The USA Today Network of Gannett papers in Wisconsin (including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) asks How open is your government? Tell us: They’re entrusted with important responsibilities to keep people safe, educate kids, maintain roads and enforce rules fairly. Taxpayers fund their salaries. But just how public are public officials? That’s what we want to know. As…
Newspapers
Newspapers, Press
Yes, It Is
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Freedom of Speech, Liberty, Newspapers, Politics, Press
‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Newspapers
Tales from Mid-Sized Newspapers
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Over at Digiday, Lucia Moses relates a young reporter’s experiences at a mid-sized Gannett newspaper in ‘I’m doing three beats right now’: Confessions of a millennial newspaper reporter. (Moses is describing someone else’s work life, not her own.) It’s not an encouraging tale: Give a specific. We have, like, one copy editor looking at more than…
Newspapers, Trump
Tumulty Finds Sycophancy’s Hard to Shake
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Trump Press Sec. Spicer gave a dishonest statement about crowd size on Saturday (“White House press secretary attacks media for accurately reporting inauguration crowds“), and spent a bit over an hour in a dishonest and maudlin press conference on Monday (“This time Sean Spicer smiles, spins, pledges not to lie“). It was a first conventional…
America, Local Government, Newspapers, Press, Trump
Trump Will Force Choices the Local Press is Too Weak to Make
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
A sound critique of the national print press says that it has a limited time left. See, concerning the work of Clay Shirky, A Prediction of Print’s ‘Fast, Slow, Fast’ Decline. Market forces will also take their toll on the local print press, and even now local papers are useful only for The Last Inside Accounts (rather than…
Newspapers
What About the Local Press?
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
A reader wrote to ask what I thought of the outlook for the local press in 2017. I’d say that there will be no big changes in the year ahead: slowly declining last year, slowly declining this year. I’m supportive of media analyst Clay Shirky’s perspective. Although he writes about the national print press, his assessment of…
Local Government, Newspapers, Politics, Press
Fake News Was a Local Problem Before It Was a National One
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
There’s post-election consternation about the amount of bogus news sites on social media. This concern pairs with the worry that fact-checking from major news organizations doesn’t work well when candidates simply lie and refuse either correction or apology. This may be a recent national development – at least on this scale – but local news for…
City, Culture, Local Government, Newspapers, School District, University
Whitewater’s Mentoring Gap
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Looking back ten years (or nine in the case of UW-Whitewater), one finds at the helm of Whitewater’s public institutions leaders who so very much embodied Old Whitewater: Steinhaus, Brunner, Coan, Telfer (beginning in ’07). They were the perfect representatives of Old Whitewater, where Old Whitewater is an attitude, not an age: narrow, grandiose, mediocre, producing…
Blogging, City, Culture, New Media, Newspapers, Press, School District, University
Revisiting Kozloff’s ‘Dark, Futile Dream’
by JOHN ADAMS • • 2 Comments
About a year ago, I wrote a post on an off-campus meeting at which local notables and a search consultant (Jessica Kozloff) discussed a replacement for Richard Telfer. A story on that meeting, published in the Daily Union, is one of the best accounts of insiders’ thinking. See, from that newspaper, UW-Whitewater chancellor session held, http://www.dailyunion.com/news/article_f042575e-a63a-11e4-bcd8-939679ffcc09.html.…
Newspapers, Open Government, Public Records
The Newspaper-Caused Public Records Problem
by JOHN ADAMS • • 1 Comment
Not far from Whitewater, Janesville’s local newspaper finds itself in an access-to-information conflict with the Janesville School District. There’s no surprise in any of this. (Quick note: I’m using that paper as an example because it’s close-at-hand. One could find other examples easily enough.) For years that paper has ridiculed citizens’ petition efforts, toadied to business…
New Media, Newspapers
Henry Blodget on Where Digital’s Headed
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
At the latest Ignition conference, Henry Blodget of Business Insider gave his most recent assessment of where digital media are headed. It’s a sound appraisal. It’s worth noting that while he sees media’s direction as predominantly digital (true enough), he leaves unstated (because it must seem so obvious to him) that successful digital media are…
Conservation, Newspapers
Wasted Paper
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Week after week, people who don’t ask for rolled-up newspapers find those dead-tree publications on their porches. Wasted paper, each week, of each month, of each season, of each year. The distribution comes close to lawful littering. Publishers should be required to obtain consent before dumping these papers on homeowners’ lawns. That prior consent would be burdensome for publishers,…
CDA, Development, Economy, Gluttony, Government Spending, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Local Government, Newspapers, Poverty, Press
Theranos as a Cautionary Tale
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Theranos is a much-hyped biomedical start-up that’s fallen in valuation and reputation (not always the same thing) following published doubts (e.g., @ Wall Street Journal, Fortune) about its supposedly revolutionary technology. Here’s the meaning of this story for Whitewater: Theranos had the participation (and attention) of some of the most gifted men and women in America,…