straight about Iraq's weapons programs.

If the United States can hand post-war control over to a legitimate Iraqi government, it can punch gaping holes in radical Islamist arguments that we are bent on Mideast empire.
It could set up the United States to act as a credible broker to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The collapse of the U.N. Security Council into irrelevancy by failing to enforce its own resolutions against Iraq should define more clearly the limits of U.N. power.

It could bring Security Council reforms such as out-front disclosure of the lucrative contracts that French, Russian and Chinese companies have to develop Iraqi oil fields.

This war can energize the United States to get serious about homeland security, immigration screening and border control.

A swift end to the war could produce a swift end to economic recession now that consumers and investors are no longer left guessing when war will occur.

Secretary of State Colin Powell this week counted 45 nations that support forcibly disarming Iraq, but a swift allied victory will send scores more scurrying to the U.S. side. And instead of disrupting intelligence sharing on terrorists, a swift, successful war and enlightened reconstruction of Iraq could persuade even more nations to help root out sworn enemies of America.

It seemed ridiculous then, and blithering nonsense today. Every paragraph is more outrageous than the one before. Do they stand by that now?

It's easy to see that before David Wells & Co. wrote Wednesday's editorial they didn't bother to review what they'd written five years earlier. Editorial & Publisher found a good number of papers questioned the war from the start. The Enquirer wasn't one of them. The editorial board didn't have the intellectual wherewithal to question the war in 2003, and they don't today have the gumption to take a stand, to say after five years whether we're safer, or whether it's money and lives well spent. It didn't have the honesty to go back to its list of "positives" and see how many have been achieved. And now they want answers, from an administration that has never and won't now give them.

It's bad enough that you can look at the front page of the Enquirer day after day and not even realize the nation is at war, but then to have the editorial board drop this drivel on us is beyond shameful. There's plenty of information out there, and the Enqurier editorial board could have done the research and come to its own conclusion. Is it really that hard to come up with a list of consequences of five years of war? Could they exhibit some honesty, go back and review what they've written and say whether they stand by those editorials today? Frankly, they're too lazy and/or stupid and/or cowardly to do that kind of work. How can they accept paychecks for producing this crap?

Hint: It begins with "G"

2008-03-16T11:26:00.002-05:00

I was intrigued by two recent items on Gannettblog: this one about Gannett's revenues through the first two months of the year, and then this one about Gannett's Friday conference call with Wall Street. It's not a pretty picture. Classified advertising is down, real estate advertising is down, employment ads are down, and auto ads are down.

Pro forma classified revenues declined 13.6 percent in the second period. Real estate revenues were down 20.7 percent, employment revenues were 16.1 percent lower, and automotive revenues declined 13.3 percent. U.S. Community Publishing pro forma classified revenues were 18.0 percent lower in February reflecting declines of 26.6 percent in real estate revenues, 23.3 percent in employment revenues and 10.9 percent in automotive revenues.

Those are big numbers, and it's really even worse than it looks. Look past the percentages to the dollars. In the first two months of the year, total ad revenue is down $69 million compared to 2007, and total revenue is down $88 million. The declines are accelerating, as the fall from 2007 to 2008 is more than twice as large as that from 2006 to 2007. Across Gannett, daily newspaper circulation is down more than 290,000 from 2007 to 2008, and circulation on Sundays is down nearly 350,000.

Compare 2008 to 2005 and the hole gets deeper. For the two-month period, ad revenue is $112 million less today, and total revenue is $125 million less today. Total daily newspaper circulation is down about 750,000, and Sunday circulation is down by 1 million.

With all that in mind, see this item at TechCrunch, with the title: "What Media Company Gained the Most Market Share in 2007? (Hint: It Starts With a G)." That would be Google. Henry Blodgett looked at the numbers for 17 media companies and found Google's revenues from ad sales rose by $2.6 billion. That's more than twice as big a gain as the next most-improved, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Total ad revenue by those 17 companies rose by 9%, to $58 billion.

Change just one word in TechCrunch's title: What media company lost the most market share in 2007? (Hint: It also starts with a G.) Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

The answer is Gannett. While Google gained $2.6 billion in revenue, Gannett's ad revenues fell by $338 million. So, the pie is getting bigger, and Gannett is getting smaller.

Gannett might try to say that it's making strides online. According to Neilsen NetRatings, Gannett's web sites, which would include USA Today and the Enquirer's Cincinnati.com sites, got 25.8 million unique visitors in February, and increase of more than 3 million from a year ago.

But Google had 104 million unique visitors in February, according to Nielsen. Gannett isn't close. This January report from Comscore shows how wide the gap is. Look at Table 3: Gannett had roughly 23 million unique visitors in January, ranking No. 33 and in the company of groups like CBS, Expedia, Bank of America and Yellowpages.com. In January, Yahoo had 138 million unique visitors, Google 134 million. The New York Times had 48 million.

This is bad, very bad, and there's no way to spin it otherwise. Gannett is losing revenue faster than its gains on the web can compensate for, and -- as the economy skids into recession -- the decline is accelerating. The budget cutting at the Enquirer has been vicious over the last year. It will only get worse. The Enquirer has cut the fat, it has cut into muscle and now it will be asked to start chopping off limbs. When you have fewer people in the newsroom to produce an editorial product, there's less in the product worth reading, so reversing the skid in circulation and producing meaningful gains in web traffic will be nearly impossible.

Gannett apparently believes the key to saving the print product is hard news and watchdog journalism, but Gannett's history is all about the journalism of hope and News 2000 and "Real Life, Real News" (scroll down to October 2, 2oo3). That's all very soft. Twenty-five years of these programs means Gannett doesn't have the DNA or the leadership to do hard news well enough to save itself. Hollis Towns a hard news editor? Tom Callinan? Get serious. Under their leadership the amount of enterprise reporting in the Enquirer as fallen to almost zero, so it looks like the future of the Enquirer is more "hard news" stories about the weather and high school sports and appeals to readers to submit photos of their pets. This is not a recipe for improvement, let alone survival.

Gannett needs to forget the past, and ask what it needs to do to build readership of the newspaper and viewship on the web, and then implement those plans without regard to the next quarter's profit. On the current path, with Gannett thinking about each quarter's profit, it will soon run out of quarters. Maybe CEO Craig Dubow needs to give up his bonus for a year or two, or three, but if Gannett doesn't figure this out soon -- and by "soon," I mean now -- it's dead.

Where's the news?

2008-03-10T12:22:00.004-05:00

The Enquirer pretends to "get" news in the Internet age by emphasizing its blogs, but the front page still looks ignorant. The top of the front page tells us about the weather, as if we all woke up this morning to discover it had snowed this weekend. Property damage and personal injury were minimal, so why is this front page, above-the-fold news?

Next is Botox and other so-called "fillers." Placement of this story in the center of the front page is shameless pandering to 40-plus women, who the Enquirer is hoping will continue to buy this dying rag and keep it afloat.

But the main story on the page is an Associated Press story about the enormous cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The story is based on a new book by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Blimes, a former federal budget official now teaching at Harvard, and it's good to see this in the Enquirer.

But it's not news. The book came out March 3, and there have been stories about it in the worldwide media for a month. It's not news to most of the world, but it's news to the cavedwellers who run the Enquirer, and so it is misplaced as the lead story in today's paper. Today's front page is a pitiful display of news judgment.

Head of circulation leaving

2008-03-07T17:26:00.004-05:00

Gary DiSanto put his Clermont County home up for sale in last summer, but it doesn't appear it's been sold. The Clermont County Auditor web site still lists DiSanto as the owner.

I am pleased to announce Gary DiSanto, VP/Circulation, will be leaving us to be the Senior Vice President/Circulation for the New Jersey Group Newspapers. In his new roll, Gary will direct the statewide circulation operations for the New Jersey Group. His last day here will be Friday, April 4.

Gary has put an excellent team and structure in place for us to build on from here. Gary ’s work on the JOA was remarkable and we could not have done it without him. We are saddened to lose Gary but excited for him and this great opportunity.

We wish him well and thank him for all he has done to make our Circulation what it is today!

Margaret

Margaret misspells "role" in the second sentence, and she says nothing about a replacement.

I couldn't help myself

2008-03-07T16:57:00.004-05:00

More awards the Enquirer didn't win: First, the National Headliner Awards. Note how many awards are won by smaller papers. A columnist from the Cleveland Plain Dealer won, and the Columbus Dispatch won an award for public service.

Second, the National Journalism Awards from the Scripps Howard Foundation. Big papers such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune won the big awards, but smaller newspapers like the Hartford Courant and the Virginian-Pilot were finalists.

Also, word is leaking out about Pulitzer winners. No mention of the Enquirer there either. Didn't the Marcus Fiesel coverage knock the judges off their chairs?

Being shown how it's done

2008-03-04T16:55:00.003-05:00

The Columbus Dispatch's Ohio Primary 2008 blog is just kicking the Enquirer's Politics Extra's ass on this big Tuesday. The Dispatch has been on top of things all day, reporting on the impact of the heavy rains and alleged irregularities. The Enquirer posted nothing between 8:30 a.m. and about 2:45 p.m. In that time the Dispatch had 22 posts.

At 3:46 p.m., the Enquirer said, "Jon Craig reports: Voters in Adams and Perry counties have been given permission to vote provisionally at their county boards of elections because of severe flooding at polling locations." The Dispatch had that at 2:12 p.m.

Death by blogging

2008-02-29T13:44:00.002-05:00

I will start this with my favorite post from a blog at Cincinanti.com/Enquirer.com/CinWeekly.com. It's from the CinSpin fashion blog, about a store at Rookwood Commons called Dr. Mojoe:

Now what has the doctor prescribed? He's giving you the chance for a speedy recovery from your fashion fever and style sickness with huge savings up to 75 percent off men and women's fall/winter merchandise (that's denim by Diesel, True Religion, Chip & Pepper and so much more). Feel better yet?

Kill me. Kill me please.

This is the problem with too many of the blogs on those sites. They take someone who likes to wear clothes, and make him a fashion blogger. They take a bunch of people who like to eat food, and make them food bloggers. They take someone with a NetFlix subscription, and they make him a pop culture blogger. And the bloggers try to be hip and funny, but they rarely are. They're just amateurs, and too many of the Enquirer blogs are written by amateurs.

Here are the top 30 blogs under the Enqurier umbrella for the week ending Feb. 23. They are ranked by number of visits. I also add a comment or two, and check out the number of comments posted.

Reds Insider, 64,422 visits. Grade: A. I have said before that I regard John Fay as a must-read. He writes well, and breaks news on this blog. Last June, however, the blog by C. Trent Rosecrans of the Post was drawing traffic equal to, and sometimes better than, Fay's. And it looks like anyone who had Rosecrans's blog bookmarked is being redirected to Fay. Comment traffic is heavy.
Politics Extra, 26,996 visits. Grade: B. Traffic should be higher, because this can be a very busy blog. There were eight posts on Feb. 27 alone, by seven different people. But this also can represent what's bad about newspaper blogs: They can be sloppy and unfocused.
Bengals, 22,461 visits. Grade: C. Mark Curnutte isn't as good as he thinks he is. Comment traffic is weak compared to Fay's Reds blog. This might seem an unfair comparison since football is out of season, but the NFL has really become a 12-month sport, so the comment traffic should be better. Curnutte has learned to stick to football and leave politics out of this.
UC Sports, 18,469 visits. Grade: A. I think Bill Koch is underappreciated. His work in the paper is good, and this blog is good. Comment traffic is heavy.
NCAA Hoops Blog, 14,654 visits. Grade: B. Dustin Dow covers Xavier and writes this catch-all blog about NCAA basketball. Why does the Enquirer have an NCAA blog when they don't have NFL or MLB blogs? Comment traffic is heavy.
Television, 13,818 visits. Grade: B. John Kiesewetter belongs to a group that is heading toward extinction: the local TV writer. It's a pleasure to read John, though he sometimes talks too much about Cincinnati TV 30 years ago. The comment boards are especially worth reading, because they appear to be written by people in the local TV community.
Paul Daugherty, 11,999 visits. Grade: C. I can't grade his blog well because I don't like Daugherty. I don't read him in the paper and I don't listen to him on the radio. He can be good, but he's often not, and it's because he's lazy (or spread too thin, because of the radio work). Moderate comment traffic.
High School Sports, 11,146 visits. Grade: B. I'm not into high school sports, but the breadth of the blog is good. Comment traffic is weak.
N.Ky. Politics, 6,516 visits. Grade: B+. Good traffic, and Patrick Crowley owns Northern Kentucky. Here's a headscratcher: Though the number of visits is about a quarter of that of the Politics Extra blog, Crowley's page views are better -- about half the Extra blog's, which is out of proportion. Why does the one-man show do so well?
BorgBlog, 3,614 visits. Grade: A. I'll bet Jim Borgman didn't pick the name of his blog.
The Foodie Report, 3,098 visits. Grade: D. I get a headache reading this blog. It's a mess. Surely they've heard, "too many cooks spoil the broth." Blogs work best when there's a unified voice, and especially when written by a single person who knows what he/she is talking about. This blog claims six contributors. Aside from critic Polly Campbell, they're all amateurs, and it shows in the low quality of the posts. Traffic should be higher considering the subject is eating, something people do three or more times a day. Comment traffic is moderate to light.
Art, 2,428 visits. Grade: B. There's lots of pictures, and lots of news about activities at local galleries. I heard an interview on the radio with a woman who writes a blog about migranes for the New York Times. That's right, migranes. That's an example of the kind of narrowcasting that news sites can do, appealing to a specific audience with a strong focus on a subject, and that's what the Art blog is. Comment traffic, however, is weak.
Life of Brian (Pop Culture), 1,597 visits. Grade: F. Awful, a complete waste of time. "One man's on-going rant" should be a personal blog and not part of the Enquirer's web site. This guy isn't even a reporter. And pop culture should be a lot more than (mostly) movies.
Classical Music, 1,379 visits. Grade: C. I love Janelle Gelfand, and the content is good, but this blog gets very little traffic and no comments.
P&G, 1,346 visits. I'll give Keith Reed a break because he's so new. Traffic is low and there are no comments. But it's surprising to me that this is the only Business blog. Just goes to show how far the Business section has fallen in recent years.
Roller Derby Diva, 1,177 visits. Grade: B. I don't know why the Enquirer has a roller derby blog. The good thing is this isn't taken seriously. I think it's knee-slapping hilarious that this got more traffic than the Forum blog. That's probably because Lauren Bishop is way hotter than David Wells.
Today at the Forum, 1,165 visits. Grade: F. What a fucking joke. It ranks behind the awful Life of Brian, Classical Music, the P&G blog by the new guy, and the Roller Derby Diva.
Pig Blogs: Emily & Lindsey 762 visits. I won't grade this one. This is one of three CinWeekly blogs about the Flying Pig Marathon, written here by two best friends preparing for their first marathon. Since I don't like to run .... About 30 comments posted, and from the looks of them, runners are tuning in. It appears this is the top-ranked CinWeekly blog.
Popography, 738 visits. Grade: D. Looks like this used to be the CinWeekly staff blog. Two of the last five posts are "Throwback video of the day." A waste of time. Only one comment posted.
"cincinnatiblogs_spring ", 520 visits. As far as I can tell, this is the old designation for the Post's Reds blog by C. Trent Rosecrans, and it now redirects you to Fay's blog. C. Trent's new blog is here.
Soundcheck, 491 visits. Grade: D. This is little more than pictures, links to videos, dates and times of shows. No comments posted. Sad. There's a wide open space for a good pop/rock music blog in Cincinnati, but this isn't it.
Pig Blogs: Ben, 485 visits. I won't grade this one either, but his blog entries are very very long. About three dozen comments.
"cin_blog ", 481 visits. I couldn't figure out what this is, but it gets more traffic than "Cincytainment." It might be the main blogs page.
Footnotes, 445 visits. Grade: ??. This was Greg Korte's blog, but there hasn't been a new post since September. It's not listed in the menu of blogs. And still, it ranks 24th.
Pig Blogs: Dean, 426 visits. I will grade this one: B. Dean appears to be a serious runner, and his expertise enhances the blog. He loses points for the too-long Daytona 500 entry. About two dozen comments posted.
Cincytainment, 419 visits. Grade: D. Another weak blog with a bad title by a rank amateur.
CincyMoms blog, 323 visits. No new entries since September.
The Last Word, 285 visits. Grade: C. Where CinWeekly readers submit guest "editorials." But they are not editorials, more like reflections on life. If you want to write, get your own blog.
Campbell County Connects, 256 visits. No new posts since Feb. 7.
"cincinnatiblogs_staffblog", 241 visits. It appears this traffic is redirected to the Popography blog.

Note that there's a big drop in traffic from Fay at No. 1 to Politics at No. 2, then another big drop between No. 9 (N.Ky. Blog) and No. 10 (Borgman). And there are other blogs that don't show up in the top 30, like Tangeants & Tollbooths, CinStages Buzz and CinSpin; they rank lower than blogs that are inactive or for all intents and purposes extinct, which is pretty sad. There's a lot of effort being put into a lot of blogs that aren't paying off. The Enquirer also clearly favors some blogs over others for promotion; they should work on their promotion efforts, but the Enquirer has always been weak in that department. And the CinWeekly blogs, for the most part, suck. No surprise there.

Clearly, blogs won't save news at the Enquirer. The numbers are too low. Sports dominates the top 10. It's surprising how low the numbers are for the arts and entertainment blogs, and CinWeekly isn't helping.

A big problem is that the Enquirer is fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Will John Fay ever link to a story by Hal McCoy of the Dayton Daily News? Not likely, but Lance McAllister will, and so will Redleg Nation and Red Reporter. The point is that if you want to be THE Reds blog, you have to connect to all things about the Reds. Without that, you're just boxing yourself in, limiting your appeal and your growth. If I only read one Reds blog each day, it won't be Fay's, because I know that Redleg Nation will link to anything important.

If the Enquirer is serious about blogs, it needs to get rid of the amateurs, support the good blogs that get traffic, and boost the good ones that don't get such good traffic. And it's critical it find some formula for boosting the news and features blogs. The Politics Extra blog has about 10 people contributing at different times, including two editors. The traffic needs to be better to justify that level of effort.

The situation in Cincinnati New Jersey

2008-02-20T15:18:00.002-05:00

Newsroom employees at the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J., are so upset with working conditions that they wrote a letter to the publisher, copied the letter to their corporate fathers, and sent to a blogger. Both the Courier-Post and the Enquirer are owned by Gannett, so the situations will have similarities.

A sample:

The staff has shrunk significantly since November – at least eight newsroom employees have left – leaving fewer people to handle a workload that continues to increase with the addition of new publications. This comes on top of dealing with the daily newspaper, zoned Communities pages, special sections and online coverage beyond what goes in the newspaper. The executive editor and the managing editor seem oblivious to the impact of this workload on the remaining employees.

The result is a staff that is overworked to the point where it often is physically impossible to complete the required work within the scheduled work week. As a consequence, many non-exempt employees work beyond their allotted hours without being paid overtime. The issue often is addressed by telling the employee to take time off as compensation, but that seldom occurs because the workload does not make it practical.

There's more, some of it disgusting. Thanks to GannettBlog for this. Read everything GannettBlog has written on the situation in Cherry Hill; it's quite revealing.

The point is that the chiefs at Gannett headquarters give directives to the local newspapers about targets for revenue and costs and profits, and they don't care about how those targets are achieved. The targets are short term, but the effects of reaching them are long term.

Read Cliff Radel's near-blow job today about Joe Trauth, a lawyer who specializes in representing big corporations in real estate and zoning fights. He's represented home builders, shopping center developers, Wal-Mart and Rumpke. Radel did manage to quote one attorney who's faced Trauth in some of these cases, but this story is a largely uncritical, unskeptical look at a corporate hired gun. No attempt is made to look at the outcomes of the cases Trauth has won. Have they been good for the community? Trauth is never asked if he feels like a corporate bully, overwhelming lesser-funded groups of homeowners who oppose many of these projects. That would be disrespectful. Radel didn't say what Trauth's hourly rate is, or how Trauth has spent the money he's made representing big companies. (Radel does write that Trauth represents small clients, but names only one and doesn't talk to any. I'll guess that Trauth has many more large clients than small ones.)

Radel is capable of this kind of reporting, but was he given the time and the direction to pursue something other than what was published? Doubtful. The Enquirer doesn't have the resources or the will to hold someone like Trauth accountable, because that type of journalism takes time and costs money, and Radel probably has other work that needs to be done. Overall, I'm not sure why this story was assigned, why it was published, or why it was on the front page. But this is the kind of uncritical journalism produced by stingy, dying newspapers.

If they say 'white stuff', I'm cancelling my subscription

2008-02-20T11:23:00.004-05:00

Sticking your head out your front door doesn't make you a weatherman. And possessing a camera doesn't make you a photographer.

That's my lead-in to the two lamest news photographs I've ever seen, on this story on the Enquirer's web site. Weather isn't news unless there's deaths and plenty of property damage. Slow traffic isn't news. The Enquirer, however, was desperate to make news out of this morning's snowfall, so Jennifer Baker (a reporter, not a photographer) took a couple of snaps of snowflakes. Since I spent 45 minutes driving through the snow today, did I really need those photographs to help my understanding of the situation?

I also realize that the story says a bus accident injured two. If that's the case, then the story is "bus accident injures two," not "more snow on the way."

More awards the Enquirer didn't ... Jesus Christ, who gives a rat's ass?

2008-02-13T14:48:00.004-05:00

I haven't been blogging much lately, and there are several reasons for this. First, my rich and fulfilling private life leaves me little time anymore for this blog. Isn't the new season of American Idol the best ever?

Second, the Enquirer has become very, very dull. The staff cuts and the budget cuts have taken their toll. It's not just that there aren't enough people and resources to do good journalism. There just isn't any spirit in the Enquirer anymore.

There are only two writers I consider must-reads. One is John Fay, who does a great job covering the Reds. The other is Greg Korte, the only staff member at the Enquirer who resembles a full-time investigative reporter. The work of Dan Horn, Howard Wilkinson and John Erardi still catches my eye, and I still look for Janelle Gelfand and Polly Campbell in Life.

The front page is at be workmanlike, but what do they have to work with? The best local stories most days don't deserve front-page play, but are put there because there's nothing better. The Enquirer does almost no enterprise, aside from Korte's work. The "Hidden Communities" article? Oh, please. I'll give the Enquirer kudos for sending a reporter to Mexico. But the only people local Mexicans are "hidden" from are the Enquirer editors, who need to leave the newsroom more often. Are they seriously trying to tell us that nobody knew there were Mexicans in Cincinnati until four were found murdered in a hotel room? The resulting story was leaden with cliches (the headline: "They came in search of a better life") and edited to death. But my big pet peave is that you could read the Enquirer front page for a month and not know this country is at war. Iraq has been on the front page just once since January 1.

The Business section these days seems to be all about which restaurants are opening and closing. This is a section that has suffered the most from the cuts. It's lost staff and space and its position in the newspaper. There's not as much business news on the front page as there used to be.

The Life section is just eye candy, little pictures and graphics and one-paragraph items that add up to nothing. The features section is a destination section for any good newspaper, something every reader must look at for things that are quirky and fun and entertaining and enlightening. This section in the Enquirer doesn't seem to have a clear purpose.

And the Editorial page? It is truly awful and embarrassing and they should just shut it down. I can't think of the last time an Enquirer editorial made a difference. I've noticed how the Enquirer won't editorialize on an issue until it's settled -- the economic stimulus package, for instance. The Editorial page seems to exist for one purpose: to drive readers to the web site, to have a "community conversation" that never reaches any conclusions. When the Editorial page is so terrible, why would you think the web site would be worth visiting? This is an abomination.

My third reason for blogging so little is that I hardly care anymore. The turning point for me was the Slaby coverage, when it became clear the Enquirer was on a campaign to milk the deaths of children for web traffic. When I wrote about that, I wondered whether I should cancel my subscription. I didn't, but I might as well have. I realized only recently how dramatically that coverage soured me on the Enquirer. I read the Enquirer maybe three times a week now. I look at it on the web occasionally, but I'm not reading it often enough anymore to have an opinion.

I started this blog because I was angry -- angry that a big city newspaper could be so terrible and apparently not care. 2007 was a historic year for newspapers, a year when a number of trends -- all of them bad -- converged, and the people running newspapers had important decisions to make. Gannett and the Enquirer have made a lot of bad decisions. The result is a newspaper as bland and flavorless as the paper it's printed on. The Enquirer is almost totally reactive today. A church burns, a soccer mom is run over by her car, and it becomes the lead story. There's very little digging, very little that we don't see on Channel 9 the night before. Why bother?

It used to be that the Enquirer was reliably the voice of the city's establishment. That wasn't good, but you knew what it was, and it gave you something to argue about. Today, I can't believe the city establishment wants anything to do with the Enquirer. The Enquirer isn't pro-business, pro-Republican, pro-anything. It's a nonentity. When was the last time you read something in the Enquirer that was impactful, that made a difference, that people talked about the next day and that didn't read like a nomination for a Darwin Award? I read it now and then to keep tabs on the people I know who work there, not to get the pulse of the city. Whatever feelings I had for the Enqurier, good or bad, are almost totally gone.

So I'll blog when I have something to say. Some input would help. Some of the discussions here have been very good, better than what I have to say, and that's what made this blog rewarding to me. If you have something, email it.

More awards the Enquirer won't win

2008-02-04T12:55:00.000-05:00

The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy released a list of finalists for the 2008 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, to be awarded March 18. The Washington Post received two nominations, the New York Times one, but two newspapers smaller than the Enquirer also received nominations: the Palm Beach Post and the Salt Lake Tribune. No Gannett newspapers are on the list of finalists.

Ex-Post editor gets sweet deal

2008-01-24T11:36:00.000-05:00

Mike Phillips, former editor of the Cincinnati Post, has landed at the Scripps Howard Foundation, succeeding former Kentucky Post editor Judy Clabes as president and CEO.

Will all ex-Post folks get such a deal? The foundation's Form 990 shows Clabes made $177,865 in 2005. Sweet. I wonder if Phillips had a drink to celebrate.

Do they give Pulitzers for cute animals?

2008-01-22T20:35:00.000-05:00

This how the Enquirer plans to save itself from extinction.

From: Parker, Linda
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 11:03 AM
To: CIN-Editors
Subject: Cutest Pet Contest a huge winner

Thanks to all for the great work in promoting this in print.

The contest is by far our most successful GP! promotion to date. In its first three days – Thurs., Jan. 17-Sat., Jan. 19 - it drew 676 pictures (488 Ohio, 188 NKY). That is 40 percent more than our next-best contest, Hometown Halloween, which drew 483 over four weeks.

As we speak, we have 880 entries - 633 in Ohio, 247 in KY.

It has lifted all boats – GetPublished! page views, community page traffic and non-contest GetPublished! submissions.

Deadline for entries is midnight on Feb. 3, so rail items still good to go until then.

Again, thanks! Linda

What will they think of next? College students to cover the presidential primaries?

Bombs in West Chester make the front page, but not those in Iraq

2008-01-06T15:29:00.000-05:00

The Enquirer has put a story about the war in Iraq on the front page just once since December 1. But let some 19 year old kill himself with a homemade pipe bomb, and the Enquirer gives us two front-page stories (here and here), a front-page box on Friday and an editorial. Daniel Ferraro's attempt to win a Darwin Award might be fodder for the Local page. The fact that the Enquirer puts it on the front page shows how little gas there is in the tank at 312 Elm.

The Enquirer is using this tragic death to further demonize the Internet, because Ferraro and his friends wanted to post video of their bomb on YouTube. The Enquirer -- the editorial page in particular -- writes almost nothing positive about the Internet. Would you, if the Internet were kicking your ass so bad?

In the past few days there's been plenty of fodder for good stories: The deal to have Portune and Hartmann run unopposed for the Hamilton County commission is one. The City Manager Milton Dohoney's demand to know why police and firemen are acting like Bengals is another. Both made the front page but neither had a follow-up. Dohoney's memo on the police and fire departments didn't even rate an editorial.

Dohoney wrote that memo Dec. 27, and it took the Enquirer till January 5 to publish it. Would that have happened if the Post was still around?

Post tribute is back online

2008-01-01T14:28:00.000-05:00

Find it here. Kerry Duke, managing editor of the new Kypost.com, says it was an oversight in the manic switch from Cincypost.com to Kypost.com. I hope that stays online a long time.

Its final breath

2007-12-31T10:50:00.000-05:00

In the end, this is what we should have expected: The Post does a much more honest and thorough examination of its demise than the one provided by the Enquirer. The overall package produced for the final edition of the Post is sad and touching. Though I've provided links below, find a copy of the Post today on the street and read it on paper.

Welcome to the future

2007-12-30T10:56:00.000-05:00

Go back 10 years, 15 to be safe: The Kentucky Post owned Northern Kentucky. The Enquirer's commitment to Northern Kentucky was so weak and distrusted that at one point in the late 1980s, the Enquirer closed its bureau there. The Kentucky Post was a franchise: a dominant readership in a growing area. At the Enquirer, there was speculation that when the JOA ended, the Kentucky Post would be kept alive as Northern Kentucky's newspaper.

That didn't happen, obviously. Did the Kentucky Post wither away because Gannett, which ran the Joint Operating Agreement, did next to nothing to sell it? Did it fail because E.W. Scripps, satisfied with its split of JOA profits, saw no point in spending a nickel to preserve the franchise?

Today's whitewash of history by the Enquirer doesn't bother to probe those and many other questions about the death of the Post. It accepts conventional wisdom that afternoon newspapers were doomed without ever examining whether everything was done to keep the paper alive. It devotes one quote to the widely held belief that Gannett did very little to improve circulation and advertising for the Post. For Chrissakes, it relies on Bill fucking Cunningham to say that the Post, in the end, could have done nothing to save itself.

Joint Operating Agreement? More like Joint Mismanagement Agreement. Nowhere in the package of stories are there any details of the mechanics of the JOA, how it provided no incentives to Gannett or Scripps to keep the local newspaper market healthy. Needless to say, both companies did everything they could to live down to the spirit of the JOA. Gannett just sucked advertising dollars out of Cincinnati but did almost nothing to build circulation. Scripps grew lazy over its split of profits.

We get a teary eyed reminiscence of the Post's journalism but no examination of its demise. What's odd about the stories is how small a role the Enquirer plays in the tale. Reporter Mike Rutledge describes the Post as "feisty and independent." Since the Post occupied that niche, it must mean the Enquirer dominates the niche for a flaccid and beholden newspaper in the Cincinnati market.

There's much said about the "Friends of Joe" stories. The Enquirer actually broke that story, sort of. David Wells wrote how Indian Hill homeowners had gotten their homes classified as farms, allowing them to pay lower property taxes. It was good reporting, but as usual -- as it had with the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire and the Carrolton bus crash -- the Enquirer fumbled the follow-up and missed the better, richer "FOJ" story.

This look back at the Post's journalism makes it look as though the death of the Post is a failure of journalism, and not a business failure. Today's package of stories contains no interviews with Gannett or Enquirer executives, past or present, about the death of the Post. When it comes time to question Scripps, we get the explanation that it would have been too expensive to build a newspaper operation from scratch to keep the Post alive, but Rich Boehne isn't asked "at what point did Scripps actually give up on the Post?"

The death of the Post was almost certainly inevitable, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have been healthier at the end, leaving something that might have been worth preserving. That would have saved jobs and maybe saved an independent voice in this town.

What we're left with is there in today's Enquirer, in black and white -- flaccid and beholden journalism. The hard questions aren't asked, the people responsible aren't held accountable. The end of the Post is an opportunity to make a lot of people uncomfortable, and given the sorry state of newspapers today, a lot of people should be uncomfortable. But what we get instead are tales of the good things that happened during the Post's history. Read this package carefully, because this is the only kind of journalism we'll get in a one-newspaper Cincinnati. Welcome to the future.

The stretch run

2007-12-24T12:35:00.001-05:00

The last edition of the Cincinnati Post will hit the streets a week from today. Today's incarnation of the Post won't be missed. As Dan Sewell's story says, the Post is a ghost of its former self. E.W. Scripps has been cutting and cutting there for 20 years, without any pretense the newspaper might get better.

In theory, the benefit of competition for newspapers is that it makes each paper better. Competition scares you into doing your best every day. The real death of the Post might have some at some point in the past 10 years when the Enquirer stopping giving a crap about what was on the Post's front page every day. Did you read Sunday's paper? I can't believe I wasted $1.50 and 10 minutes on it. Stories like "Whatever happened to....?" is what you get when you have editors with no imagination and no resources. A dull effort, it read like the reporters did the entire thing by telephone, and it was dressed up to make it look like it was something. The editors also chose to lead the paper with another meaningless Christmas shopping story. It was a terribly weak Sunday effort, one that can't be blamed on a "slow news week" just before Christmas, or a short staff. It was a general lack of wherewithal -- planning, people, news judgment, imagination -- that produced Sunday's waste of newsprint. However, Sunday's paper did a fine job of wrapping around the advertising inserts, which is all Gannett cares about.

Make no mistake: The Post should continue to scare the Enquirer into publishing a quality product. The junk that the Enquirer put out Sunday as news isn't compelling to any reader, whether you're 40+ and reading it on paper or a 20-something reading it online. The people who put out the Enquirer should stand outside Post offices next Monday, and watch those folks walk out, carrying boxes, never to return to that newsroom, and know that that's their fate if boring newspapers like Sunday's edition become a habit.

Know that there is no joy at the Enquirer over the end of the Post. For instance, it's not uncommon for a newspaper to hire at least some of the staff of its defunct competition. Not here. The Enquirer will hire no one from the Post full time, though it might use one or two on a freelance basis. The Enquirer recently held meetings for its staff about life post-Post. Publisher Margaret Buchanan was asked about hiring Post folks. We have no openings, was her reply. That's only part of the story. Several recent hires from the Post didn't last long. They were openly contemptuous of the editorial "leadership" of Tom Callinan and Hollis Towns, and quit rather than waste their careers at the Enquirer. The Enquirer isn't willing to submit itself to any more of that abuse.

Worse, however, is that the demise of the Post will bring no windfall to the Enquirer. Buchanan said in those meetings that the Enquirer expects revenues to decline by as much as 8% in 2008, so the cost-cutting is likely to continue, as they say, till morale improves. During the meetings with staff, Callinan was heard saying the Enquirer had to build its audience “to serve advertisers” in order to grow its business. No one cross-examined Callinan on that, but many in the newsroom believe it means the Enquirer just won't hit you very hard if you have money. It all made sense after I read last week's overly-reverent coverage of the new Western-Southern 660-foot glass phallus downtown.

An analyst quoted in Sewell's story says, ""It's the relatively rare community that does have two papers anymore." Two newspapers? Has he been to Cincinnati lately? It's difficult to argue we even have one.

Get your lightning rods straight

2007-12-12T14:17:00.000-05:00

Michael Clark's profile of Gary Hines, head of the Butler County NAACP, is all right, but it's a profile of the wrong person. The person who should have been profiled is Mike Taylor, superintendent of Lakota schools.

As the Hines profile states, and as the Enquirer has been reporting from the beginning, Hines did not ask that the performance of the play "And Then There Were None" be canceled. He says he complained, passing along the feelings of black families in the district. It was school administrators who decided to cancel the play. From the first story on this, November 27:

But Hines, who operates GPH Consultants - a diversity training company - in West Chester Township, said that despite his strong protest, it was Lakota officials' idea to cancel the play in response to his complaints.
Jon Weidlich, spokesman for Butler County school district, said subsequent discussions - after district officials met with Hines earlier this month - among students and staff at Lakota East High School led to the decision to cancel the play.
"After learning of the play's origins and the hurt that it caused, we had hoped to use the performances as a way to create a discussion about diversity of all kinds in our community. However, students and staff continued to raise issues, and it was quickly obvious that bad feelings about the play were much more widespread and strong than originally thought. The best action seemed to be to switch to a different play," Weidlich said.
Keith Kline, Lakota East principal, said: "Certainly, it was a tough decision but one that needed to be made.
"Doing the play now is not a way to promote the respectfulness we are trying to promote."

As usual, the Enquirer exhibits its twisted and misdirected sense of accountability. By running a front page profile of Hines, the Enquirer makes it look like it's his fault the play was canceled. Maybe he is a trouble-maker, or maybe not. Maybe his complaint is legitimate and maybe not. But he didn't have the power to cancel the play. He's just one man and he won't even reveal how many members the Butler County NAACP has.

[ And the headline on the story is just stupid: "He didn't expect to be A LIGHTNING ROD." First, when you're the head of an NAACP chapter, you're a lightning rod. Second, Hines is never quoted saying that in the story. He is paraphrased saying he didn't anticipate the firestorm, but that's it. It's the Enquirer who named him the lightning rod. ]

The real story here is that the school administration made the decision, and the Enquirer has yet to dig into that. The Enquirer editorial board praised the Lakota administration for its wisdom in deciding to stage the play, but never called into question the flawed decision making that led to its cancellation in the first place.

So, why hasn't the Enquirer profiled superintendent Mike Taylor and Keith Kline, the Lakota East principal? Why haven't they been held accountable? The story and the Enquirer's coverage in general introduce the issue of censorship, and the introduction of it today in the Hines profile makes it look as thought he is the censor. He is not. That would be Taylor and Kline, but the Enquirer coverage never really connects those dots.

The Enquirer needs to set this record straight, and detail who at Lakota talked to whom to arrive at the decision to censor the play.

Doing less with less

2007-11-18T10:13:00.000-05:00

A bullet has been fired at the Enquirer newsroom. It comes as USA Today said it will eliminate 45 newsroom positions, 9 percent of its newsroom. Enquirer Publisher Margaret Buchanan has give the newsroom a Hobson's choice: Eliminate either eight newsroom positions, or find a way to save $500,000 from the newsroom budget for 2008.

Sounds like something from one of the Saw movies. It appears that the bulk of the savings will come from the elimination of the Friday Life section, which will be folded into the Weekend section, which itself will be shrunk by a reduction in the size of the calendar.

I can see it now: Buchanan yells at Tom Callinan that the newsroom has to do more with less. Callinan puts on that hangdog look, the one you get when your glass of Beefeater's is empty and you realize Gannett stock is below $40 a share and retirement is that much further off, and he tells Hollis that he has to do more with less. Hollis will call everyone into a meeting and bellow at people and pound the table that they have to do more with less.

You can't do more with less. You can only do less with less. Killing Friday Life and folding it into Weekend will allow the Enquirer editors to say they're giving readers the same with less. But it's just less. Eight newsroom employees may have dodged the bullet. It zinged right past them, and hit the readers, who will still pay 50 cents for a smaller product.

Joe Nuxhall dies

2007-11-16T08:56:00.000-05:00

Every newspaper must anticipate the deaths of famous and infamous local people, so I'm sure the Enquirer has files prepared on people like Carl Lindner and Bobbie Sterne. Joe Nuxhall died too late last evening to make this morning's paper, so the Enquirer is serving up its coverage on the web. Here's what the Enquirer web site has prepared for Joe Nuxhall: Life of a Legend. This is a shoddy little piece of Flash that seems fixated on presidential inaugurations and wars and major moments in Reds history, but not on Joe. There isn't a single Nuxhall-related entry for the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. There's a 1967 entry for Joe's move to the broadcast booth, and Joe isn't mentioned again in his own "life" until 2002, when it's noted he suffered a heart attack. We'll miss Joe, and let's hope the coverage improves.

The transition begins

2007-10-31T15:01:00.000-05:00

Last week, the Enquirer found a new excuse to trim staff: the death of the Post. began trimming staff in preparation for the closing of the Post. Here is the email sent by publisher Margaret Buchanan to Enquirer employees:

From: XXX On Behalf of Buchanan, Margaret
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 4:11 PM
To: Cincinnati-All
Subject: Staff reductions related to the end of the JOA

To: Non-Represented Employees
From: Margaret Buchanan

Many of you, especially those of you whose work involves Post responsibilities, are probably wondering what will happen to staffing levels when the Joint Operating Agreement between Gannett and Scripps comes to an end on December 31. With this communication, I hope to give you some idea of what's coming in the weeks ahead. But please understand that a lot of the communication will need to be done at the manager/supervisor employee level because the situation is unique from department to department, and because we want employees to hear about these changes directly from their managers.

I will first say that, yes, there will be a reduction in force effective December 31, 2007. Most of you will not find that surprising. The jobs we're looking at are mainly tied to Post work.

Second, we will make every effort to retain these affected employees in other jobs -- where an employee is a) interested in a particular open job, and b) has the qualification for that job.

Third, for employees who we are unable to place elsewhere, we will offer severance pay in accordance with our policy.

Just today, managers have begun to discuss staff reductions with employees in the Production, Advertising Operations and Circulation (departments). About 3% of The Enquirer's total workforce will be affected by these reductions.

We regret having to reduce staff. But we all realize that the termination of the Post, and business necessity, give us no choice. Give the current competitive business climate, we need to make the most of our resources and restructure our organization to be in the best position to compete.

You will be hearing more about this from me and your division heads in the coming weeks.

I appreciate your hard work and dedication.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

The Business Courier, which has been asleep at the wheel on the troubles at the Enquirer, puts the number of employees at about 30, based on total employment of 1,140.

My favorite sentence in the letter is: "But we all realize that the termination of the Post, and business necessity, give us no choice." In the past, the surviving newspaper would have been strengthened by the death of its rival, but times have changed. The Post has been weak for years. The instances where the Post has been able to reach up and slap the Enquirer with a good scoop have grown few in number. Now, the age of Cincinnati as a one-newspaper town is greeted with layoffs. The mood inside the Enquirer is quite gloomy these days, with the veterans hoping they can hold on till they decide to retire, not an earlier date chosen by Gannett.

Comparing Peter Bronson to a sane person

2007-10-16T13:45:00.000-05:00

When is the Enquirer going to wake up, see that Peter Bronson is irrelevant, and fire him? Many of his commentaries lack any kind of original thought, and merely crib what other people are writing on the Internet. He is a knee-jerk reactionary, frothing at the mouth any time a Democrat has any success.

Read his hateful diatribe against Al Gore for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. The column is based on a well-publicized case in England, where a judge found that because there are a factual errors in Gore's global-warming movie "An Inconvenient Truth," teachers must show it with accompanying "guidance" on the relevant science.

Bronson refers to an article in the London Evening Standard about the case. See the article here. Bronson writes:

When the British government decided to use it (the film) to educate children about global warming, school official Stewart Dimmock filed a lawsuit claiming that Gore's movie was inaccurate political "brainwashing" and "sentimental mush," according to the London Evening Standard. Last week, the High Court agreed. A judge ruled that Gore's film is "alarmist and exaggerated," and must have warnings to point out nine scientific errors.

The actual paragraphs from the Evening Standard story reads this way:

Describing the documentary as 'a powerful, dramatically presented and highly professionally produced film', Mr Justice Burton said it was built round the 'charismatic presence' of the ex vice president 'whose crusade it now is to persuade the world of the dangers of climate change caused by global warming'.

But he said it might be necessary for the Government to make clear to teaching staff that some of Mr Gore's views were not supported or promoted by the Government, and there was 'a view to the contrary'.

Agreeing that Mr Gore's film was 'broadly accurate' on the subject of climate change, he found that errors had arisen in 'the context of alarmism and exaggeration'.

As you can see, Bronson first leaves out the line that the judge found the film "broadly accurate," and then misquotes the line "the context of alarmism and exaggeration" as "alarmist and exaggerated."

Bronson won't acknowledge that the judge found the movie essentially accurate, or that scientists as well generally agree that Gore got the basic science right. Read this and this. And while pointing out factual errors in the movie, Bronson sidesteps the question of whether global warming is real. That's because that would require some real thinking; it's much easier, I suppose, to simply apply one's prejudices and make jokes.

Bronson misses the point that while something may contain inaccuracies, that doesn't always mean the whole is inaccurate. He also misses the point that if you're going to fault somebody for accuracy, your argument had better be pristine. And, somebody at the Enquirer needs to ask Bronson some hard questions before anything he writes is published.

What really bothers Bronson? Paul Krugman of the New York Times has a saner view of why the right hates Al Gore and his Nobel: "(I)f science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros.

"Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy."

Journalism lite

2007-10-08T07:07:00.000-05:00

Janelle Gelfand is one of the Enquirer's better writers. She is, however, lost in the shuffle because she covers a subject with limited appeal: classical music. That by itself is pretty amazing, considering the Enquirer hasn't had a popular music writer in nearly two years, since C.E. Hanifin, quit. [ A side note: About a month ago, the Enquirer invited the heads of local arts organizations to drop by and talk about arts coverage. Tom Callinan insulted the group by implying the don't get it about the Internet, and editor Hollis Towns insulted the group by not showing up at all. ]

In today's paper, Gelfand penned The Making of a Mogul, about Antonio "L.A." Reid, the chairman of Island Def Jam Music Group. He's a music industry biggie born and raised in Cincinnati. It's a decent read, except for the fact that the Enquirer apparently didn't bother to put Gelfand on a plane, so she could meet him and interview him in person. It looks like Gelfand interviewed him by telephone.

How can you profile someone without actually meeting them face to face? Even CityBeat does better than this, but this is what you get with the Enquirer these days: The paper is too cheap to do the story correctly. The result is a story like "Mogul," where there's some quotes from the subject, quotes from some people who knew Reid growing up, and some Cincinnati namedropping (James Brown, Sarah Jessica Parker). It's about Reid's kids and family and friends and how Cincinnati made him the person he is, but contains nothing about his management style (how he finds and develops talent) or how he deals with the turmoil in the industry.

It's another example of the Enquirer's shallow world view. The Enquirer believes all readers care about is the Cincinnati link, and aren't intellectually curious about anything else. Here, the Enquirer uses the local link to get close to someone famous and powerful, but all they come back with is where he went to high school. The only thing missing from the story is how he likes his chili and whether or not he likes goetta. The fault isn't Gelfand's, it's the Enquirer's low expectations. This kind of local-boy-done-good story belongs in a 10,000-circ community newspaper, not a major metro daily.

The Enquirer punts

2007-10-03T13:00:00.000-05:00

After the Bengals were embarrassed Monday night by the Patriots, Marvin Lewis said some Bengals players are playing selfish football. Who? He won't say, but you'd expect a good newspaper to get to the bottom of this, right?

Not the Enquirer. In today's big story, Bengals beat writer Mark Curnutte moans that Lewis "declined an Enquirer interview request," and that's where it ends. The best Curnutte can do is interview other reporters (John Clayton) and TV talking heads (Steve Young and Emmitt Smith), but never once does he attempt to answer who those selfish players are. On his blog, Paul Daugherty picks on Chad Johnson because he's such an easy target. But that's lazy writing, and remember than but Johnson doesn't play defense.

To identify the offending players, it takes knowledge of the game, and if you don't have that, you need to know whom to talk to. Interview somebody, watch some tape. Lewis handed the Enquirer a story line, but it doesn't appear anyone at the Enquirer knows football well enough to explain the breakdowns, nor does anyone have the sources to crack the Bengals.

Sports might be the best section in the newspaper, but not for its football coverage. This is pure mediocrity.

Letting Joe go

2007-09-25T13:23:00.000-05:00

The Enquirer let Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters off real easy today. The story concerns a report by a team of lawyers sanctioned by the American Bar Association calling for reforms to Ohio's capital punishment system. From the Enquirer's story:

The study said the chance of getting a death sentence in Hamilton County is 2.7 times higher than in the rest of the state. Further, a convicted killer from the Cincinnati area is 3.7 times more likely to be sentenced to die than a convicted killer from Cleveland and 6.2 times more likely than one from Columbus, the study found.
"We don't plea-bargain death penalty cases," Deters said. "We take cases very seriously. If proof is not a problem, we seek the death penalty.
"Tell me: Who is on death row that shouldn't be?" he asked. "To these people, it's not about innocence, it's about whether their lawyer could have been a little trickier."
Deters also said nobody from the bar association study team called him.

The print version of the story also allows Deters to spend three paragraphs calling the authors of the study a group of liberals.

The Enquirer contains a link that says "Read the ABA's full report." That's a good suggestion, because it looks like Jon Craig and Sharon Coolidge, the two reporters who wrote that story, never read the full report, only the executive summary.

The report criticizes Hamilton County for much more than just the rate at which capital punishment is sought. An example (page 161 of the full report):

Furthermore, the Ohio Supreme Court has, on at least fifteen occasions between 1981 and 2004, rebuked Hamilton County prosecuting attorneys for misconduct during the guilt and sentencing phase of capital trials. The Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court has stated that “Hamilton County has a greater number of [ ] cases” in which prosecutorial misconduct has been found, and added that “the record speaks for itself.”

Ohio’s discipline system for attorneys also appears to be ineffective in disciplining prosecutors whose misconduct in capital cases has time and time again been criticized by the Ohio Supreme Court. The Ohio Supreme Court has identified three prosecutors by name who it found to have engaged in misconduct in capital cases; however, none of these prosecutors have been subject to discipline and one was later promoted and appointed to a Municipal Judgeship in Summit County, Ohio. Similarly, Joseph T. Deters, Prosecuting Attorney for Hamilton County, has overseen an office which has been repeatedly rebuked by the Ohio Supreme Court for misconduct in over fifteen capital cases. Nonetheless, since he began work at the Hamilton County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, Deters was elected to the offices of Hamilton County Clerk of Courts in 1988, Hamilton County Prosecuting Attorney in 1992, Ohio Treasurer of State in 1998, and re-elected as Treasurer of State in 2002. Deters was re-elected as Hamilton Prosecuting Attorney as a write-in candidate in 2004, gaining 57 percent of the vote. As of 2005, no attorney in the Hamilton County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has been terminated for misconduct.

Or this, from page 163:

In Jamison v. Collins, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granted a writ of habeas corpus to a death-row inmate, Derrick Jamison, as a result of the State’s suppression of various pieces of exculpatory evidence. The court found that the petitioner’s efforts to seek discovery of exculpatory material at trial were complicated because the Cincinnati Police Department (C.P.D.): "routinely selected certain information and evidence from its files that it judged to be relevant to a homicide case and assembled these documents into what was referred to as a 'homicide book.' Rather than turn over the entire case file to the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office, the C.P.D. would only provide this 'homicide book.' According to petitioner, this 'homicide book' did not contain all of the evidence gathered by the police. This fact is undisputed by the [State]."

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found that no exculpatory material was included in the “homicide book,” and members of the C.P.D. also testified that “they received no training from the Hamilton County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office as to what constituted exculpatory evidence.” Jamison was permitted discovery prior to the federal habeas corpus proceeding, in which several pieces of previously undisclosed exculpatory evidence came to light. The Sixth Circuit found that the prosecution was not able to evaluate whether evidence within its possession constituted Brady material since “it was intentionally kept in the dark regarding the exculpatory evidence.” After the Sixth Circuit granted the petitioner’s writ of habeas corpus, the State of Ohio elected not to re-try Jamison.

There's more in the report. But why wasn't any of this in today's story? Why no mention of the homicide books or the lack of discipline? The reporters let Deters get away with discrediting the report because they didn't have the ammunition in hand to challenge him. Deters asks why the no one from the panel interviewed him, but it's clear from the full report that a member of the panel interviewed someone in Deters' office. The Enquirer doesn't hold public officials to account, so when a report like this comes up, the reporting descends into a kind of he said/she said scheme. This can't even be called shoddy reporting, because the story is barely reported. Whoever from the Enquirer it was that interviewed Deters didn't challenge him, because they didn't have the background to do so, and that's because the Enquirer never challenges Deters.

Though the story was on the front page today, there are other signs the Enquirer doesn't care much about this. The politics blog never commented on it, and the editorial board paid no attention, not even bothering to call for a community conversation on the matter. By mid-afternoon, this story was off the top half of the home page, quickly buried by the Enquirer. It's clear the Enquirer is more willing to be tough on Marvin Lewis and a mother whose child died than it is with a prosecutor with the power to put people on death row.

Friday follies

2007-09-14T09:52:00.000-05:00

On today's front page, we have the Nesselroad-Slaby interview across the top, and the sentencing of a teen driver in the second lead position on the right. Both stories jump to an inside page, and the interview story is co-written by a Community News report, a sign of things to come at the Enquirer. Neither of these stories, at a real newspaper, would rate those positions -- either because they wouldn't sensationalize those events or that most newspapers are more sensitive to the families involved than to exploit their tragedies this way. The effect of this is to push the headline on the troop reduction story below the fold, and this story doesn't jump. This all tells you what Enquirer editors think of Iraq news. Papers in Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Akron and Louisville all put the headline of their Iraq stories above the fold. At the bottom of the page is a weird science story about Google offering a prize for landing a moon rover. Enquirer editors love weird science stories.

Across the very bottom of the page is an Roecker & Boerger ad. It's a big one, two inches high. I thought it was just my imagination that these ads are getting bigger and more intrusive. Then I saw the Lexus ad across the bottom of the front page of the Sports section -- it's an odd shaped ad that at its peak is four inches tall. Yes, they are getting more intrusive. Anything for a buck.

Finally, over on the cover of the Life section, if the headline on the story about Bengals wives ("Inside Their Huddle"), isn't a euphemism for sex, then I don't know what "hide the salami" means. Newspaper people are trained to have dirty and twisted minds, because it helps such things from being published. As I said before, this wouldn't happen at a newspaper where the editors' sensitivies are more finely tuned.

More awards the Enquirer won't win

2007-09-12T12:44:00.000-05:00

The Online News Association has announced its finalists for the annual awards for outstanding digital journalism. The Enquirer is not nominated in any category. The Enquirer says it's committed to the Internet and committed to business journalism and committed to community journalism, but that's clearly not enough. The Enquirer must also be committed to excellence in what it does.

The Data Center, for instance, isn't a bad idea, but in the end it's just searchable tables, and that's not journalism. Look at some of the nominees, and you see that the core of these sites is ambitious journalism. And though the Enquirer was shut out, Gannett overall did quite well. Nominees include USA Today for general excellence, the Detroit Free Press, the Des Moines Register, the Wilmington News-Journal, the Tallahassee Democrat, Florida Today (two times) and the Journal News.

With its emphasis on crime and courts and traffic and voyeurism and "fan faces," the Enquirer's web site is becoming an embarrassment to the people who work there. It's a shame there's not an award category for Best Security Camera Video Sponsored By A Replacement Window Company.

As a matter of fact, it is about me

2007-09-07T10:04:00.000-05:00

The above-the-fold play given to the Slaby case and the posting of videos continues at the Enquirer. The web hits and newstand sales must be really good. I hope Callinan isn't going to claim again that the story "galvanized Ohio," as he did (wrongly) when he apologized for the Enquirer's behavior during the Marcus Fiesel coverage.

I've thought for a long time about canceling my subscription, and this week I've really thought hard about it. The only reason I continue to subscribe is that I want to support a local daily newspaper. Great cities have great newspapers, and if Cincinnati didn't have one at all, you might as well erase us from the map. So I pay my subscription, spend 90 seconds every morning reading what's worth reading in the Enquirer, throw it out and grumble about it. I know I'd be better off cancelling the Enquirer and subscribing to the Wall Street Journal or even USA Today.

Then I read this, a column in the National Journal about the demise of mainstream media, and the very question of whether we should continue to support newspapers as they twirl round the drain. The author calls that nonsense:

Nothing will kill the great newspapers more quickly than turning them into charity cases. And nobody should ever read a newspaper out of a dreary sense of civic obligation. Like great books, the best news shops have always drawn readers because they were feisty, well executed, and thrillingly alive to their own times. Their magnetism was rooted partly in the fact that they were optional, something you didn't technically need to get through the day, yet somehow couldn't live without.

So yes, this is about me, and whether I believe the Enquirer is serving my needs and the needs of my community. What cowards they are, the people who run the Enquirer. They're picking on a woman whose child has died, when they don't have the guts to take on a megalomaniacs like Si Leis or Joe Deters, or idiots like Jean Schmidt, and run them out of town. They won't take on Cintas and they won't take on Carl Lindner. We expect newspapers to keep powerful people honest and accountable, and yet the Enquirer chooses as its target a woman whose child has died. They're not going to rest until she's in jail or dead, or until they run out of videos to post and people stop clicking on their links.

More awards the Enquirer didn't win

2007-09-06T10:16:00.000-05:00

Just as the Enquirer gave me a big middle finger by putting the Slaby story across the top of the front page again, the world of journalism awards gives the Enquirer a big middle finger. The Society of Environmental Journalists announced its awards, and not only did the Enquirer not win anything, but one of its former reporters did. Spencer Hunt of the Columbus Dispatch, who quit the Enquirer when he learned what kind of editor Tom Callinan was, won second place for explanatory reporting for his series on coal in Ohio.

The Enquirer has lost its conscience

2007-09-05T08:46:00.000-05:00

I'm not providing links today. With a headline size more appropriate for the bombing of Baghdad, the Enquirer splashed across the front page today the story that the mother who left her baby to die in a hot car will not be charged with a crime. It has also posted on its web site video "that shows Brenda Nesselroad-Slaby's fateful movements on the day her 2-year-old daughter died in her searing hot SUV. The video shows Slaby removing doughnuts from her SUV, parking it, and walking into work. Her child remained inside for eight hours." That link this morning is the most prominent on the Enquirer's front page.

I'm not providing links because I'm not going to encourage people to view the video or the story, because that would only encourage the Enquirer to post more and more of this crap. The Enquirer doesn't care about the family, the community or the dead baby, only hits, hits and more hits. The paper has been shamelessly exploiting the deaths of children to sell more papers and to get more web hits. The death of this child was an accident, and I can't imagine how the constant drumbeat of big, above-the-fold headlines on this story serves the community. It clearly doesn't. The Enquirer is simply appealing to the basest instincts of its readers in a desperate attempt to gain readers and web hits.

If this is the tack the Enquirer is going to take from now on, it should just get rid of any pretension that its a real newspaper and convert to a tabloid. Margaret Buchanan, Tom Callinan and Hollis Towns should be ashamed of themselves.

We will tell you what's premium, and you will like it

2007-08-30T14:23:00.000-05:00

Today's front page has the big red ball "Premium in this edition" logo. I think I know what a premium is, but I don't know that the Enquirer does. Today's "premium," for instance, is the September calendar of events on the cover of the Life section. If a calendar tells you that the big event for Sept. 16 is the appearance by Loverboy at the hallowed Hamilton County Fairgrounds, should you call it a premium? This calendar also tells us that Sept. 10, 11, 13 and 27 are Premium Days, when we'll "enjoy holiday or bonus content in the Enquirer." Please, enter these dates into the calendar in your iPhone so you'll know to run out to your driveway that morning, gather the newspaper up in your arms and wallow in the wonderfulness of that day's Premium content. Can life get any better?

A premium is something extra, something special. Have the standards at the Enquirer sunk so low that a calendar is a bonus? When the paper devotes just six paragraphs to the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and Bush's trite speech in New Orleans, when the center of the front page is yet another weather story, when the new contestants on "Dancing With The Starts" get nearly as much coverage as Sen. Craig's troubles, a calendar looks like a premium. On most days the Enquirer delivers less that what people expect. When they provide something people expect, they think it's a premium.

UPDATE: The Enquirer this morning reported that its circulation is up 3.4 percent. That's remarkable, as the rest of the newspaper industry is shrinking, and there's news today that ad revenue is plummeting. There have been some very good comments on this topic, so the question now is how much of that circulation increase is attributable to this "premium" scam?

More awards the Enquirer didn't win

2007-08-28T10:24:00.000-05:00

The Association of Food Journalists announced 42 winners in its 2007 awards competition. Guess who's not among them?

How to abuse data

2007-08-26T08:55:00.000-05:00

The Enquirer's newfound obsession with data is on full display Sunday morning. All three stories on the front page are based on numbers. Greg Korte's look at a Hamilton County home improvement program is all right, but not earth shattering. Denise Smith Amos' review of ACT and SAT scores follows a formula that the Enquirer is wearing out -- find data, quote a couple of "expert" sources (make sure you get an Ohio source and a Kentucky source) and ask a few real people how they "feel" about something, but don't reach any real conclusions. Her article sidesteps the whole debate about whether those tests are overemphasized or whether they actually predict success in college.

The worst of this group, however, is the story that the Enquirer gives most prominent play -- Jessica Brown's take on the large number of speeding tickets written by Arlington Heights police. The core of the story is a pointless discussion of what defines a "speed trap," and this story also reaches no conclusion. Brown seems to take the Arlington Heights officials at their word. It doesn't appear she spent a minute sitting in the village's traffic court or looking at the situations under which drivers were ticketed. All the tickets are public records. Did she review any of them? It appears she interviewed only three drivers, when thousands have been ticketed. This is the barest sort of reporting.

Data are becoming a crutch for Enquirer editors and reporters. They are using found numbers as a substitute for real inquiry and for real reporting. None of today's stories are truly awful, but none is front-page news. The Enquirer is parading these stories as the best work it can produce. It's sad to think that that may be true, that this is the best the Enquirer can do.

The end of old school

2007-08-20T10:12:00.000-05:00

The big story inside the Enquirer is the dismissal of Business reporter Jim McNair. Late Thursday afternoon, he was called from the Information Center on the 19th floor to human resources on 16. The rumor is he was told there were complaints about him, but was not told what those complaints were or who made them. He was told he was fired, and was escorted out of the building. He personal belongings are still at his desk.

McNair is old school. He is not a proponent of the journalism of hope and didn't want to write about "good things happening." He wants to put people in jail. His coverage of Enzyte maker Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals probably helped do exactly that. He relentlessly covered the Erpenbeck and Fiorini financial scandals, and has kept the family feud at Check 'N' Go in the paper.

But McNair's brand of journalism made people inside the paper uncomfortable. The Enquirer has no history of providing this kind of hard-nosed reporting, so there was no natural spot for McNair in the newsroom, no investigative team for him to join and no editors who understand how to produce this kind of journalism It often took months for his work to appear in the paper. The Enquirer didn't see fit to run much of his work on the front page. These include his stories on workers becoming ill at a local flavorings company, and his November 2006 stories on shoddy home construction. Both of those package were published in the Sunday Business section, not on the front page.

McNair was often as hard on his editors as he was on his subjects. That didn't help him win any allies, especially when his stories led to complaints to publisher Margaret Buchanan. In July 2005 they came down hard on him for a factually correct story about Fifth Third's poor performance as an investment advisor to the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation, because it was seen as unfair to Fifth Third. More recently, his coverage of rising foreclosures, declining home sales and falling prices caused local homebuilders to complain to the publisher. Remember that both Fifth Third and the local real estate industry are very big advertisers in the Enquirer.

Many people in the newsroom are suspicious that McNair was fired because the homebuilders complained too loudly, and that he was fired to placate advertisers. That would be really troubling, and because nobody trusts the Enquirer brain trust, this is what people are left to believe. Since the Enquirer won't say why McNair was fired, this is shaping up as another classic, clumsy personnel move by Tom Callinan. Callinan claims to have a master's degree, but I think it's from the Dick Cheney School of Management.

Read this Friday story and this Saturday story about Cintas, and read what CityBeat wrote weeks ago, and decide for yourself which paper has the spine to take on big business. A newspaper that is begging for advertising money won't admit the ugly truth that many of the businesspeople they take money from are crooks and cheats. Love him or hate him, McNair was good at exposing these people, and that's what a good newspaper is supposed to do. Buchanan, Callinan and the people who run the Enquirer were forced into a choice not only about McNair but about what kind of journalism they want the Enquirer known for. And by their gutless decision, they've exposed themselves.

UPDATE: There's another discussion of McNair's departure here. Two of the commenters, Leah Beth Ward and Gregg Fields, are former Enquirer business reporters. Also, Bill Sloat at the Daily Bellwether and Editor & Publisher have weighed in on this.

A declining audience

2007-08-16T15:03:00.001-05:00

The Shorenstein Center at Harvard has published a study of news on the Internet, and the news isn't good for newspapers like the Enquirer. The study is here, and it's a PDF file. Here's the last two paragraphs of the executive summary:

Our evidence suggests that the Internet is redistributing the news audience in a way that is pressuring some traditional news organizations. Product substitution through the Web is particularly threatening to the print media, whose initial advantage as a “first mover” has all but disappeared. The Internet is also a larger threat to local news organizations than to those that are nationally known. Because the Web reduces the influence of geography on people’s choice of a news source, it inherently favors “brand names”—those relatively few news organizations that readily come to mind to Americans everywhere when they go to the Internet for news.

Although the sites of nontraditional news organizations are a threat to traditional news organizations, the latter have strengths they can leverage on the Web. Local news organizations are “brand names” within their communities, which can be used to their advantage. Their offline reach can also be used to drive traffic to their sites. Most important, they have a product—the news—that people want. Ironically, some news organizations do not feature the day’s news prominently on their websites, forgoing their natural advantage.

The review of newspaper web site traffic shows that overall, traffic growth is basically flatlining. The big "brand name" newspaper web sites like the Times, the Post and USA Today are gaining traffic. Traffic at sites of medium-sized newspapers is shrinking, however, and shrinking fast. The Enquirer was not included in the survey. Gaining traffic are search engine news sites (like Yahoo and Google), bloggers, "aggregators with attitude" and TV and radio sites.

So, newspapers are losing their grip.

The largest threat posed by the Internet to traditional news organizations, however, is the ease with which imaginative or well positioned players from outside the news system can use news to attract an audience. Just as the television networks made their mark as entertainment media before making a serious and successful entry into news in the early 1960s, yahoo.com, aol.com, and other search engines and service providers are making a serious and successful foray into news. And if such sites came in through the side door, others have come in through the front door, offering users a form of news that traditional media were not providing. Sites driven by partisanship, by users, and by interactivity are now a significant part of Internet-based news and are likely to grow in audience and influence.

Newspapers are hampered by big bureaucracies and tight budgets. The new players are more nimble, and, in the case of Google, rich. The Enquirer is undermanned in this fight, and as you can see from this list, it doesn't even register among the most popular news sites.

The last unholy act

2007-08-09T15:49:00.000-05:00

A Wall Street Journal blog wonders whether Gannett is setting itself up for a management buyout.

That explains everything. All the ridiculous moves we've seen Gannett make recently have been intended to drive the stock price down, to make the deal cheaper. Two years ago, Gannett stock was in the mid-70s, and is now below 50. If management makes a bid, shareholders would have to hope that someone else smells a bargain and makes a counteroffer.

UPDATE, Friday p.m.: Another blog chimed in on this news, but Gannett's CEO denies anything is up. He discloses that in a memo, so there was no opportunity for follow-up questions. How convenient. Also, go back to the Wall Street Journal blog item, and read the comments.

More Dinkel to come, most likely

2007-08-08T09:56:00.000-05:00

Jeni Lee Dinkel goes to jail for 60 days, and the Enquirer gives it the biggest headline of the morning. Can we stop reading about it now? Probably not. The Enquirer has run nearly two dozen stories on this tawdry case, including eight on the front page, five on the front page of the Local section and three editorials. The editorial board doesn't even get this excised about Iraq.

Online advertising will overtake newspaper ad revenues by 2011. Newspapers have missed the boat. The cuts will continue, and the Enquirer will continue to over-cover stories like the Dinkel case in a desperate attempt to drive web traffic, while real news goes uncovered.

Bridge to nowhere

2007-08-03T10:15:00.000-05:00

The Enquirer's response today to Wednesday's news of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis is terribly irresponsible. Its local bridge story is the main headline on the front page, and it places the headline "Some bridges here in poor condition" next to a photograph of the wreckage of the I-35 bridge. See the front page here. That strongly implies that the "poor" bridges here are in fact dangerous. The Enquirer hasn't proven that, not even close. All it did was review a database. There's no sign in the story that anyone at the Enquirer ever actually visited any of the bridges listed in the story and accompanying charts. Every county in Ohio has bridges in "poor" condition. That's a long way from saying the bridges in our area are either dangerous or unusually so. The Enquirer simply meant to cause alarm and I'll say it again, that's just irresponsible.

No one else in the region played the story this way. The Plain Dealer's approach is questionable. Its front page headline reads "Could this happen here?", but it's the readers themselves were asking. Its main story isn't very good, but a sidebar says there are three bridges in Cleveland that share their design with the I-35 bridge.

The Akron Beacon-Journal put its story above the fold, though it includes a photo of a local bridge. That avoids the offensive juxtaposition used in the Enquirer, and it shows that someone there actually left the newsroom to look at a bridge.

The Columbus Dispatch put its story below the fold, and seven reporters contributed to the story. The Toledo Blade also put its story below the fold, leading with coverage of the Minneapolis collapse.

In Kentucky, the Louisville Courier-Journal also put its story below the fold. The Lexington Herald-Leader also put its story below the fold, and included a photo of workers on a local bridge.

Put this together with the publishing of the names of the jurors in the Marcus Feisel case, and it shows how little journalistic sense the editors at the Enquirer have.

This is why it matters

2007-08-02T10:07:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal has a front-page story today about the Justice Department's prosecution of Chiquita for its payments to Colombian terrorists for seven years beginning in 1997. I can't provide a link because a subscription is required. Here is the top of the story:

In April 2003 Roderick M. Hills, then-head of Chiquita Brands International Inc.'s audit committee, went to the Department of Justice with other Chiquita representatives with a stunning admission: The company had been making illegal payments to a violent Colombian group that the U.S. branded as terrorists.In years past, the admission might have been enough to get Chiquita off the hook. Companies and their executives who reported wrongdoing and agreed to cooperate often have enjoyed lenient treatment. Many received a "deferred prosecution" in which no charges were filed unless they committed additional crimes.
But things didn't work out that way for Chiquita -- or for Mr. Hills and some colleagues. In March of this year, Chiquita pled guilty to engaging in transactions with a terrorist group and agreed to pay $25 million in fines, the first time a major U.S. company was charged with having financial dealings with terrorists. Now Mr. Hills, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, faces the possibility of personal criminal charges. A federal grand jury is looking at his role, and that of other high company officials, in continuing the company payments for almost another year after the meeting with the Justice Department.

The investigation illustrates the recent posture taken by U.S. authorities to prosecute aggressively even when companies turn themselves in for breaking the law. Critics say that strategy could cause difficulties if companies decide they suffer no worse by waiting to get caught. "This case will make companies think twice about self-reporting," says Stetson University law professor Ellen Podgor.

Mr. Hills's lawyer, Reid Weingarten, and lawyers for four other individuals, including former Chiquita chief executive Cyrus Freidheim Jr. and former general counsel Robert Olson, submitted legal memos to federal prosecutors last month arguing why their clients shouldn't be charged with terrorism-related crimes. "That Rod Hills would find himself under investigation for a crime he himself reported is absurd," says Mr. Weingarten. Mr. Hills declined to comment.

The case may turn partly on how friendly a treatment Chiquita officials thought they were getting from U.S. authorities. A paramilitary organization had threatened to kidnap or kill employees on the banana farms of Chiquita's Colombian subsidiary, Banadex, and Chiquita was concerned that its employees could be harmed if it cut the payments immediately. Lawyers familiar with the case say Mr. Hills and Mr. Olson believed senior Justice Department officials understood this and were deferring any demand to stop the payments to the United Self-Defense Forces, known by its Spanish abbreviation AUC. Chiquita ultimately paid $1.7 million over seven years.

The Justice Department denies it gave Chiquita -- the world's largest banana company, with $4.5 billion in sales last year -- any leeway to keep paying. Meanwhile, the case has become something of a political football, with congressional Democrats pledging further investigation into U.S. companies underwriting violence abroad and the toughness of U.S. enforcement.

The Journal did a lot of original reporting -- reviewing court documents, interviewing current and former Chiquita officials. Carl Lindner, who was chairman of Chiquita when the payments began, is not mentions, but the story says Chiquita officials may face prosecution individually.

The Enquirer hasn't written about this since March. The cutbacks on the reporting staff are killing coverage, and the news is getting shallower. The coverage has shifted to a TV news formula of crime, traffic accidents and fires. This has dominated the Enquirer's front page 36 times in the 63 days since June 1. There have been front page stories about Iraq just 12 times since June 1, and only eight of those stories have involved the situation on the ground in Iraq. Over that time, 182 Americans have died in Iraq. Wednesday morning's front page story on Iraq was the first in 13 days. Even on the days we don't get crimes, fires and accidents, we get Harry Potter, the Creation Museum, a high school band raffle and sports news.

The Enquirer has laid down on covering Chiquita. Can you imagine what else we're missing because of the Enquirer's inadequacy?

The Enquirer in Wired

2007-07-31T13:09:00.001-05:00

In Wired, Jeff Howe uses the Enquirer as the central character in this story, "To Save Themselves, US Newspapers Put Readers to Work," about how Gannett newspapers are trying to move ahead as the print product declines.

This is a trite and largely uncritical look at how the Enquirer and Gannett are remaking themselves. Howe is a proponent of crowdsourcing as a newsgathering technique, and he uses the Wired article to promote crowdsourcing as vital to the survival of newspapers.

All you need to know about the author is in this sentence fragment. After describing some of the Enquirer's online moves, Howe writes, "Such innovation isn't exactly Gannett's style. Better known for ruthless cost-cutting than risky initiatives ...."

I have no love for Gannett (surprised?), and "ruthless cost-cutting" is only one of the kinder ways to characterize the company. But saying the company isn't known for risky initiatives just isn't true. What do you call the startup of USA Today? What other company has started a national daily newspaper from scratch and succeeded? Al Neuharth was an Evil Genius. He built Gannett from a chain of 10 newspapers in upstate New York to an international media company, and that didn't happen without taking some risk. Where Neuharth was evil, though, was in emphasizing selling ads over groundbreaking journalism. That was great for quarterly numbers and Wall Street, but bad for the long-term survival of daily newspapers. The fact remains Howe oversimplified Gannett's history, and a deeper appreciation for the company's history might have improved his article.

Howe eats up Tom Callinan's line of bullshit. Callinan is the evil without the genius. When Howe told how Callinan went to college at night for a degree in new media, I was reminded of this from "A Fish Called Wanda:"

Otto: Don't call me stupid.

Wanda: Oh, right! To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've known sheep that could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs. But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?

Otto: Apes don't read philosophy.

Wanda: Yes, they do, Otto. They just don't understand it.

Callinan is not the king of new media, and there are a lot of questions Howe could have addressed, but didn't. He thinks its great that the Enquirer has a bunch of programmers putting data online, but he doesn't ask how many reporters the Enquirer has. Howe says the Enquirer's web efforts have attracted dozens of businesses that had never advertised with the Enquirer before, but he didn't ask what they're spending. He presents impressive numbers on how the web efforts are growing, but doesn't question how long that might continue. I thought Wired was better than this.

Thurman, Prosser and busted links

2007-07-27T13:14:00.000-05:00

We don't need more proof that the Enquirer has stopped being a real newspaper, but they keep giving us proof. The Newseum has stopped including the Enquirer among its daily compilation of front pages from around the world. The Newseum lists 12 Ohio newspapers, but not the Enquirer. On the Enquirer's archive page, it provides links to PDFs of the front page, but every link I tested was broken.

I say that because I wanted to talk about the Enquirer's decision to put the Odell Thurman story across the top of the front page. I wanted to link to the front page but I can't because the Enquirer has screwed that up, too. I can't understand the twisted logic that let the Thurman story lead the newspaper. Thurman isn't a key player, not like Carson Palmer or Rudi Johnson. Was this really such a surprise?

What was a surprise, a shock, was the death of Skip Prosser. He was a genuine good guy, and I think lots of UC fans liked him, against their better instincts. But Prosser got outplayed by a drug addict. The Enquirer, taking a page from Bill Cunningham, seems to especially like stories about black miscreants, because there are two such stories above the fold on the front page today. Here is the other.

I wouldn't have picked the story on Prosser's death to lead the paper. The media generally and the Enquirer specifcally likes to lionize sports figures because that's easier than finding real heroes in society. But given the choice between stories of Prosser's death and Thurman's extended suspension, I would have chosen Prosser.

There was much other news to choose from for the front page. Both Lexington and Louisville devoted most of their front pages today to the news on the Comair crash. There was the stock market's slide due to growing unease about mortgage investments, and there was more news about Alberto Gonzales and drunk astronauts.

All you have to do is watch the Enquirer's new daily newscast to see that it isn't trying to be the New York Times or even USA Today. With its mix of news about crime, fires and car crashes, and the nutrient-free ramblings of the airheads at Cin Weekly, the Enquirer seems to be trying to out-Fox Ch. 19.

Layoffs, buyouts and clearouts

2007-07-25T13:28:00.000-05:00

The Enquirer claims to be transforming into more of a community newspaper, while employing fewer and fewer of us. Now it is clearing out circulation customer service, sending the work to Tulsa instead.

-----Original Message-----
From: XXXXXXXXX
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2007 9:34 AM
To: Cincinnati-All
Subject: Circulation Customer Service change
Importance: High

To: Cincinnati All

Last year, Gannett announced the creation of its Centers of Excellence (COEs). Under this plan, only a few centralized service centers across the country will handle the circulation customer service operations for all of Gannett's local newspapers.

Effective Tuesday, July 17, The Enquirer's customer service functions -- and those of 26 other Gannett newspapers -- will be operated out of COE in Tulsa, Oklahoma. From that point on, all of our Enquirer customer calls and e-mails will be routed to Tulsa.

We expect this transition to be seamless, as local customers will not know that their calls are being routed to Tulsa. The reps there will have all the information they need to serve our customers. However, all of us may occasionally receive calls or emails from local customers who, for some reason or another, choose to contact us for help regarding service-related issues, temporary stops, billing, etc.

If you receive such a call or email, here's how we recommend you handle it:

Phone: Transfer the call to Circulation, extension 4500. Before doing so, please provide the caller with the full phone numbers to reach us directly (513-651-4500 or 1-800-876-4500). Any calls received on these numbers will automatically be routed to the COE in Tulsa starting July 17.

Email: Forward the email to the Tulsa COE at circhelp@cincinnati.com Over the last several months, we've been working closely with a number of employees here, in Circulation and in other departments, as well as folks at Gannett and in Tulsa, to make this a smooth transition for our customers. And we will continue to work with the staff in Tulsa to ensure our customer service remains top notch.

If you have any questions, please give me a call.

Gary J DiSanto
VP/ Circulation
The Enquirer

There've been some shots taken at DiSanto in the comments on this blog, but he was well regarded before coming to Cincinnati, and the fact that circulation is up a bit recently probably has more to do with him than Callinan's sorry news judgment.

Also, The Nashville Tennessean has asked for 15 newsroom volunteers to take buyouts, and management hints there could be layoffs after that. Can this move be far behind for the Enquirer?

Pleading ignorance

2007-07-24T11:15:00.000-05:00

My favorite quote from this Post story, an interview with Enquirer publisher Margaret Buchanan:

Buchanan said no decisions have been made regarding workers in advertising, printing presses and other Enquirer employees who worked on The Post side of the operation.

"We only just heard the news like everyone else that there isn't going to be a Post," Buchanan said.

Another on the move

2007-07-20T12:18:00.000-05:00

Gary DiSanto, vice president of circulation, has put his house up for sale. (Link to Clermont County Auditor's site, to confirm his address.) He joins publisher Margaret Buchanan, whose Indian Hill abode remains for sale.

No surprise, but still a shame

2007-07-17T13:48:00.000-05:00

The Cincinnati Post will close at the end of the year. All the speculation about whether it would survive in one form or another is ended. Will anyone miss the Post? Circulation was down below 29,000, and the Post wasn't doing a good job of keeping the Enquirer honest, so I don't know why anyone will miss it.

Could Scripps trade something in its portfolio to Gannett for the Enquirer, to keep a newspaper presence in its home city? And would Scripps bother to keep its headquarters here in Cincinnati? Those are questions not answered by the story in the Post, and I don't expect the Enquirer to ask those questions. There seem to be fresh rumors about a trade, but I'm not on the edge of my seat waiting for it to happen. Why would we expect Scripps to run the Enquirer any better than it ran the Post?

Read the Post story, and see how long it takes for it to mention the fate of the newsroom employees. Another question not answered is whether the Enquirer will take on any of them.

Two tidbits come out of the Post story. The first is that Post's profits from the JOA have been declining, which indicates also how far the Enquirer's profits have fallen -- but Gannett is still making tens of millions of dollars here, and that begs the question why have staff and resources been cut so far? And look at the circulation numbers at the bottom of the story: It looks like the Enquirer's circulation climbed during the years when Larry Beaupre was editor, then tumbled after the Chiquita debacle.

More awards the Enquirer didn't win

2007-07-16T12:06:00.000-05:00

A newspaper prints 52 Sunday papers a year. Wouldn't the Enquirer have something that's prizeworthy? A headline maybe? The answer would be no. The American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, announced winner of their 2007 awards for excellence in feature writing contest, and the Enquirer didn't win any.

CincyMommy Dearest

2007-07-11T14:45:00.000-05:00

A few of the CincyMoms crowd have discovered my blog posting from May, and they are flaming me relentlessly, calling me a bad parent, sexually repressed, and many other terrible, hurtful and highly amusing things. The Pure Romance woman even offered to sell me "Superstretch Lips", to make me a better person. If their assessment of me is as accurate as the "advice" they trade on CincyMoms, then I'd go elsewhere for advice.

Make sure you read this thread at the CincyMoms site. Michael Perry, who oversees the web site, offers an explanation of how the site uses paid "discussion leaders" to boost discussion traffic. He does not, however, identify those discussion leaders, and there's still no mention of this practice on the site's FAQ, so, in my view, CincyMoms is still not conducting itself ethically in this matter.

I'll have more to say later, or maybe not. For now, read and enjoy.

UPDATE: Karen Guitierrez, in a lengthy post on page 6 of the discussion thread mentioned above, answers many questions about the moderator issue. CincyMoms no longer uses paid moderators, she says, and she provides the names of all the previous moderators. She also promises to add this information to the site's FAQ. It's troubling, though, that she blows off this whole dustup like this: "I´m sure I have made some mistakes along the way, and I´ll probably make more." This should have been taken care of months ago. Journalists should think early and often about what's ethical, and that doesn't seem to be on the radar at CincyMoms.

"Good enough" in action

2007-07-08T21:27:00.000-05:00

Since the information center concept was announced months ago, the Enquirer's news philosphy has been to make stories "good enough." Anybody who's ever heard old business saws like "don't let perfection be the enemy of progress," or "paralysis by analysis", can sort of understand where "good enough" is coming from. Here's how the Enquirer defines "good enough":

Good Enough -- Developing a strategy or tactic that will solve a problem (address "the job to be done") that is not a perfect solution, but is "good enough" to address the problem. "Good enough" does not assume satisfaction with mediocrity, but serves as a starting point for a solution that can be improved upon over time. Accepting "good enough" as a operating principle increases the opportunity for quicker "speed to market" with changes and innovation.

That's great if you're Google or Apple, but in an oppressive atmosphere where jobs and expenses are being cut, where salary raises are small and benefits costs are rising, it's a recipe for mediocrity, no matter what the bosses say. And we saw that in action this weekend.

I had high hopes when I saw the headline "Local GOP breaks with Bush" on Sunday morning. This is the kind of story where you should hold your elected officials accountable, but that's not how it worked out. The story just rehashed old quotes from our four senators and four representatives. On the Forum page, the Enquirer got canned, unchallenged quotes from Voinovich, McConnell, Brown, and Bunning, and they excerpted Sen. Richard Lugar's speech from June 25. The Enquirer didn't get an interview with a single one of them. The only live quotes are from three party spokesman, a college professor and Steven Driehaus, who's challenging Chabot.

The Enquirer merely skimmed the surface of this story, and it's because they just collect quotes and facts without digesting them or providing analysis. Is this why the Enquirer has Malia Rulon in Washington, so she can interview party spokesmen on the phone without dialing long distance? It's not impossible to get to Boehner or Voinovich. You just have to know where to look and how to ask. But why demand an interview when a canned quote is "good enough"? What the Enquirer published today is meaningless drek. What's good enough to make the editors of the Enquirer happy just doesn't cut it with the rest of us.

Everywhere but here

2007-07-06T14:51:00.000-05:00

On Friday morning, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati dismissed a lawsuit challenging President Bush's domestic spying program. This is a big national story with a Cincinnati dateline, the kind of story the local press should cover like a blanket. By mid afternoon, the AP version of this story was a featured headline on the web sites of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times had produced its own story on decision.

At the Enquirer's web site, however, the small headline on this story rested under the section "Latest AP news." The Enquirer's reporters were too busy to work on this story because they were tied up getting stories posted on a new Gold's Gym coming to Florence, a state trooper who'd been on Oprah in a car wreck, and two women who'd left their five kids at home alone. The biggest space on the Enquirer's main page was taken up by a poll on whether you think there should be seat belts on school buses.

The Enquirer wouldn't know real news if it jumped up and bit them on the ass.

The information center

2007-07-04T07:26:00.000-05:00

Editor & Publisher describes the "information center" concept being implemented throughout Gannett. The article makes too many points to be adequately summarized here. The Enquirer's Hollis Towns is quoted saying the newspaper thinks about online first, print second. Look for the words "do more with less".

The article is a fine wrapup of Gannett's strategy, but I have two small complaints. The story barely touches on whether the information center is someplace any self-respecting journalist would want to work, and long term, if the industry is going to attract competent people, it has to provide a satisfying work environment and competitive salaries. The push online stresses the posting of information that is practically unfiltered and unedited. News about traffic jams and petty crime is great for short-attention-span readers, but I don't think it serves a democracy very well.

And while the story notes that web traffic is rising and circulation is stabilizing, it says nothing about revenue, whether the push to put everything online is paying off with growing revenue and profit, and whether Gannett has even figured out how to make money from this. There is a view within Gannett (and the story doesn't say this, either) that web traffic is about as good as it's going to get, and that the double-digit increases in traffic aren't going to continue forever. The Enquirer likes to brag about it's web traffic, but on closer inspection the numbers just aren't very good.

History shows how Gannett likes to issue edicts from D.C. Gangsters like Towns beat down their staffs to impose these new edicts, but the staffs -- underpaid and overworked -- do this new work with little enthusiasm, and these efforts eventually fall apart. Part of the information center movement should include across-the-board pay increases and improvements in benefits. Morale was already low as this movement began, and with Gannett turning all reporters into general-assignment reporters, morale can't be getting any better.

Poor design, lack of inspiration

2007-07-01T09:47:00.000-05:00

As one commenter noted, the Enquirer is shutting down its standalone publications Design and Inspire. This is a big setback for the Enquirer's attempt to forge a new business model. Publications fail for two reasons -- bad content, and inability to sell ads. They suck, and neither readers nor advertisers will bother with them. Read below Margaret Buchanan's spin on this. She pretends to give "reasons" for shutting down the publications, but it's corporatespeak and it's dishonest. In the first bullet point, she calls the publications "superb", but then blathers on about a need to reallocate resources. The fact is the Enquirer keeps trying to do stuff on the cheap, and poor quality leads to poor results. And layoffs -- three people lost their jobs.

To: All Employees

From: Margaret Buchanan

I want to bring everyone up-to-date on some developments happening in our organization, with specific impact on the magazine division.

Inspire magazine will cease publication immediately. There will be one more issue of Design Homes & Gardens magazine (August/September issue).

The reasons behind our decision:
While Design and Inspire were superb publications for a time and place, we must continually adapt our strategies and commitment of resources to keep up with changing times, shifting audiences and readership expectations.

Based on increasingly sophisticated research, we are finding more effective means of delivering targeted audiences. That’s where we need to focus our resources. We have made and will continue to make investments in new ways of delivering news and information, with stronger results and return on investment for advertisers. Examples of some of those new initiatives: CincyMOMS.com, enhancements to the Community Press & Recorder newspapers, the online Data Center, Our Town magazines, and other ideas in the development stages.

We need to be flexible and try new things to add to our core Enquirer and Cincinnati.com readerships. Design and Inspire, while high-quality products, duplicated much of our current strengths and did not add significant reach or frequency. The magazines were not delivering adequate return on investment for our advertising customers and were not delivering expected return on investment for The Enquirer organization.

Times change. We learn. And while I am proud of the work many of you associated with the magazines have done, we will be a stronger organization as we tighten our focus on a stronger core Enquirer and Cincinnati.com and targeted initiatives mentioned above.
Margaret Buchanan

More iCrap

2007-06-29T20:33:00.000-05:00

Look at the Enquirer's iPhone blog. I'm sure the headline on the final post of the day, "Drama winding down ... ," wasn't meant to be in any way ironic. They send two reporters onto the streets to report from the front lines, they have their No. 2 editor in the newsroom posting on the blog all day, they even post photos from the lines, and in the end -- THERE'S NOT A SINGLE PHOTO OF SOMEONE HOLDING AN IPHONE!! How stupid is that? They waste the day of three employees and never once show a picture of somebody who finally got their hands on a phone.

The extent of the Enquirer's naivete and stupidity in incomprehensible. I'll allow that the iPhone might be a story. But the Enquirer doesn't comprehend why it's a story. Every bit of their reporting was second- and third-hand. Reporting on technology is a hands-on thing. Not one of the five Enquirer reporters who worked on this story (Lauren Bishop and Mike Boyer blogging today, Alex Coolidge, James McNair, and Cliff Peale on his blog) this week ever got their hands on the device. The reporter has to see and touch the device to tell us how it works, and to tell us why it's important. The Enquirer is taking the only approach it seems to know how to report a story -- it only reports on what people say about something, and not anything seen first hand. Not even the reviews it published on the front page Thursday were its own. Apple fanatics are already getting their iPhone news off the web, and because the Enquirer doesn't cover technology seriously, no one looks to it for any expert coverage.

The cell phone has already become ubiquitous and changed how we live. That revolution has already happened. The impact of the iPhone is that it's going to change the way we use cell phones, maybe. The Enquirer has already missed reporting the revolution, but is trying to make up for it by over-covering the iPhone. The only thing this coverage sheds light on is the Enquirer's ineptitude and lack of sophistication about technology.

iCrap

2007-06-29T12:17:00.000-05:00

How much is Apple paying the Enquirer for this blanket coverage of the release of the iPhone? The sad part is that Steve Jobs probably isn't paying a dime for it. The Enquirer editors are just this stupid. They're drunk on the Apple Kool-aid, and they think that by doing this they're covering technology.

I mean, for God sake, the Enquirer is even blogging from the line of people waiting for the fucking phone. I pity the poor reporter who's forced to do this, and as a sign of how much time is being wasted on this, the metro editor herself, Julie Engebrecht, is posting the messages to the blog. Can you imagine how much real news out there isn't being covered because the Enquirer has tied up the time of at least two reporters and one of its top editors with the iPhone? This is pathetic.

You get what you pay for

2007-06-27T12:41:00.000-05:00

The opinions expressed on this blog are available for free, and so, they're worth nothing. Tom Callinan explained his grand strategy for rescuing the Enquirer's dead tree edition, and it's pretty much the same thing: Get readers to give you content for nothing. And that's what it's worth.

I find no use for the Enquirer's Get Local section, which is the result of Get Published. The section for Batavia has not a single user-submitted item, and has such can't miss news as "New breakfast items at Wendy's". The Hamilton section has this item submitted by "user" Sue Kiesewetter, wife of Enquirer TV writer John Kiesewetter and also a long-time stringer for the Enquirer. (Tag line for the item is this clumsy line: "Contributed By Sue Kiesewetter | Enquirer contributor".)

Does anyone else read or use Get Local? It doesn't even register on the web stats I've seen for the Enquirer, and the Enquirer just moved the editor responsible for starting Get Published, Ron Liebau, back to Metro, to supervise reporters again.

What's another name for stuff you give away for free that you get for free? I'd call it garbage. The article, describing Callinan's appearance at a panel discussion on the future of newspapers, says "Get Local" traffic actually fell in May to 157,619 page views, which is miniscule. The stuff that the Enquirer is getting for free is about library hours and church events. It is not real news or anything that looks like watchdog journalism. Gannettoids love to talk about crowdsourcing, but the Enquirer can't point to two or three projects it's done involving crowdsourcing. It's a novelty unless you're doing one of those every week.

Callinan said, "We realize we've got to change or die." The change he's calling for, however, is to make lots of money by getting people to read stuff the Enquirer gets for free. That's just not going to happen. The change I'd like to see is more news, better reporting. The Enquirer has cut its staff and is now producing less news. The Gannett dictum of doing more with less is not going to result in a product people will want to view 10 years from now, whether or not they're asked to pay for it.

A change coming?

2007-06-16T02:28:00.001-05:00

It appears that Enquirer publisher Margaret Buchanan has put her house up for sale, 8065 Brill Road in Indian Hill. She paid $1,255,000 for it in 2003, according to the Hamilton County Auditor web site. She is now asking $1,399,000.

Boring stories of glory days

2007-06-07T11:07:00.000-05:00

In "Glory Days," Bruce Springsteen sings about old friends getting together to talk about old times, but while it starts out nostalgic, it turns into a rumination about lost opportunities:

Now I think I'm going down to the well tonight
and I'm going to drink till I get my fill
And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it
but I probably will
Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
a little of the glory of, well time slips away
and leaves you with nothing mister but
boring stories of glory days

That's what I think about when I see the center of today's Enquirer front page devoted to the 2002 Roger Bacon High basketball team, which beat LeBron James five years ago in the state final. Another boring story of glory days. Is this the best the Enquirer can do on its front page? Put this story back in Sports where it belongs, and put some real news on the front page.

Sunday's NFL Insider column

2007-06-03T17:52:00.000-05:00

The Enquirer's NFL writer, Mark Curnutte, is an NFL insider. Says so right on his Sunday column, NFL Insider.

Apparently, all you need to do to be an "insider" is read the web sites of other newspapers, because that's all Curnutte is doing in putting the column together. Each item was reported somewhere else first. The Brady Quinn item was reported by Cleveland area media (the Plain Dealer and the Warren Tribune Chronicle) midweek. The item about the Pittsburgh Steelers' search for a new center was in Saturday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and has been reported before. The item on Samari Rolle of the Baltimore Ravens was reported by the Baltimore Sun on Friday. The item on Buffalo Bills' ticket sales was reported by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle on Thursday.

And the item on St. Louis Ram Marc Bulger? Curnutte writes:

Bulger, 30, said he tries "to stay out that stuff" when it comes to contract talks.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch wrote on May 26:

Bulger, 30, said he tries "to stay out of that stuff" when it comes to contract talks.

Curnutte dropped the word "of" in the partial quote, but otherwise it's the same sentence.

At the end of the NFL Insider column, the Enquirer is thoughtful enough to put this tagline: "Written, in part, from notes provided by other NFL beat writers."

In part? I would say that 100% is a big part, and not a single item is properly attributed to its original source. Writing "Rolle ... told reporters who cover the Ravens" is totally inadequate. There doesn't seem to be a shred of original reporting here, and it even appears Curnutte has engaged in a little cutting and pasting.

Every sports writer does this, re-reporting for readers in one city something previously reported in another. Attribution rules are always a little loose. But you should never pass off others' work as your own. Putting your picture on a column of old news and calling yourself an "insider" takes this to a very high level.

Real journalism alert

2007-06-01T09:54:00.000-05:00

"The Tragedy of Trustin Blue" showed up on the Enquirer's web site this morning, a tale of how seven children died of abuse while their cases were being monitored by Hamilton County Department of Job and Family Services, written by Sharon Coolidge. This was not published in today's paper, and it seems too big for Saturday, so we might see it on Sunday.

This is a major effort for the Enquirer, with four stories, video and a library of documents linked to the case, and it smells like a mea culpa for the over-coverage of the death of Marcus Feisel. Trustin's death originally was a brief of on the front page of the Local section on January 24, 2006, followed by a longer story inside Local on February 2, 2006. Coolidge previously wrote about this case in a Sunday story on August 22, "Moms' choices put kids in peril," about four kids who died due to abuse by their mothers' boyfriends.

I give it a B. This is a very good review of documents. It names the names of police and social workers linked to this case. It reads clinically at times, though, and it fails to point to any big systematic problem at Jobs and Family Services. The department has too many cases and too few workers for a city with so many low-income single moms.

It's probably just my dirty mind at work, but a video for this story, where a child died after being horribly sexually abused, is on the same page as a link to "The making of 'Cornhole'." Somebody should fix that.

Shrinking resources and teenage recklessness

2007-05-31T13:19:00.000-05:00

You should read this, Editor & Publisher's story on the impact that staff cuts are having on newsroom operations. The Enquirer isn't part of the story, but other Gannett papers are, as are similar-sized papers from around the country. Everyone's story is the same: You have to do more with less, tough choices are made about what stories not to cover, and reporters claim they have less time to check facts and cultivate sources.

When Don Ruane of The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., first covered the town of Cape Coral back in 1979, he didn't start writing his first stories of the day until close to 4 p.m. That left him plenty of time for fact-checking, quote-fixing, and being out and about to schmooze with sources and run down some story tips.

Today, the 56-year-old reporter, who has served in various reporting and editing roles over more than two decades, is back on his old beat. But this time around, he says any extra time he once had is gone, and the likelihood of mistakes has blossomed. Not only must stories be done as quickly as possible for the Web, but covering government meetings means more updating online and less time working sources and developing leads.

"You wonder about the quality sometimes when you rush stuff out," says Ruane. "We probably have more misspellings online because we are rushing to get things up, we are trying to beat the noon news."

Others in the news trenches agree. ...

Think about that when you see today that the Enquirer put four reporters (five, if you count the strangely different bylines "Denise Amos" and "Denise Smith Amos" as two people) on second-day coverage of the deaths of two teenage girls in a car wreck. The deaths are undoubtedly tragic and sad, but these unfortunate girls weren't the first victims of teenage recklessness, and they won't be the last. Why do these deaths deserve such blanket coverage, and why, on Wednesday, were these deaths given a higher position on the front page than the deaths of 10 American soldiers in one day? (I'd link to the PDF of the front page, but the Enquirer's own link to it is busted.) Has the Enquirer ever devoted this kind of coverage to any soldier's death? No, because they know the most recent war death won't be the last, and because they're afraid to argue about the war's legitimacy. It's much easier to write tearjerkers about speeding teenage drivers.

And why did these deaths get so much more coverage than the death of this boy, a story buried on page 2 of the Local section? Are the deaths of two white suburban girls really worth that much more than the death of one white suburban boy?

Two more things on this: First, the Enquirer ran this picture on its front page, but then, for some strange reason, split that photo into two headshots on the front page of the Local section. Second, the tired headline "Shattered Dreams" -- one that has been used for stories on teenagers' deaths for decades -- proves that the Enquirer is so short on resources, imagination and balls that they're willing to sink to beating cliches into the ground on the front page, instead of actually uncovering and reporting news. In the macabre world of what makes news, this story was giftwrapped for the Enquirer. All they had to do was put "Shattered Dreams" over the top of it and it's front-page material.

In an environment of shrinking resources, the Enquirer does what's easy, not necessarily what's important.

Two notes

2007-05-24T13:49:00.000-05:00

Would the Enquirer have the guts to call out "the sheer weirdness" of the new Creation Museum, as the New York Times did today? Right now that's the most-emailed story on the Times' web site.
Why is it that every time I see Enquirer editor Tom Callinan quoted on something, he's explaining a mistake? Bob Steele of The Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values, who was called to Cincinnati to lecture the Enquirer staff after a reporter was suspended for plagarism, used his trip to turn out this article about how the Enquirer handles online forums. Callinan, who couldn't find his ass in the dark with both his hands, explains how the Enquirer fucked up and shut down most of the discussion boards on the site. Karen Gutierrez of CincyMoms also speaks up about discussions on that site.

What neither person seems to understand is that creating lists of what people say isn't automatically useful, it's doesn't automatically lead to solutions and it's certainly not journalism. Note how often Callinan brings up the number of page views, and how low most of the numbers are. Callinan talks about "crowdsourcing" and Gutierrez talks about "viral marketing" as if they know what those terms mean. Good newspapers did "crowdsourcing" long before some blogger coined the term, but Callinan talks about it as if it's a recent discovery -- which, at the Enquirer, it is. And Gutierrez sends out a few emails and calls it viral marketing. Pathetic.

After reading that, I checked the Enquirer web site to see if there were any discussions online. I found two -- one on immigration, and this one on Fountain Square. Look at the Fountain Square discussion. It's from October, linked today from a story about Taste of Cincinnati. How lame.

Out with a whimper

2007-05-24T11:50:00.000-05:00

FIRST: The Purple People Bridge Climb was a lame idea from the start, lamer still because it cost you up to $80 for the pleasure. But the Enquirer thought it was a great idea, and put the bridge climb on Page 1 six times (November 10 and 14, 2005, in 2006, April 6, May 3, May 25 and June 13), plus an editorial, plus a 1,900-word hummer for Dennis Speigel, the genius behind the idea.

On Wednesday, Speigel announced the climb would be shut down. The Enquirer's play of the story is puzzling -- on the front page in Kentucky, but deep in the paper in Ohio, at the bottom of page A13, the third page of the Business section. I don't believe it was ever an above-the-fold front page story from the start, but why does the Enquirer seem to consider this a Kentucky story and not an Ohio story? The Enquirer doesn't seem to understand that the interest in a story is based on the reader, and not the writer. It appears the Enquirer treated this as a Kentucky story because it was written by a reporter from the Northern Kentucky bureau, Mike Rutledge. Does that mean they also think only Kentucky readers would be interested? Maybe they just didn't want to embarrass Ohio resident Speigel on this side of the river.

SECOND: Chris Henry's drug test in Kentucky was apparently negative. Was the Enquirer ever justified in putting this story on the front page? You would think good judgment is called for when we're talking about accusing somebody of using drugs. However, it's another case of the Enquirer passing on good news judgment, passing on doing the right thing, in favor of using web traffic to determine what goes on the front page. Is anyone in the Northern Kentucky bureau thinking about looking into how many other people on probation are getting such poor drug tests? A story like that would resemble watchdog journalism, which we know the Enquirer doesn't like to do. Will the editorial page take on prosecutors in Kentucky who let out inconclusive drug test results? No, they're too busy washing John Boehner's mouth out with soap.

Wrong question

2007-05-20T09:16:00.000-05:00

Sunday's big story on the Creation Museum makes this big pronouncement:

The museum also puts our region at the center of one of the most enduring questions of all time: Who created Heaven and Earth -- and when?

Ryan Clark's reporting doesn't begin to try to answer that, and that's good, because it's the wrong question. That question assumes there is a "who" to be credited with the universe's creation, and that's far from a foregone conclusion.

The real question is, should the Bible be taken literally? Clark's reporting sticks more to this question. But the posing of that other question just muddies the story's presentation. The Enquirer isn't actually brave enough to tell readers up front that the story's might actually challenge one's reading of the Bible. Instead, the editor (Lee Ann Hamilton, maybe) makes up this other question, and then fails to answer it.

This just shows that the Enquirer believes if its pronouncements are big enough, that makes the stories big. Clark's reporting isn't bad, but it's clear from the presentation that the editor in charge wasn't smart enough to really frame the story well.

I also don't understand the headlines. The front page headline reads, "Did man walk among dinosaurs?" Does the Enquirer pose this as an unsettled question? This question has an answer, and the answer in absolutely not. Man and dinosaurs never met, so why did the Enquirer put that question on the front page? On the Forum front page is the headline, "What the Lord made". I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Did God build the museum? In the story, one man interviewed calls the museum a miracle. It's not.

So there's a remaining question: Does a newspaper have to respect all opinions? No it doesn't. At least part of a newspaper's job is to debunk myths, to challenge conventional wisdom and poke holes into widely known "truths." I don't expect any newspaper to take on or be able to answer the question, is there a God? But the evidence behind evolution and against the Genesis story as the origin of life on earth is overwhelming., and Clark's stories essentially say that. So why does the Enquirer posture this way?

To top it off, the editorial board skips the issue entirely, instead weighing in on last week's immigration deal. Compare that to today's editorial in the New York Times, and see which paper has the better grasp of the issue.

CincyMoms

2007-05-19T08:22:00.000-05:00

(Note: When first posted, this item did not allow comments. That was inadvertent and has been corrected. Also, you might need to register at CincyMoms to view some of that content.)

Let me say from the outset that I have no philosophical disagreement with CincyMoms.com. It's a legitimate idea for a web site, and if it helps parents raise their kids, that's fine.

I just don't think that under the Enquirer's leadership, it's going to be very good. I received this email last week:

Have you heard the Enquirer paid a group of "conversation starters" to post regularly to the site, then failed to mention that to readers? It was brought up -- by a photographer -- at a recent staff meeting when (the photographer) asked, innocently: "Shouldn't we tell people that?"
The response was essentially, no. "People don't like to be led in conversations," I believe is a direct quote from Hollis.

That's troubling if true. I looked all over the CincyMoms site for any mention of this practice. It's not in the FAQ (the Enquirer doesn't seem to understand that the FA in FAQ stands for "frequently asked," which means these should be real questions from real people). Nor is there any mention of this practice in the blog maintained by Karen Gutierrez, who leads the CincyMoms effort for the Enquirer. And I couldn't find anything in the boards about CincyMoms. I tried to search the discussion boards for talk of this practice, but the CincyMoms search function hasn't worked in days.

On the other hand, so what if it is true? Sure it's dishonest; ethics isn't a strong suit at the Enquirer. Inserting paid talkers into online discussions to boost traffic is easier said than done. Take a look at this clumsy effort by Gutierrez, who goes by the online name "cincymom". It's a Valentine's Day thread called "Tell us why your man is special":

Did he scrape the ice off your car this morning? Take your turn with the baby last night? Does he just GET you? For Valentines Day, tell us why your man is special.

This got 28 responses, not a huge amount. But this just reflects the Enquirer's uneasiness with public discussion. The Enquirer has killed off all discussion on its web site, because the discussions were being hijacked by a few insane users. The editorial board is pushing "community conversations," and this week produced this masterpiece about high gas prices, where readers suggested such brilliant and original ideas to save money on gas by driving less and driving smaller cars.

If, through CincyMoms, the Enquirer is trying to appeal to West Chester soccer moms, then they're missing the target. You don't make money on the web by appealing to people who inhabit Norman Rockwell paintings, and Gutierrez's lame discussion idea suggests. You just don't find many well-adjusted people posting on discussion boards like this. People who join these discussions range from merely insecure and pissed-off (like me) to those who are desperately lonely and scared and have low self esteem, or are just apeshit crazy.

Doubt me? Read "Drunken night, big mistake" about a woman in a bad marriage who gets drunk and wakes up the next morning to realize she participated in a three-way. Or this thread about a woman in a loveless marriage.

Remember the Enquirer's clumsy Mother's Day front page pulled from CincyMoms? This is better reading: women writing about how their kids and husbands ignored them on Mother's Day.

That's the real world of parenting. Frankly, of all the families I know, I can only think of one I'd consider normal, and even there, the overachieving daughter hates her father. The rest of the families I know, there are divorces, kids in wheelchairs, kids on drugs, kids on Ritalin, kids on antidepressants, mothers on antidepressants, kids and mothers on antidepressants. The "normal" family is a myth, but the Enquirer only wants to write about kids who get perfect scores on their ACTs. That's great, but it goes without saying that many of us are just average, and by definition, about half of us are below average.

The sad stories of bad marriages and pathetic Mother's Days, the Enquirer can't make that stuff up. That's real, and certainly the Enquirer doesn't pay enough to hire people smart enough make that up.

What might be more insidious is letting advertisers interfere. Note that this discussion, "Weirdest place you've done it?", was started by user PureRomance4U. Pure Romance is the name of a Cincinnati company that sells vibrators and other bedroom apparatus through Tupperware-like parties, and which, if I'm not mistaken, is a CincyMoms advertiser.

What kind of traffic is CincyMoms getting? I don't know, but the site this morning claims 5,732 members and 52,000 message posts on its bulletin board, but the posts are from only 3,550 users. That means only about 60 percent of CincyMoms users have posted messages.

My guess is that CincyMoms traffic is subject to a 90-10 rule, which says 90 percent of your traffic comes from just 10 percent of your users. Read this discussion started by a woman wondering why some users post so often. There are women in this discussion who have up to 900 posts, and they're not please with the insinuation that they don't have anything better to do than hang out on CincyMoms.

(I think I'm in love with Lucky1. She has over 700 posts and a screw loose. She had this to say to a question about anal sex. "Let me see if I can word this delicately... It is AWESOME ...." I'm glad she was able to put it so delicately, since I probably couldn't handle her more-vivid description.)

A generous estimate would mean CincyMoms only has 500, maybe 1,000 active users, people who come to the site every day and participate. In a city of 2 million, that's a small number. Are advertisers willing to pay for that?

I don't have any issues with CincyMoms. There are obviously people who participate here who need help, and if they can get it there, that's great. My problem is with the clumsy way the Enquirer promotes it, especially using valuable front-page real estate to do so, and assigning a reporter (John Johnston) to do CincyMoms-themed stories. Those stories were of the quick and dirty variety, about how to get your kids to eat vegetables or behave in restaurants, and rarely dealt with the meaty issues around raising kids.

One last note: This discussion thread says a freelancer for Wired magazine is working on a story about CincyMoms. Let's hope he can get some answers out of the Enquirer about paying people to boost traffic on the boards.

Don't bother

2007-05-13T07:20:00.000-05:00

Did you waste $1.50 on the Sunday Enquirer today? I did, and I'm hoping you read this before you waste your money and your time.

The bulk of the front page is taken up by a CincyMoms ad. Why do I want to pay $1.50 to be told about some lame web site? It's shameful the Enquirer can't find better news to report on the front page of its biggest newspaper of the week.

The Sharonville plane crash follow-up story was written by a features writer, a business writer, and the medical writer. Many news editors believe in the theory that any decent reporter should be able to cover any story that comes up. It's a nice theory, and Bishop, Newberry and O'Farrell are all competent reporters. In the long run, however, having a newsroom -- oh, forgive me -- having a local information center full of generalists leads to poor beat coverage and a lack of the kind of nuanced coverage that leads to good watchdog journalism and great storytelling. You can tell by today's front page this is already afflicting the Enquirer.

A headline above the letters in the Community Forum section says "Ruby-Simpson tiff seems like a publicity stunt". I don't think Jeff Ruby threw OJ out of his Louisville restaurant for as a stunt, but the Enquirer took care of the publicity, putting this non-story on the front page twice in the past few days. Today's deification of a guy who runs a bunch of steak restaurants isn't a bad story, but doesn't deserve the front page.

What did other newspapers do today? The Lexington Herald-Leader's mother's day story is about a mom who lost her son in the war. The Toledo Blade investigates Rep. Paul Gillmor's new $1 million home. Somehow the words "Enquirer" and "investigate" don't seem to go together well or often in the same sentence. The Cleveland Plain Dealer examines the state of the troubled Davis-Besse nuclear power plant. The Washington Post leads with a story about a deadly ambush in Iraq, a story the Enquirer buried on page 15. It also has a story on how GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani got rich after 9/11. The New York Times today tells how civilian deaths are hurting the war against the Taliban.

Being a lousy newspaper isn't an accident. The Enquirer is terrible by choice. As its print product sinks, the Enquirer is trying to become a successful web site, but how can you be successful on the web with such awful decisions about how to deploy your reporters?

Non-news on the front page

2007-05-10T09:40:00.000-05:00

If you believe that a newspaper should put the most important news on the front page, and that the most important of the important news is placed above the fold, then there's no way to justify the Enquirer's decision to lead the paper with the story of how Jeff Ruby threw O.J. Simpson out of his restaurant, six days ago, in Louisville. It's an abominable news decision, probably driven by the story's web traffic. The Enquirer, for some reason, regularly deifies Ruby, probably because he's easy to get to and he'll say absolutely anything that pops into his head.

Slightly worse is the center of the front page, devoted to the Ohio smoking ban. The Enquirer tells you right up front it's not a story -- the deck reads, "few complaints, no violators identified." If it's not news, why is it on the front page? The news well in this town can't be that dry. The Enquirer is just to lazy and incompetent to find news.

A few thoughts on Monday

2007-05-07T09:42:00.000-05:00

Strange graphics: Saturday's story on the Flying Pig says marathoners like to run here because they get a cool medal. Then the Enquirer fails to run a picture of the medal.

Today's story by Malia Rulon on UC's attempt to land a presidential debate talks all about how colleges benefit from these events. But when the Enquirer lists where debates have been held since 1992, it lists the cities but not the colleges.

This is typical of the Enquirer's careless planning. Gannett wants stories to have breakouts and sidebars and graphics, but nobody seems to think much about how they're all supposed to work together.

Love those boosters: Dustin Dow's two-part series on boosters of college athletics looks at the upside but doesn't mention at all the downside. It seems most big scandals in college athletics have connections to rich boosters who get too involved. With both UC and Xavier saying they plan to increase their booster bases, what are they doing to keep this clean? Is there a part three? The Enquirer has clearly given up on watchdog journalism, because this series lacks the necessary skepticism.

Bricks are bad: We might expect the editorial page to take up the question of whether sucking up to college boosters might cause problems, but not at the Enquirer. Instead, the editorial board takes another strong stand, this time against throwing bricks at school buses near the zoo. The editorial mentions that two school districts cancelled field trips to the zoo, without passing judgment on whether or not that was the right thing to do or a good thing to do. It takes no talent whatsoever to write editorials like this, so why the Enquirer needs a staff of six to that is a mystery.

A mile wide and an inch deep

2007-05-06T09:39:00.000-05:00

Sunday's package of stories on baby boomers illustrates what's wrong at the Enquirer. There are no fewer than nine stories on this subject today. The Enquirer writes about it as if it's something they discovered, and takes the approach, "this is who you are and this is what you want." The lead story almost totally descriptive, a rehash of old headlines. How stupid does the Enquirer think I am that they have to tell me Anthony Munoz and Johnny Bench are baby boomers?

The Enquirer seems to pride itself on this kind of swarming of a story, but the results are shallow. Last year the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote a series -- not just one story -- on how boomers have failed to save for retirement, and they've won a handful of awards for it. Here, the Enquirer devotes less than 600 words to the topic. The Enquirer says we don't have enough geriatric doctors. The New Yorker treated that story this way. Read both, and decide which is the more compelling treatment. And does anyone really give a crap about what Nancy Zimpher thinks about retirement?

It's typical of how the Enquirer treats issues like this. They talk to college presidents and football coaches, but not often to the masses of people of average or below-average means who are really going to struggle with meeting their financial and health-care needs in retirement. That's where the story is, and today, the Enquirer dealt with it only as a bunch of statistics. Is it a lack of resources or a lack of courage that keeps the Enquirer from leaving the office to go find real people to talk to?

What the Enquirer should do is conceive the story the way they printed it, but don't print it. Expand the subjects where they've found impact, on housing, employment, retirement costs, health care and so on. But this is how the Enquirer covers an issue: a swarm, then silence. The swarm produces coverage that just scratches the surface of an issue. You can bet you won't read much about this in the future, because the Enquirer feels it's already been there, done that. The staff is too thin to assign a reporter full time to write about baby boomer issues, and the editors aren't smart enough to push the limits of the coverage.

For me, the best part was the 36 headshots of baby boomers on the Business front page, with the names in type so small and shrunken many baby boomers would need a powerful magnifying glass to read them.

UPDATE: The Sunday New York Times Magazine devoted its issue on Sunday to middle age. See it here this week. You might need to be registered, and if you aren't registered, you should be. This is what a newspaper with real ambition can produce.

Sad Saturday

2007-05-05T13:15:00.000-05:00

The story selection on the front page of the Enquirer today is abysmal. The paper seems to be more frequently going with all-local front pages, which usually means sports, Marcus Fiesel and stories about children. In that vein, today's front page doesn't disappoint.

The Marcus Fiesel story was over weeks ago, and this overwrought story doesn't deserve the front page. This story about who gets to sing the anthem at Reds games was so flat and poorly written that even the web editors missed the point, and put this head on the story online: "Springdale kids sing anthem." This story about a county clerk who was fired doesn't get to the point until the 16th paragraph, that he might have been hired after being fired from his Norwood job just so he could qualify for his public employees pension. And this story about the Flying Pig Marathon isn't bad, but did it deserve the top of the front page?

This isn't all is today's Enquirer. Editors apparently thought this story was so good it was printed twice in my copy of the paper, once on the front of the Local section and again on the second page. And usually on Saturdays the main story in Business is about personal finance. What's the hot topic today? Free comic books. Thank you for saving me $2. Now I can retire.

There was news worth reading today, but the Enquirer buried it. This story about kids throwing rocks at a school bus at the zoo is every West Chester mom's nightmare, and just gives people in the burbs another reason not to come into the city. The Enquirer played it down. Keep in mind that Enquirer publisher Margaret Buchanan is on the 3CDC Board. Another Cincinnati cop was arrested, and this story too was buried. And Mr. Pig died April 30, and the Enquirer finally got around to printing his obit today.

Not even the best in Ohio

2007-04-24T10:43:00.000-05:00

The Associated Press Society of Ohio awards prizes in five classes, based on the circulation of the newspaper. The Enquirer competes against just five other newspapers for prizes -- the Akron Beacon-Journal, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch, the Dayton Daily News and the Toledo Blade.

The competition gives three awards for General Excellence, so each paper has a 50-50 chance of getting at least a mention. It's a coin flip.

When the awards were handed out this weekend, the Enquirer lost. First place for General Excellence went to Cleveland, second to Akron and third to Columbus.

In all, there were 109 awards in 31 categories. The Enquirer won 19 awards, including six first-place awards, including Best Business Writer (Alexander Coolidge), Best Investestigative Reporting (imagine that, for a package on eminent domain) and Best Web Site. The Enquirer was strongest in photography, where it won three firsts for Best Spot News Photo, Best General News Photo and Best Photographer -- all for Glenn Hartong, who deserves the recognition.

That's the good news. The big winner was the Columbus Dispatch, which won 30 awards and eight firsts. The Cleveland Plain Dealer won 28 awards and 11 firsts. The Enquirer was shut out in 14 categories, including General Excellence, Best Columnist, Best Feature and Best Community Service.

In 15 categories where writing and reporting were most important, including "best section" awards, the Enquirer didn't do well -- just two firsts and eight awards overall. The Dispatch received 16 awards and seven firsts. The Plain Dealer: 14 awards and three firsts. There were four awards given for Best Community Service. Columbus won the top two, followed by Akron and Dayton. Cincinnati's over-the-top Marcus Fiesel coverage -- clearly the paper's highest priority story since August -- got an honorable mention for Best Breaking News. The Enquirer also won a second in that category for its coverage of the shooting involving rapper T.I.

I point this out to show just how weak the Enquirer's news operation has become. Start with 19 awards. Take out seven that went to photo, four to sports, and one each to the web site, Borgman and the recently departed Byron McCauley. That means the heart of the news operation won just five awards, and two of those were honorable mentions. There were zero for features, graphics and headlines.

This is a newspaper that doesn't know how to excel. I'm not sure it wants to.