Peoria Pundit

Yeah, that really was me in Chicago Magazine saying this about Aaron Schock:

“He takes all the air out of the room, politically, here in Peoria,” says Bill Dennis, who writes the blog Peoria Pundit. “Either you think he’s the greatest thing ever, or you’re deeply suspicious of him. I’m suspicious of him because he’s so eager to get ahead in office.”

I have several things I need to say.

First, would it KILL print publication that put their articles on the Web to insert a clickable link to the blogs they mention in their article. I mean, show a brother some love, wouldya?

Second, I said a LOT of things about Aaron Schock. I talked to this reporter two months ago. We spoke for about an hour, I think.  And THIS was the quote they pulled out. Not surprising, ’cause it’s a good quote

I’m a libertarian. I suspicious about ALL politicians.

Via The Monitor:

KGBT-TV, the Valley’s CBS affiliate, quietly laid off 10 staffers Tuesday and finalized plans to cut the noon newscast starting Monday. It was the third round of cuts for the station which in 2008 saw then-reporter Janine Reyes and longtime weatherman and Valley fixture Larry James join the swelling ranks of the unemployed.

“‘It’s part of what is going on around the country, and we’re having to cut you just like them,’” [weatherman Romeo] Cantu recalled being told when he was let go minutes after finishing a 9 a.m. news segment. “The only thing I really regret is I didn’t get the opportunity to say goodbye to the Valley.”

Cantu was told moments after he wrapped up morning news, denying him the opportunity to say goodbye to viewers. Stations go to make it seem like their personnel are part of viewers’ families. That’s a pretty crappy to treat family.

KGBT is owned by Barrington Broadcasting, owner of Creve Coeur-based WHOI.

At approximately 1 p.m. yesterday, a man named Janis Krums made the following post to his Twitter account:

http://twitpic.com/135xa – There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy. about 23 hours ago from TwitPic.

But, but, but … he’s not a reporter. He’s not in the pay of a company that owns a printing press or a broadcast license. There’s no evidence he ever took a college course in journalism. He’s just a guy with a cell phone.

What gives him the right to perform an act of journalism? Doesn’t he know he needs a thousand-dollar Nikon to snap a pic like that?

Welcome to the new media.

ALSO: Three days before becoming a Twitter star, he post an article to his blog about how Twitter is making people better communicators.

Peoria’s only locally owned newspaper has updated its Website.

Of particular interest to PP readers is reporter Sara Browning’s article on upcoming city council and school board elections. Editor/Publisher Debbie Adlof also has an interesting roundup of news tidbits.

Everyone knows that sometime in the future, there will be no newspapers. It’s silly to expect anything else. Delivering news electronically over the Internet is just so, so, so much more efficient and inexpensive. It’s so much quicker. It’s so much more flexible. It’s going to happen.

But as little as a year ago, only a small percentage of people in the news business actually thought the change was imminent.  It was sorta like knowing that someday, we’ll all be using flying cars and going on vacation to the the Moon.

In case there are any doubters now, this ought to confirm for disbelievers that we are seeing the beginning of the death of the printing-press business model of news delivery.

The Seattle P-I is being put up for sale, and if after 60 days it has not sold, it will either be turned into a Web-only publication with a greatly reduced staff or discontinued entirely.

“One thing is clear: at the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print,” said Steven Swartz, president of the Hearst Corp.’s newspaper division.

Emphasis mine.

This isn’t some weekly, community newspaper. This is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning paper in a major city. It follows a decision by the Christian Science Monitor to switch to online and print only once a week.

Last year, I offered some tough-love advice for newspapers. People laughed and scoffed. But it’s all happening, sooner than even I thought.

Change is scary.

GateHouse media is an easy target for criticism these days. God knows I’ve criticized them for their cheapskate approach to news. Their stock price is in the crapper. They’re suing the New York Times over a linking policy, which has made them the target of allegedly forward thinking New Media advocates.

But while the elite snicker, GateHouse has quietly been at the forefront of the inevitable next step in the mainstream media: Evolving into an online only model of providing news. There are dozens if not hundreds of Websites out there that purport to be news sources. But there are relatively few online only organizations actually have a staff of reporters, editors and photographers who seek to do what daily newspapers do: Provide meat-and-potatoes journalism for a community. GateHouse started The Batavian several months ago to do just that. This online news organization is competing against a traditional newspaper without a Web presense.

And now GateHouse had taken the next step: Moving from print to online. The Kansas City Kansan, owned by the GateHouse, will end its 87-year history as a print newspaper and go entirely digital on January 10:

Without the cumbersome tasks of page design and layout, and other duties associated with print, the online staff will be free to find more and varied stories to post online. Without press deadlines to contend with, the staff will be able to keep up a continual flow of news every day, publishing breaking news and information as it comes in.

“The approach we’re taking with the new Kansan site is a proven method for making news more interesting and engaging online,” said Howard Owens, director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media, the parent company of the Kansan. “We’ve found that readers really enjoy this format and will visit the site more frequently because of it.”

The Kansan staff is being reduced from eight people to four as a cost savings measure during the transition.

Owens will work closely with the staff over the coming months to help with the transition to an online-only approach to news. He said the new site should quickly see its audience double within months of the switch.

Naturally, commenters are complaining about losing the Kansan. Some people will be unable to grasp the idea of a newspaper that doesn’t double as birdcage liner. There are fewer and fewer of these people every day, and more and more people who expect to get their news online. More importantly, there are more and more business willing to pay to advertise online.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The value of a newsppaer isn’t the paper it’s printed on, it’s the news that is printed on the paper. The computer is making newsprint and ink increasingly irrelevant to the news business, much like the automobile made horse and buggy irrlevant in the transportation business. Online is just incredibly less costly that print. It delivers news almost immediately after it is gathered. The news you read with your morning coffee was written 12 hours earlier.

Folks, people who need to know what is going on in their communities will turn to the online news organizations to get their local news. People who say today they love the feel of a fresh newspaper and the smell of fresh ink will go out and buy a laptop. You can get one for less than the cost of the smallest flat-screen television. And in the end, the biggest critics will be the biggest fans because it will be more complete and easier to use.

Eventually, there will not be any newspapers. They will either die or evolve into online only. And to the consternation of many, it is a GateHouse Media publication that is among the first to raise from the primordial ooze onto dry land.

Meanwhile, the elite New York Times contents itself with establishing online news portals built entirely other companies’ headlines.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis — one of the critics of GateHouse’s suit against the NYT — provides the snark:

I would say this is a forward-thinking act of innovation, except it comes from link-hating Gatehouse, whose stock is stuck at $0.04 and so it could be an act of desperation; I don’t know which. This is a paper that earlier sold its building, shifted its printing, and cut back from daily to twice-weekly in print.

Would Jarvis prefer that the Kansan go out of business entirely by trying to continue to pay for printing on dead trees? Apparently so. And by moving online, the Kansan has gone from twice weekly to 24/7, which is a step UP from daily.

I’m beginning to wonder if Jarvis has the intellectual capacity to grasp that what the NYT is doing isn’t the same as ordinary deep linking, but is essentially using a competitor’s intellectual property to take away their advertisers. It’s not fair comment, which is what allows people like Jarvis and myself to link to and comment on other people’s work. 

Earlier this week, I received an anonymous tip that Pekin Times editor Rick Wade has left this paper. I published it as a blind item. Commenters claiming inside information verified it was Wade who lost his job, although some of the details of the circumstances are disputed. And there has been no denial from either the Pekin Times or their corporate parent, GateHouse Media.

But here is the sad part, from a journalistic perspective. Not one word of the situation has appeared in the Pekin Times. At least, not the online version. I’m not driving to Pekin to examine the dead-tree version, nor should I have to.

The era in which a newspaper could chose to hide it’s dirty laundry without expecting the news to get our anyway is long past. When a newspaper fires it’s top editor, the public needs to be informed of the act.

Do the people who call the shots at GateHouse think Pekinites do not have the Internet? Do they think the witnesses to the firing have not passed along the details to friends and family?

I don’t want to pile onto the Pekin Times during what is probably an uncertain time, but from a position of reader advocacy, I’ve gotta wonder how committed the newspaper is to accuracy and fairness.

UPDATED: Commenter Jared Olar says the Pekin Times is now reporting on the incident:

There’s something about Rick Wade’s firing in the Daily Times now. It’s about a verbal and physical altercation between Rick Wade and Mike Vetroczky, the paper’s business manager, after Rick had been told he was being fired. It doesn’t give any information about why Rick was fired, though, and doesn’t even mention that Rick had been the paper’s editor and Mike is the business manager.

Originally published on December 5, 2008 at 12:36 am

What heartless neo-con blogger said this:

Security snipers, hidden, unknown, and constantly alert, are one solution to terrorist invasion of a hotel. As soon as bullets start to spray, the sniper takes him down with one shot to the head or heart.

Aside from what the grievances of the terrorists might be, for powerful nuclear nations to priss around like sissyboys in the face of violent extremists, it just seems stupid.

Lives were needlessly lost in Mumbai.

Done guessing? It’s this guy.

I don’t have a copy of tomorrow’s newspaper in front of me, of course. But glancing at the front page of PJStar.com, I notice links to four articles (three local) related to the “Black Friday” shopping mania.

I’m old enough to recall when the media started covering this in a big way. Before that, everyone was just aware that the day after Thanksgiving was a good day to avoid shopping if you wanted to avoid crowds, but a good one if you wanted a crack at bargains.

We didn;t need front page articles to inform us of this, nor do validate our shared experiences.

But THE MEDIA has now decided it’s a cultural event. The news hook is how it’s supposed to be a bellwether (a word used almost exclusively by the media) for how much shopping people are going to do in a year. With politicians telling us to panic about the state of the economy, we have the media absolutely obsessing about Black Friday this year.

But for the most part, “Black Friday” has become one of those stories that editors assign almost out of rote. It’s a a tale told by idiots, bull of storm and fury, but signifying nothing but a journalistic cliche.

I say ban Black Friday from the front page … unless someone gets killed or something.

My Internet outage delayed posting this month’s issue of the Community Word, but I finally got everything posted.

I think it’s a particularly newsy issue, with lots of election and politics. Sara Browning profiles the 18th District Congressional candidates. Marie Blood reports on planning for a shelter for homeless veterans. Amanda Knowles writes about the national problem of domestic violence.

Roger Monroe offers his conservative Republican perspective on the Peoria County State’s Attorney race and other politics. Bill Knight looks at how well candidates for Congress level with voters about the issues. My column looks at the the referendum and speculates a bit on local races.

All the regular columnists are there too.