Media Watch

Columbia Journalism Review on new Plymouth newssite

CapeCodTODAY's sister newssite lauded by Columbia Journalism Review

Year-old "paperless newspaper" wins high praise from journalism's bible

While Cape Cod TODAY is the first-ever paperless newspaper begun in 1996, Plymouth Daily News (PDN) is one of the latest, and it is the sister newssite of this publication. Yesterday the the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published the review of PDN copied below. CJR is an American magazine for professional journalists published bimonthly by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961.

Feb 2, 2012 11:12 AM

Plymouth Daily News
Hyperlocal news for “America’s hometown”

By Caitlin Kasunich

PLYMOUTH, MASSACHUSETTS — For almost two decades, editor and publisher Walter Brooks and his family have run online media ventures in several Massachusetts communities. Starting in the early months of 1996, Brooks helped launch the online edition of the vacation guide Best Read Guide/Cape Cod. Just a year later, he started the hyperlocal news site CapeCodToday.com—an early example of the hyperlocal genre, which CJR profiled in 2011. Around 2000, Brooks and his wife, son, and daughter-in-law set up eCape.com as a separate IT and web marketing corporation. In 2010, PlymouthDailyNews.com, a hyperlocal site serving Plymouth Massachusetts, became the latest addition to the family business. (All of the ventures are incorporated under eCape.com, of which Brooks’s daughter-in-law Julie Brooks is president and CEO.)

Plymouth Daily News offers local news for residents of Plymouth and the five surrounding towns that are part of Barnstable County: Carver, Duxbury, Kingston, Plympton, and Wareham. The site runs five to seven news items per day on average, says Brooks, and regularly features quick-hit hyperlocal news items on everything from crime and business to politics and travel.

Recent stories include a piece on contractors in the area who were cited for failing to pay workers, as well as a brief alert to residents about an upcoming special election. The site’s homepage showcases other, more unique features, including a list of the day’s events in the community, weekly reader polls, and a business directory.

• Brooks serves as editor for both Cape Cod Today and Plymouth Daily News; a managing editor, Maggie Kulbokas, also works on both sites. Beyond them, the Plymouth Daily News staff includes a part-time community editor, a part-time sales employee, and half a dozen freelance writers who come and go as needed (political writers are generally brought on board during election seasons, for instance). A dozen local volunteer bloggers regularly post on the site. Brooks says that he and Kulbokas dedicate about 80 percent of their time to CapeCodToday.com and 20 percent to PlymouthDailyNews.com.
• The community editor, Matthew Nadler, also runs a news site for two Plymouth neighborhoods called The Manomet Current, which CJR profiled in 2011. “In the interest of good community journalism,” says Brooks, Nadler was not asked to suspend the site in order to work with Plymouth Daily News. 
• Although Brooks declines to give specific revenue figures, he says the year-old site is “nearing break even.” 100 percent of the revenue is derived from ad sales; rates are posted on the site. 
• PlymouthDailyNews.com—which has a Facebook page and Twitter handle—received 70,000 unique visitors in its first year, according to Brooks. In the future, he hopes to expand current features of the website while adding new ones, such as obituaries and local court reports. A large-scale re-design of PlymouthDailyNews.com and CapeCodToday.com is also underway, and will hopefully be completed this spring. A mobile-friendly version of the site’s business directory may be on the horizon, and, following what has been a successful model for Cape Cod Today, Plymouth Daily News may soon be joined by a host of niche content outlets for the Plymouth area, including sites focused on weddings, kids, seniors, business, and shopping. Launch dates have not yet been confirmed.

Brooks is all rapture when describing his transition from newspapers to the web: “There is never a need to cut a story, or leave one out because of available space. Our newsprint is in the cloud, and literally, the sky is the limit.”

Read the CJR Review here.

Why the Cape Cod Times didn't cover "Occupy their own offices"

Things must be getting a little hairy on Main Street Hyannis
Times editor should have found out "Who's that knockin' at my door?"

Cape Cod Times 11/08/2011, Page A08

LETTERS

Your Nov. 3 front-page story detailing alleged misstatements and untruths by Stephen B. Lindberg, almost all of them from a profile that appeared in The Cape Cod Chronicle, unfairly impugns our newspaper's reputation.
   Like most news outlets, we rely on our sources to provide accurate information and the instincts of our reporters to raise red flags when that information may be question­able. Focusing almost an entire front-page story on the claims contained in our article implies a lack of responsibility on our part and by implication questions the reliability of our reporting.
   It is ironic that on the same front page, your story about efforts to purchase the former Chatham Theater building con­tains several errors that could have been corrected with some simple fact-checking.Your reporter, however, appears to have relied on the informa­tion provided by that story's sources.
   If a newspaper with the resources of the Cape Cod Times - owned by the mega­corporation Dow Jones Inc. doesn't have the resources to fact-check its stories, how can it criticize an independent, family-owned weekly news­paper like The Chronicle for failing to do so?

TIM WOOD, Editor, Cape Cod Chronicle

By Walter Brooks

I've only been a newspaperman for 60 years, so maybe our local daily's editors are playing by new rules.

I walked into my first newspaper newsroom in the 1940's and sat by my daddy's Underwood typewriter at the Waterbury CT Republican-America for many years.

I grew up around that office, even went to Taft School for Boys with it's later Publisher, and started at my first daily newspaper job in 1951.

Back then we were all taught that even if your newspaper never reported on drunk driving cases, you made an exception if an editor or reporter on your newspaper was arrested for drunk driving.

Then you absolutely must report it.

A week ago today a good sized crowd of "Occupy" protestors from around Cape Cod marched up and down in front of The Cape Cod Times office on Main Street Hyannis, and even marched into the lobby making a lot of noise, but no Times editor had the guts to send a reporter and photographer to report about it in the newspaper.

I emailed the Times editor Paul Pronovost to ask why they had failed to cover a story literally at their front door and in their lobby, and got the following email in return reprinted here word-for-word:

Paul Pronovost's petulant reposte
Honestly, Walter, why should I bother? Because you fancy yourself a fellow journalist? Please! You are an opportunist who exploits half-truths and innuendo to advance his own ends. If I believed for a moment you would listen earnestly or portray accurately anything I would share, I'd be happy to do so. But you are, quite simply, untrustworthy.

Paul apparently is not aware that in today's world, a "journalist" is what you call a newspaperman who is out of a job.

I still have a newspaper job, albeit an electronic one or two.

I was nonplussed by Paul's rude answer until I saw his Letters page today with the rather disturbing comments by another Cape Cod newspaper editor reprinted in the sidebar.

The Cape Cod Times also ignored Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Elizabeth Warren's visit to the Orleans Farmer's Market on Saturday, even though there was on of it reporters there. Of course, their bias for her opponent Scott Brown is obvious when they run "My View" columns 50 percent longer than their rules to plug his reelection.

And it reminded me of the time when Paul's newspaper reprinted verbatim a release from the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound as if it were their own words.

And this week's latest ABC circulation drop to 41,000 daily probably didn't help his disposition either. It was 60,000 twenty years ago, and the Cape's population has grown by 30,000 since then.

Maine is about to get Schecht-ed upon

Former Cape Cod Times Editor Cliff Schechtman moves north
New Press Herald Editor has some baggage

Reprinted with permission of Down East.

Look what the wind blew in: The Maine Press Association’s email newsletter of Sept. 22 (it’s not yet posted online) carried the word that the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram will soon have a new managing editor. Cliff Schechtman will take over the position on Oct. 17, replacing Angie Muhs, who’s moving to MaineToday Digital (a marketing business owned by MaineToday Media, the parent company of the newspapers) overseeing all online content.

     EDITOR'S NOTE:

For a decade Cape Cod Times Editor Cliff Schechtman led that newspaper's 'editorial Jihad' against America's first offshore wind farm proposed just after 9-11.
   His loathsome and unprofessional deeds whilst there included running a plagiarized PR release from an anti-wind farm group as an Editorial for the newspaper.
   That group is funded primarily by oceanfront trophy home owners with links to the oil industry.

Schechtman has had a long and interesting career in journalism. From 1993 to 1995, he served as editor of the Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., a paper run by Richard Connor, today the CEO of MaineToday. Schechtman left there for the Cape Cod Times, where he was editor in chief for a decade before moving to Newsday on Long Island. He was named associate editor of that publication last year.

Schechtman’s resume is heavy on the investigative pieces he oversaw, covering such issues as National Guard bases that contaminated local drinking water supplies, dangerous gaps on Long Island commuter railway platforms and prying public document out of the sheriff’s office. But there’s no mention of the way he directed reporting on a controversy that will likely have implications here in Maine.

Cliff's misdeeds revealed

In 2005, one of Schechtman’s ex-staffers wrote a piece for the Providence Journal accusing him of skewing coverage of plans for off-shore wind turbines near Cape Cod. That criticism was later picked up by other publications, which claimed he followed orders from his publisher and other rich and powerful Cape Cod residents, who didn’t want their ocean views obscured by wind turbines. He’s said to have emphasized negative news and avoided stories that reflected positively on the project. A book on the subject accused him of being an activist on the issue and of blurring the lines between news and opinion.

This column originally appeared in Down East on September 24, 2011 here.

Cape Cod Times as a Murdoch tabloid

Is the NewsCorp influence showing up in our local daily newspaper?
Will you or your grandma make it on page 3?

By Walter Brooks

Things must be  getting hairy in the ad department and newsroom at 319 Main Street Hyannis. Circulation at the Cape Cod Times is dropping along with the newspaper's advertising as the world (even Cape Cod) shifts to online media for the news.

The circulation numbers for the Cape Cod Times as of its ABC Publisher's Statement on 3/27/11:

• 37,522 Monday - Saturday
• 41,901 - Sunday

The circulation was near 65,000 twenty years ago.

The influence of the Times' new owner, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, may be seen in the newspaper's current request for photos of local bathing beauties.

Our Photoshopped version of a future Cape Cod Times front page on right is in the style of their London SUN sister publication, the pride of Murdoch's glitter rags. The raunchy model is an actual front page photo and the newspaper's online version goes full frontal nudity. We censored the woman's photo a bit.

The daily's editors cover themselves by asking for ancient bathing suit photos from our distant past as well as photos of readers "teeny with a bikini, tankini or (gasp!) a monokini?", but we all know how many grandmothers will send in an old black & whites pic.

It hard not to see where the editors got their idea given that the newspaper's owner is Rupert Murdoch and his London SUN infamous page 3 feature.

Despicable behavior by an arrogant old man
Murdoch closes his largest tabloid in wake of scandal, coming arrests of reporters

Murdoch's ethics are apparent today all over the media around the world as he supports his editors who abetted NewsCorp reporters hacking into the phones of murdered children and victims of the horrific London subway bombing.

  Follow live coverage here.
   Read the backstory here.

But today, the uproar grew so loud that with five of his journalists about to be arrested, Murdoch's UK headquarters, News International, announced it is shutting down the News of the World, the best-selling tabloid at the center of Britain's phone hacking scandal, and the 168-year-old weekly newspaper would publish its last edition on Sunday, without ads.

But don't think for a minute that Murdoch bowed to public decency and closed a money maker - the News of the World has been bleeding money fir three years as more and more people who were hacked illegally successfully sued the newspaper. Reuters reported today, "as allegations multiplied that its journalists hacked the voicemails of thousands of people, from child murder victims to the families of Britain's war dead, the tabloid hemorrhaged advertising, alienated millions of readers and posed a growing threat to Murdoch's hopes of buying broadcaster BSkyB."

How Did News of the World Hack Victims' Cell Phones? Read the PC magazine here.

The abrupt decision to shut the newspaper follows an extraordinary three days in which multiple revelations about intrusive phone hacking cost the paper its advertising base and reader support. The tabloid was found to have hacked into the phone message of a teenage murder victim and was suspected of possibly targeting the relatives of slain soldiers in its quest to produce attention-grabbing headlines.

Read the Yahoo News story here.

Most movies no longer advertise in Cape Cod Times

60 percent of our local movie screens missing from paper for a month now
The last Regal Cinema ad ran in Cape Cod Times on May 31

By Walter Brooks and staff

If you’re looking for show times at any of Cape Cod’s thirty movie screens owned by Regal Cinemas, don’t bother picking up the print edition of the Cape Cod Times because you won’t find them there any longer.  The last Regal Cinema ad ran in the local daily print edition on May 31^st. 

There are about fifty Cape movie screens listed on our free movie listing area here. Thirty of those screens are owned by Regal Cinemas of  Knoxville, TN which has a dozen locations in Massachusetts with half of them here on Cape Cod.

Perhaps the Harwich Lighthouse Cinema's first feature will be "The Fall of the House of Stewart."

I spoke with their marketing department and was told that it is now an industry trend to drop ads from the old media in favor of the internet which offers as good or better returns for less cost.

And Regal needs to save money because the company reported that total revenues for the first quarter ending March 31, 2011 were $570.9 million compared to total revenues of $719.8 million for the first quarter ended April 1, 2010. Net income (loss) attributable to controlling interest was $23.6 million in the first quarter of 2011 compared to $16.5 million in the first quarter of 2010. See the complete press release here.

Bad press for CC Times owner

Rupert Murdoch owns our local daily, and the Aussie tabloid publisher is engaged in the despicable habit of hacking dead children's phone records for news stories.
   The NY Times today reports: Boycott Targets Tabloid's Advertisers, and The Murdoch Style plus Murdoch hacking crisis deepens with war dead outcry in Reuters. Now advertisers are beginning to boycott his newspapers.

Is the sale of Regal's East Harwich cinemas in jeopardy?

Regal is also in the process of selling theater properties like the 6-screen location on Route 137 in Harwich which is under contract with the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School, although that sale appears increasingly at risk due to the school's recent bad publicity and unionizing which tends to scare off investors.

The school had looked into launching a $2 million fundraising campaign to finance the sale. When asked about the status of the campaign, Acting Director of the Lighthouse Charter School Paul Niles replied, "While we did undergo a study designed to help us explore issues related to a capital campaign, we have not launched a campaign. This study helped us to explore issues of capacity and the kinds of infrastructure necessary to carry out a campaign. It is possible that we will choose to conduct a campaign sometime in the future.". We are told the purchase and sale agreement with Regal will expire before long.

Times biting the hand that feeds us

Local editorial cartoon is bad for Cape Cod #1 business
It demonstrates a lack of knowledge of the daily's editors

On right is the editorial cartoon at the top of the Cape Cod Times editorial page Saturday April 30, 2011.

It would be a harmful and anti-business thing to publish even if the the point of the drawing were accurate, but it is not.

The editorial page editor has been around Cape Cod for several decades, and unless he's never read anything about tourism in that time, knows as we do what happens to the Cape's tourism when gas prices escalate.

He knows, or certainly should know, that every time there is a hike in gas prices, is HELPS rather than hurts the domestic tourism business.

As recently as this week we reported, once again, that Americans were not curtailing vacations, but were choosing US destinations over ones they had to fly to, and were choosing ones closer to their homes, and Cape Cod is within a tankful of gas from one-third the US population:

Gas prices aren't affecting tourism to Cape Cod
Provincetown among country's favorite

Travel Daily News reports that despite high gas prices, a new survey from HomeAway, Inc. finds the majority of Americans still plan to take a summer vacation, but will adjust their plans in light of rising costs by choosing destinations nearer their homes. Luckily Cape Cod is within a day's drive for one-third of America's population.

According to the survey, 81 percent of respondents report they will take a vacation this summer regardless of the price of gasoline. Of those who typically take a summer vacation each year, 38 percent will not change their vacation plans, saying increased gasoline prices will not affect their travel.

Hawaii was picked as the top "dream" summer vacation spot, but Provincetown is the most popular vacation destination this summer on HomeAway.com. The rest of the top 10 most popular summer destinations are beach areas, with the exception of Las Vegas and New York City.

Read the Travel Daily News  story here.

Cape businesses should ask The Times "why"

Whoever chose this specific Indianapolis Star cartoon was picking it out from dozens available for The Times editorial page and the very start of the tourist season here.

Did that editor think it was funny? Funny for the majority of Cape Cod businesses which depend on our brief summer tourism season for almost all their income each year?

There is not a business here which isn't helped by tourism. Even those not in the hospitality industry directly get much of their business from those which are. One survey claims over 60 percent of all the money earned by everyone on Cape Cod each year comes from our summer visitors.

We hope Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce head Wendy Norcross calls The Times out on this hurtful gesture, as well as the heads of  all the local town chambers of commerce.

You can contact The Times' editorial page editor Williams Mills at (508) 862-1251, or email him at wmills@capecodonline.com.
You may also write CapeCodTODAY an letter at editor@ecape.com.

Yes, Virginia, there was a newspaper...

Reminding most readers who have never seen one what a newspaper was

By Walter Brooks, guerrilla marketer

Older readers are familiar with that old chestnut of a story which newspapers reprint every year around Christmas, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."

Editor Church answer, "Virginia, our little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age," wouldn't have sat well with today's tech-savvy kids. Maybe it's the mustache.

Today, however, it is more necessary to remind the vast majority of readers under the age of forty what a newspaper was when there were ones worthy of the name still being published.

Editor Francis Pharcellus Church's response in long-gone New York Sun when eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote to ask if there really was a Santa Claus, compared that belief to the love and generosity and devotion which exist in the human heart.

Today's more skeptical and tech savvy eight-year old readers would be more amused at Editor Church than at young Virginia O'Hanlon, because your grandchildren are years ahead of Virgina at that age, and probably teach you how to use the web, iPhone, and most other gadgets you buy.

And no of the eight-year old today ever read a daily newspaper. Not just kids, less than 19 percent of Americans under age forty read a daily newspaper any longer either.

How to own the heart, minds and wallets of twenty-somethings

When my then thirty-something daughter-in-law Julie Brooks and I launched CapeCodTODAY.com fifteen years ago, we asked every young person between 15 and 20 whom we ran into, "what would have to be on a website for you to want to check it out every day?'

Their collective answers became the nucleus of the first editions of CapeCodTODAY.

The we sat back and waited ten years until those young cyber-savvy children were twenty-five and the kind of 'active consumer' every advertiser wants.

Our format has evolved enormously in fifteen years, but the target remains active consumers who turn out to never read newspapers.

They get their information from non-traditional media like The Daily Show and newssites like ours.

Today the median age of our readers is over fifty, but we still cater to the 'flash mob' mentality because readers really decide which of us succeeds or fails.

Are they reading your newspaper today?

If you are a newspaper publisher or work for one, I guarantee you there is a Walter Brooks and his daughter-in-law Julie in your town who thinks they can own the future instead of you.

You can wait until that happens, and share your present market with some upstarts like us, or allow us to help you compete with yourselves with a CommunityDailyNews.com edition of your own.

In the mean time, read the obituaries in your local newspaper. It will list that newspaper's ex-subscribers who are not being replaced by today's younger readers.

As Claire Booth Luce said, "The money is always out there - only the pockets change."

Canadians say they won?t pay

A new survey predicts only 4 percent will pay for news
Online news is the only area showing growth

The Globe & Mail , the Canadian equivalent of the New York Times and/or Wall Street Journal, reports that a new survey by the Canadian Media Research Consortium predicts that only 4 percent of our neighbors to the north will pay for online news. The survey also suggests that another 15 per cent of the 1,682 Canadian adults polled for the study said they were unsure if they’d pay for their favorite news site.

Perhaps more importantly, an overwhelming 81 per cent said they definitely wouldn’t.

But only online news showing readership growth

The same newspaper, however, reports in another story that online news consumption only area of industry growth. The Globe & Mail quotes an AP report showing that Local, network and cable television news, newspapers, radio and magazines all lost audience last year, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research organization that evaluates and studies the performance of the press. News consumption online increased 17 per cent last year from the year before, the project said in its eighth annual State of the News Media survey.

Read how to start your own virtual newspaper here.

The survey states;
The internet survey showed that Canadians are overwhelmingly opposed to fees for content. Ninety-two per cent of those who get news online said they would find another free site if their favorite news sites started charging for content.
Somewhat surprisingly, there is little or no difference among age groups, educations levels or urban and rural populations on this question. At present, approximately 85 per cent of internet users in Canada get news online at least once a month.

Read the Globe & Mail survey story here.
Read the Canadian Media Research Consortium here.
Read the Globe & Mail story on online news gains here.

AP's Jane Seagrave takes the helm at The Vineyard Gazette

Associated Press Digital News Executive named Publisher of Vineyard Gazette
Jane Seagrave has wide ranging newspaper experience

By Walter Brooks

When Jerome and Nancy Kohlberg bought the venerable Vineyard Gazette for $2 million last November, we wondered who would be the next publisher. After all, whoever was named would be filling some very big shoes walking in the footsteps of Dick and Jodie Reston as well as Henry Beetle Hough who even managed to stop a bridge being built to the island in 1966.

Jane Seagrave will become publisher in April. Mark Lovewell photo with ex post facto permission.

That shoe has now dropped with the announcement of the appointment of Jane R. Seagrave as the new publisher of the 164-year-old newspaper on Martha's Vineyard.

She is a native of New England and graduated cum laude from Bowdoin College.  Seagrave was a reporter for the AP in Boston for six years and is currently senior vice president and chief revenue officer for The Associated Press in New York City, where she has worked in a series of executive roles since 2003. In 1987 she went to work for Lawyers Weekly Publications, launching weekly newspapers, also enrolling at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she obtained a master's degree in public  administration in 1989.

That's a pretty heady C.V. for a small island with a winter population estimated at about 15,000 residents. But this vacation mecca for the literate well-off swells to over 75,000 people in July and August, and over half of the Vineyard's 14,621 homes are occupied only in those months.

Retired Gazette publisher Dick Reston came from a newspaper family. Both he and his brother are journalists, and his late father, "Scotty" Reston, was the famous and highly respected Bureau Chief and columnist for the New York Times.

The Gazette has fought against the growing commercialism of the Vineyard and even was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Hurricane Bob in 1991.

Who is Jane Seagrave?

Jane Seagrave may be just the person to follow these giants. At 56 she's had a long career in the inky trade on both the editorial and business sides, and according to the press release, she has focused heavily on the emerging world of electronic journalism lately.

Jerome Kohlberg is one of the Ks in KKR as in Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts, one of the world's largest private equity firms specializing in leveraged buyouts. Although he ceased an active role in the business he founded, as recently as 2008 he popped up on Forbes' list of billionaires.

It was difficult for us to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Kohlberg hunkering down in Dick's old office in Edgertown any time soon, and we knew they would find a highly competent newspaper person to run it for them with a superb staff of writers already in place.

It looks like they have found such in Jane Seagrave who will take over the helm at the Gazette in early April. She will need all her skills because this small island has another good weekly newspaper in The Martha's Vineyard Times which is formidable competition. The battle has been between a sort of  'town vs. gown' melee with the Times making significant inroads with the year-round residents while the Gazette has a large off-island circulation.

The Gazette release said that her work has covered a wide range, spanning both print and digital publishing on the news and business sides. She was president and publisher of Philadelphia's daily legal newspaper, The Legal Intelligencer, chief executive officer of localbusiness.com and chief online strategy consultant for American Lawyer Media in New York.

For the past seven years she has been at the Associated Press in New York, as a vice president and director in new media markets and then as a senior vice president in global product development which included introduction of AP Mobile, online video and other digital products. She was named chief revenue officer last year.

Ms. Seagrave is married to John H. Kennedy, a former Boston Globe reporter who is now a journalism professor at La Salle University. They have a daughter in college. They will relocate permanently to the Vineyard from their home outside of Philadelphia, PA.

How did he find her?

An indication of Mr. Kohlberg's level of interest in finding the best possible publisher for the Gazette can be found in the search committee to find his new publisher. The committee was led by Cristine Russell, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and included:

• Alex Jones, former reporter for the New York Times, NPR's 'On The Media', and current director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School;
  
• Peter Osnos, founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books, and former reporter and editor for the Washington Post; and
  
• Geoffrey Cowan, president of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands and dean emeritus of USC's Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.

That probably cost him more than the entire year's editorial budgets here at CapeCodTODAY and PlymouthDailyNEWS.

Roger Ailes battles an upstart online-only newspaper

The web may be saving America for democracy and free speech
Creator of Fox News buys local weekly, loses staff to online newssite

By Walter Brooks

The Roger Ailes weekly the Putnam County News & Recorder, which for over a century had focused exclusively on local events with nary an Editorial, is now an ultra conservative newspaper behind a paywall, much like his boss Rupert Murdoch imposes on our local daily newspaper.

The town's new upstart newssite, Philipstown.info, is completely free like the newssite you are reading now.

North Africa and the Middle East is being saved by the internet, and the web may yet do the same for America.

The  current New Yorker has an arresting feature entitled "Fox among the chickens" about an independently owned weekly newspaper which for over a century had focused exclusively on local events with nary an Editorial, the Putnam County News & Recorder, being bought by Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, who put his wife Elizabeth in as the publisher. She shares her husband's political views, and, like him, she wanted the paper to have a role in local events and community decisions, especially about taxes, schools and patriotism.

Shortly after assuming ownership in 2009, the Ailes began to radically change the coverage and focus of the PCN&R as the weekly was known locally.

While some readers had observed a new religiosity in the paper,  others became offended by what they saw as a turn to hyper-patriotism.

The beginning was the weekly's first-ever editorial quoting Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" thesis as the pattern Washington should follow.

This was quickly followed to a front page series ad nauseam reprinting the Federalist Papers in total, all 85 of them.

Mr. Ailes and his wife so infuriated local subscribers with the right-wing agenda they imposed on the 145-year old weekly, that the staff the quit en mass and joined an upstart virtual newspaper, or newssite, named Philipstown.info which opened directly across Main Street from the printed weekly which has since moved up the street.

Vote in our poll about newspaper paywalls here.

No web traffic tracking and no advertising

Philipstown.info Editor Michael Mell tells us that they have yet to track their web traffic. It is undoubtedly zooming after all the publicity the newssite has received, especially since the PNC&R wensite is locked down behind a typical Murdoch paywall. Rupert and Roger don't want you free-loaders reading their slanted news for free.

An escalating web traffic would encourage any fledgling staff.

The newssite does not accept advertising either and its Facebook page calls it a non-profit. I'm sure these hard-working idealists think that a plus, but it flies in the face of a century of newspaper research indicating that advertising is a major reason many people read their newspaper, online of otherwise.

Having local advertising is the best possible way for any media to show local support and following.

As an example, the Business Directory on this newssite bring us more new readers than any other element, and we've been doing this for 15 years now.

Part of the newssite's mission statement reads;

One thing we will not impose are political views. No editorials. The only opinion pieces in Philipstown Dot Info will be yours. As to our news policy, we believe it has never been stated better than this: “without fear or favor”.

The battle goes on, and this New Yorker story is a must-read for anyone wishing to continue working and prospering in media today.