FREE WHITEWATER

Boosterism, Newspapers

Saving What’s Left of the Janesville Gazette

by  • 

The nearby Janesville Gazette is ending its Saturday and Sunday print editions. See The Gazette to cease Saturday, Sunday print editions. The Saturday edition should have been canceled years ago; ending a Sunday edition, however, is a sign of a grave illness.  For any paper, even one treading water, the Sunday edition should be a mainstay. I’m from a newspaper-loving family, and grew up in an era when serious readers expected – and received – much from newspapers.  My interest in newspapers is as reader (bloggers are not reporters, and I would never trade this role for theirs).  Below, I’ll highlight the gravity of the Gazette‘s illness, and offer a few suggestions for how the paper can survive (and thrive).

The Illness.

In the story about the cancellation of weekend editions, one reads that “Gazette circulation surveys show at least 70% of the paper’s readers receive The Gazette’s content through online and multimedia channels.”  Online and multimedia channels are much broader than paid digital subscribers – this is likely  an admission that many readers don’t read the Gazette‘s paid online content as much as skim abbreviated offerings on Facebook.

Worse, Mary Jo Villa, the Gazette publisher and APG regional president, insists that by canceling the weekend editions (including Sunday) “[w]e are not eliminating any content,” Villa said. “Most of the Sunday content will be in Friday’s edition, which will become a weekend edition.” If the Sunday content can be moved to Friday, then it was untimely. The Sunday edition by her view wasn’t a vehicle for urgent stories, but for evergreen, read-anytime-it-doesn’t-matter content and advertising inserts.

The Treatment. 

Prepare for only one print edition.  Five remaining print editions are probably four days too many.  Pick one day, and cancel the other four.

End storytelling – it’s an inverted pyramid or nothing.  Even before the pandemic, these were stagnant years for our part of the state. Those conditions demand stories that represent the seriousness of our condition.  Stories that begin with five to ten anecdotal paragraphs about someone who had a bad experience before offering any facts or figures are a waste of readers’ time.  Start with a concise summary of the problem, with relevant metrics to support one’s reporting.  Almost everyone at the Gazette now writes in a storytelling style; if they can’t be retrained they need to be dismissed. Hard times demand hard-hitting stories.

On editorials and opinion, abandon boosterism.  Accentuating the positive despite real conditions (‘I know you’re starving but your lipstick looks smashing!‘) is a mendacious and futile perspective.  Carrying water for corporate welfare schemes, the WEDC, Forward Janesville, and Rock County 5.0 didn’t help this paper – it’s brought the paper to the brink.

Find a solid managing editor.  Get rid of the managing editor who allowed the paper to descend into vapid storytelling and servile boosterism.

Sell the building – if anyone will buy it.  One imagines the Gazette (APG) owns its building.  Sell it, assuming there’s someone in Janesville looking to buy a white elephant.  Buy something small with the proceeds from the sale of the old building.  Reporters, editors, etc., don’t need a big building – a laptop and mobile phone are more than enough for most people.

In the place of boosterism, speak truth to government and institutional power.  This is what a paper should offer, and what the Gazette most certainly hasn’t offered.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.6.20

by  • 

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-four.  Sunrise is 5:40 AM and sunset 8:02 PM, for 14h 21m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Unified School District’s distinctions committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3 PM.

 On this day in 1915, George Orson Welles is born in Kenosha.

Recommended for reading in full —

Dan Mangan reports Trump does not wear coronavirus mask at Honeywell factory that makes masks:

President Donald Trump did not wear a mask as a coronavirus precaution during a visit Tuesday to a Honeywell factory in Phoenix that is producing millions of N95 masks for the federal government.

Other official visitors with Trump, who did put on safety glasses for his tour, also were not wearing masks.

But Honeywell employees working on the production line were wearing masks. And a sign in the factory said that everyone there is required to wear a mask.

At one point during his tour, the Guns N’ Roses cover of the James Bond movie song “Live and Let Die” was being blasted from the factory’s PA system, as workers performed their tasks.

Trump, who has consistently refused to wear a mask while interacting with others despite federal guidance urging all Americans to do so, earlier Tuesday had said that he would put on a mask if it was required at the Honeywell facility.

A White House official said that Honeywell had told the White House that Trump and other visitors did not need to wear masks.

“If it’s a mask environment, I would certainly do that,” Trump had said Tuesday before boarding Air Force One to fly to Arizona.

“I would wear it. If it’s a mask environment, I would have no problem.”

Trump was not wearing a mask when he walked off Air Force One after it landed in Arizona.

And the president did not wear a mask at a roundtable discussion about Covid-19 assistance to Native Americans, which took place before he toured the Honeywell plant, which is producing masks under a $27.4 million Defense Department contract.

Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Tom Hamburger, and Anu Narayanswamy report Well-connected Trump alumni benefit from coronavirus lobbying rush:

As a wave of coronavirus restrictions shuttered more than two dozen of his hotels, Dallas hotelier Monty Bennett publicly pleaded for help.<

“Every American should expect just enough from government that our businesses can survive. Is that too much to ask?” the longtime GOP donor wrote in a March blog post.

Behind the scenes, Bennett’s companies paid $50,000 to hire two well-connected allies of President Trump for help seeking financial relief: Jeff Miller, former vice chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee, and Roy Bailey, a top fundraiser for the president’s reelection campaign, according to lobbying disclosures.

As lobbyists blitz Washington for a piece of the massive federal response to the global pandemic, a group of former Trump administration officials and campaign alumni are in the center of the action, helping private interests tap into coveted financial and regulatory relief programs.

In all, at least 25 former officials who once worked for the Trump administration, campaign or transition team are now registered as lobbyists for clients with novel coronavirus needs, according to The Washington Post’s analysis of federal lobbying records and employment data compiled by ProPublica.

Fireballs! Eta Aquarid meteors captured by NASA all-sky cameras:

more >>

Business, CDA, Coronavirus, Economy, Free Markets, Government Spending, Local Government, Public Health, Retail/Merchants

Consumer Sentiment

by  • 

Much of the ‘reopening’ advocacy rests on the idea that after allowing a business to reopen, that business will see an adequate return of customers. While some businesses may see adequate customer demand, it’s almost certain that others will not.

It has never been true that simply opening a business would assure its survival. If that were so, then businesses would never fail. It cannot be repeated enough, as Jonathan V. Last (JVL) ably does yet again:

But this will not be a “reopening” in any sense of the word. People who think that it will be—that it’s just a matter of flipping the switch so that the country can get back to work—think that the problem is just supply: Consumers are desperate to buy and do stuff and all we have to do is unlock the flow of goods and services and everything gets back to normal.

This is a superficial and ultimately mistaken understanding of what comes next. Because what we’re going to face is a demand problem: People are going to change many of their behaviors and live their lives the way they did pre-pandemic.

Here’s an example from over the weekend:

The first of 40 U.S. Bad Axe Throwing venues to reopen since widespread shelter-in-place orders were issued across the country was in Atlanta on Friday. Bad Axe CEO Mario Zelaya expected business to be bad, maybe 10% of the hundreds of customers he would expect to see throw axes and drink beer on a typical weekend. “That was the worst-case scenario, especially with all the marketing we did,” Zelaya said. “The reopening weekend was a disaster. We had two customers all weekend.”
You’re going to see a lot of this sort of thing.

What scares me—and should scare you—is that you don’t need a collapse of consumer demand to zero in order to create a catastrophe. There are lots and lots of businesses where even a 20 percent decline will mean unsustainability. 

(Emphasis added.)

JVL is describing the myopia of the reopening crowd toward the retail environment, but shallow thinking like this has reigned long before his pandemic. Much of the economic policy in places like Whitewater, Wisconsin has rested on the idea that if you supply something, you’ll generate demand. Indeed, Whitewater’s simplistic approach has been to take a small town with significant public capital expenditures from a state university and pile on additional public capital subsidies in the theory that if you build it, they will come. That approach has been a failure before the pandemic (low income levels and increasing poverty); it will prove a failure now.

Consumers – of goods, services, housing, and employment – often choose based on more than mere availability.

Businesses will not get the reopening they need – let alone the one that they want – until there is a vaccine (or a speedy, effective treatment) for COVID-19.  In the meantime, heroic measures at mitigation (e.g., social distancing, wearing of masks, intensive medical care) are essential.

Those not focused on our public health problem will not be able to solve our economic problem.

See also The Reopening Debate Will Turn on Consumer Demand and The Finance 202: American consumers aren’t ready to shop again, even as states reopen.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.5.20

by  • 

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see clouds, scattered showers, and a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:01 PM, for 14h 19m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 It’s Cinco de Mayo: Mexican troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza halt a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla.

Recommended for reading in full —

William Booth, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Carol Morello report The world came together for a virtual vaccine summit. The U.S. was conspicuously absent:

LONDON — World leaders came together in a virtual summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate but highlighted from Washington what one official called its “whole-of-America” efforts in the United States and its generosity to global health efforts.

The online conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus, which has killed more than 250,000 people worldwide.
….

A senior Trump administration official said Monday the United States “welcomes” the efforts of the conference participants. He did not explain why the United States did not join them.

 Danielle Moran reports Red States Will Need Coronavirus Bailouts Too:

On April 27, President Trump took to Twitter to escalate the spat over the next coronavirus stimulus, questioning whether the federal government should rescue “poorly run” states led by Democrats. His tweet echoed the comments of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who suggested during a radio interview that states with large pension obligations under union contracts could pursue bankruptcy instead of federal aid. The Kentucky Republican’s office gave his comments a twist in a press release with a section titled “On Stopping Blue State Bailouts.”

It’s true that many of the states that are ground zero for the Covid-19 pandemic—New York and New Jersey, as well as California and Illinois—are solidly Democratic. But the fiscal challenges that states now face aren’t limited to the blue ones and go well beyond pension obligations. States across the country are reeling from a brutal double whammy of lost revenue: With 30 million people thrown out of work in the past several weeks, income tax collections are tanking, and sales taxes have evaporated after stores and restaurants shuttered. Most states receive a majority of their revenue from those two sources.

Moody’s Analytics projects a fiscal shock to states of $158 billion to $203 billion through the end of the fiscal year ending in June 2021, resulting in almost half of states having to fill a budget gap of at least 10%. (Their ability to weather the impact will depend in part on the amount in their reserves.) Under Moody’s most severe scenario, Louisiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia—all red states—are projected to lose more than 39% of their revenue. Another Republican stronghold, Alaska, is poised to see the largest loss, potentially as much as 79.6% of its general fund. That’s because the state gets much of its revenue from the oil and gas industry, and prices have crashed.

I.C.U. Doctor Brings Music, and Hope, to Coronavirus Patients:

more >>

Law, Litigation, Newspapers

Demand Letters

by  • 

A demand letter is an attorney’s formal request on behalf of a client for either money or action from a third party. Demand letters can be sent before or after a lawsuit is filed. Although these letters typically demand an amount of money, they can also ask for actions including apologies or retractions for a third-party’s statements. (The opposite of a demand letter is an offer letter, by which a third party’s attorney proposes the terms of a settlement.)

Last week, upset with columns in the New York Times, Sean Hannity’s lawyer sent a demand letter to that paper claiming the paper had defamed Hannity and demanding a retraction of the allegedly defamatory statements.  (They alleged the Times distorted Hannity’s remarks when it published columns claiming he downplayed the coronavirus.)

The Times’s lawyer rejected Hannity’s demands, replying tersely that “[i]n response to your request for an apology and retraction, our answer is ‘no.’”

The key insight: simply sending a demand letter does nothing to determine whether, as a matter of law and fact, a client has been defamed, let alone whether there’s a practical, good-faith lawsuit that could be filed on that client’s behalf. On the contrary, demand letters may over-state a possible claim against a third-party, either to intimidate the third-party into a settlement or simply to satisfy a client’s desire to assert himself (as may have been the motivation in Hannity’s case).

Demand letters do not have to meet even the rudimentary legal threshold of a complaint in either state or federal court.

Local reporting has, over the last year, relied on pre-litigation demand letters or press releases when reporting controversies in the area (see 1, 2). That’s not wrong, but it can be insubstantial: presenting one side’s claims and contentions as though a reflection of the state of the law is dubious and misleads one’s readers.

This approach may lead to a few clickbait headlines, but only at the cost of a sound understanding.  Callow reporters and histrionic editors may think they have something big, really big, but viewing a controversy mostly though a demand letter is a shallow, and so sometimes misleading, approach.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.4.20

by  • 

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8:00 PM, for 14h 17m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Unified School District’s distinction committee meets via Zoom at 9:30 AM and district’s school board via Zoom at 6 PM.

 On this day in 1942, the Battle of the Coral Sea begins.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Peter Baker reports Trump Foresees Virus Death Toll as High as 100,000 in the United States:

President Trump predicted on Sunday night that the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the country may reach as high as 100,000 in the United States, far worse than he had forecast just weeks ago, even as he pressed states to reopen the shuttered economy.

Mr. Trump, who last month forecast that fatalities from the outbreak could be kept “substantially below the 100,000” mark and probably around 60,000, acknowledged that the virus has proved more devastating than expected. But nonetheless, he said that parks, beaches and some businesses should begin reopening now and that schools should resume classes in person by this fall.

(A respected model from MIT now projects that America will suffer – and then continue to exceed – 100,000 deaths as soon as May 22nd. )

William H. Frey writes COVID-19’s recent spread shifts to suburban, whiter, and more Republican-leaning areas:

There is a stereotypical view of the places in America that COVID-19 has affected most: they are broadly urban, comprised predominantly of racial minorities, and strongly vote Democratic. This underlines the public’s perception of what kinds of populations reside in areas highly exposed to the coronavirus, as well as some of the recent political arguments over social distancing measures and the states easing their restrictions.

While that perception of high-prevalence areas was accurate during the earlier stages of the pandemic, COVID-19’s recent spread has changed the picture. During the first three weeks of April, new counties showing a high prevalence of COVID-19 cases are more suburban, whiter, and voted more strongly for Donald Trump than counties the virus hit first. These findings result from a new analysis of counties with high COVID-19 prevalence rates (more than 100 confirmed cases per 100,000 population) based on data available from The New York Times and the U.S. Census Bureau.

….

The shift was most marked with respect to urban residence status. On March 29, four-fifths of high-prevalence county populations resided in the urban cores of large metropolitan areas. This fell sharply in the subsequent weeks, as more shares of residents in new high-prevalence counties lived in suburbs and smaller areas. Among residents of counties which entered high-prevalence status between April 6 and April 12, for example, only 31% lived in urban core counties, while 45% lived in suburbs and 24% lived in small and nonmetropolitan areas.

Counties entering high-prevalence status during the April 13 to April 19 period showed a rise in shares of urban core residents, due largely to the inclusion of the three populous California counties. But overall, there has generally been an increased spread to areas outside of urban cores.

Celebrating May the 4th in a Galaxy Far, Far Away:

more >>

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.3.20

by  • 

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 5:44 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 14h 14m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Shelley v. Kraemer that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities are legally unenforceable. (Three justices—Robert H. Jackson, Stanley Reed and Wiley B. Rutledge—recused themselves from the case because they owned property subject to restrictive covenants.)

Recommended for reading in full —

Tom Hamburger and Juliet Eilperin report Maryland cancels $12.5 million PPE contract with firm started by GOP operatives:

The state of Maryland on Saturday terminated a $12.5 million contract for personal protective equipment with a firm started this spring by two well-connected Republican operatives.

State officials said the company, Blue Flame Medical, failed to deliver masks and ventilators as promised and that the matter has been referred to Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) for review.

Blue Flame received a down payment of nearly $6.3 million from Maryland in early April — after promising to provide within weeks desperately needed PPE for front-line medical personnel dealing with the novel coronavirus.

….

Blue Flame was started in late March by Michael Gula, a Republican fundraising and lobbying consultant in Washington, and John Thomas, a California political consultant.

Before moving in to the medical supply business, Gula was known in GOP circles for his political fundraising prowess. His firm has raised campaign funds for Sens. Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.), Steve Daines (Mont.), Ron Johnson (Wis.) and dozens of other influential Republicans. He startled some longtime clients in March when he announced he was quitting the fundraising world during an election year to start the medical supply business with Thomas.

Derek Willis reports A Conservative Legal Group Significantly Miscalculated Data in a Report on Mail-In Voting:

In an April report that warns of the risks of fraud in mail-in voting, a conservative legal group significantly inflated a key statistic, a ProPublica analysis found. The Public Interest Legal Foundation reported that more than 1 million ballots sent out to voters in 2018 were returned as undeliverable. Taken at face value, that would represent a 91% increase over the number of undeliverable mail ballots in 2016, a sign that a vote-by-mail system would be a “catastrophe” for elections, the group argued.

However, after ProPublica provided evidence to PILF that it had in fact doubled the official government numbers, the organization corrected its figure. The number of undeliverable mail ballots dropped slightly from 2016 to 2018.

The PILF report said that one in five mail ballots issued between 2012 and 2018, a total of 28.3 million, were not returned by voters and were “missing,” which, according to the organization, creates an opportunity for fraud. In a May 1 tweet that included a link to coverage of the report, President Donald Trump wrote: “Don’t allow RIGGED ELECTIONS.”

This Voice Actor Can Mimic Any Animal:

more >>