Category: Media

Yesterday The Gazette, one of a dwindling number of locally owned news operations around the country, announced a planned acquisition by an out-of-state conglomerate.

The Gazette‘s announcement:

Minnesota-based company is entering into an agreement to purchase The Gazette and 11 community newspapers, the companies announced jointly Tuesday morning.

The agreement between Tom Pientok, president & CEO of Folience Inc., and Mark Adams, president and CEO of Adams MultiMedia (AMM), is expected to be finalized by Dec. 1, at which time most employees of The Gazette will join Adams MultiMedia. Employees of The Gazette were told of the transaction Tuesday morning.

That more change was coming to a local newspaper is not a surprise. As Paul Brennan notes in the The Little Village, there have been signs of needing to change coming:

In recent years, the Gazette has experienced the same financial difficulties many newspapers have. In 2021, the company sold off its printing plant, laying off 62 employees in the process. Printing of the paper was outsourced to Gannett Publishing Services in Des Moines.

In January, the Gazette announced it was cutting back its print edition to three days a week, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday.

It’s easy to suggest this is another terrible consolidation of local media, and the values of the organizations ownership deeply matter, but I’m willing to wait and see how this plays out.

I said “news operation” above intentionally. Folience, Inc., the local, employee-owned company that owns The Gazette owns a newspaper and lays out daily editions, but only prints the newspaper three times a week. And, I’m told, editors have resisted pursuing digital products like email newsletters. All of this is bizarre to me.

So they’re a news operation, and the sooner they realize that, the better. To survive, the digital product has to come first, and if Adams MultiMedia can help pull the local operation around to that, it only helps.

I should note that I do not currently pay for The Gazette after being a proud subscriber for year for, really, one simple reason: the website could not keep me logged in, so I finally got fed up with having to log in ever time I followed a link instead of just getting to read the story. I was delighted when I discovered This One Weird Browser Trick that let me just…read the news. Give me convenience, and I’ll pay for it.

A hed in The Des Moines Register:

Urbandale school board refuses to remove gender identity protection despite new Iowa law

This is sloppy and dangerous. 

There is no law requiring Iowa’s cities, counties or school districts to remove gender identity protections in the same way the State of Iowa did when we became the first state in the nation to remove civil rights protections from a previously protected class. Doing so is pre-compliance. 

It’s dangerous because plenty of entities were confused and removed protections anyway before restoring them, including the Iowa City Community School District, the City of Dubuque and the Dubuque School District, and this framing only reinforces this misconception.

Oops, sorry. The Gazette’s headline is “UI police detective tells Iowa City man to ‘leave my family alone’ after harassment.”

Headlines frame stories — in the age of social media, are all many people read — and, unlike the Daily Iowan’s piece, this frame only tells the story of the prosecution and the police.

The ledes of the two pieces tell two very different stories. Compare the two. Here’s Trish Mehaffy’s from The Gazette:

A University of Iowa police detective said an Iowa City man created a social media profile of him using personal information, including his spouse’s name, and used “hateful discriminating language” that he would never use.

The first three paragraphs are all from the detective’s “victim impact statement.”

Meanwhile, here’s Emma Jane’s lede in The Daily Iowan:

Daniel Kauble was sentenced Thursday to two years of probation and six months of suspension — meaning he will serve jail time if he violates probation — for operating a parody account on X, formerly known as Twitter, impersonating University of Iowa Police Department detective Ian Mallory. 

Simply regurgitating police reports, court filings and victim impact statements is stenography, not journalism. I don’t care how you feel about this series of events, acknowledging Kauble’s Twitter account was a parody is key to understanding what’s happening here, and “satire” or “parody” do not appear in The Gazette story.

(The Press-Citizen, if it ever covers this, will do it at least a week late with a clickbait headline such as “Who Harassed a UIPD Detective?” but it’s not worth criticizing.)

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Update: The Press-Citizen got a story up on March 20 and included the adjective “parody”

The Des Moines Register:

Everyone has an opinion on who makes the best pizza, and to that end, the Washington Post took a different approach to determine the tops nationwide. The editors there started with the 7.5 million Yelp reviews of 85,000 pizza establishments nationwide, developed a formula to figure out the best — taking into consideration the rating, number of reviews, and how often reviews mentioned that particular pizza style, the Post said — and then presented it to the public.

The Des Moines Register, winner 17 Pulitzer Prizes, was once a proud newspaper. Now they run stories rewriting data journalism about pizza from the Washington Post.

National Public Radio has left Twitter, like list of people, after being “state-affiliated” like Chinese and Russian propagandists. The organization won’t return even if the label is changed, says NPR CEO John Lansing, who told in-house media reporter David Folkenflik:

“At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter. I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”

Better late than never.

Zachary Oren Smith, formerly of the Iowa City Press-Citizen, reporting for Iowa Public Radio:

The nation’s largest chain of newspapers is shrinking much of its physical footprint in Iowa. IPR News confirmed Gannett Media will not renew its office leases for the Ames Tribune and the Iowa City Press-Citizen. Leases expire in April.

The official word is this is part of a “flexible workplace model,” and no jobs are being cut (this time). Of course, there’s only a couple of reporters left, and most of the other functions (layout, editing, production) have been centralized out of town.

Legacy media hasn’t been robust for years, but the Iowa City and Cedar Rapids area is left with The Gazette, KCRG, Iowa Public Radio and Little Village as critical sources of original reporting.