Phoenix News Blog

​The East Valley Tribune may have a new lease on life, just two weeks after the failing publication announced it would be closing its doors on December 31.

At the time of the closure, Trib CFO Mark McEachen told employees that the closing might be "a good marketing tool" to lure potential buyers, and he may have been right.

www.seattleweekly.com

​A former journalist at the now-Web-only Tucson Citizen is claiming that Gannett, the paper's parent company, didn't live up to its end of the bargain after the 138-year-old paper went bust back in May.

Alice Flick, the longtime TC scribe, who wrote under the byline A.J. Flick, claims Gannett screwed her out of a severance package the company offered her to stay on as a writer as the paper went down in flames.

www.ahwatukee.com

​The Ahwatukee Foothills News is asking its readers to spare what they can to help keep the tiny paper afloat in the Internet age.

One problem -- its parent company, Freedom Communications, just pulled the plug on one of its other Valley newspapers after declaring bankruptcy but still had the gaul to hand out hefty bonuses to its top execs.

www.tribunecarfinder.com

​Big bonuses for execs of failing companies seems to be the common theme in business culture these days, and the East Valley Tribune and its parent company, Freedom Communications, apparently are no exception.

The Trib will cease to be after December 31, putting an end to a newspaper that thrived for more than a century. What you may not know is that as the paper was laying off employees and moving from being a daily to a three-day-a-week paper, Freedom Communications execs got about $2.6 million in bonuses.

Our friends at Heat City did the leg work on this one and got access to court documents filed in Freedom's bankruptcy case. If you're one of the roughly 140 people laid off by the Trib, or someone who is just pissed to see another newspaper fail, get ready to blow a gasket.

www.imdb.com

​Last month, about 10,000 copies of the University of Arizona's student newspaper were stolen from various newsstands across the university. They were found the next day, dumped in various locations on the outskirts of the campus.

You may be wondering "why the hell would anyone steal 10,000 free student newspapers?" If you ask the editorial staff at the Daily Wildcat, it was to keep people from reading about the latest fraternity date-rape story.

Tim McDonnell, News Editor for the Wildcat, claims that members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at U of A sent at least two "pledges" to steal as many papers as possible to keep people from reading an article in the paper's "Police Beat."

The article, according to McDonnell, was about a girl who filed a police report saying she had been drugged at a Phi Kappa Psi party and thought she may have been raped while she was blacked out.

 

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The impending death of the East Valley Tribune means fewer news articles in the future about things that go on in the Phoenix metro area.

But it's even worse than that: The planned shuttering of the Trib's Web portal in two months, coinciding with the closure of the physical property, means the past will become more vague, too.

All those informative articles that hundreds of Trib employees have produced over the last several years will become inaccessible to most Internet users -- unless the Trib's dysfunctional-parent company, Freedom Communications, takes action to save them.

In others words, if you go to Google in 2010 and type in "mesa mayor scott smith," the Trib's articles about Smith won't pop up.

At least, that's what we're assuming at this point.

We left messages about this issue with Julie Moreno, publisher of the Trib, and Burl Osborne, interim CEO of Freedom Communications, but they haven't called back yet.

The problem is that once the Trib servers go dark, the archive stories buried in those servers will likely become unhooked from public access. That's what has happened at some other U.S. newspapers that have shut down.

www.citizensrequired.com

​Just when we were thinking, "Gee, we haven't seen Sheriff Joe shamelessly promoting himself in about 48 hours," we caught this little nugget: Arpaio will be fielding questions on Good Morning Arizona tomorrow.

​Ladies and gentlemen, the world will go on. Meghan McCain has promised to keep her Twitter account up and tweeting. 

www.tinypic.com

​You're in luck, ladies! One of America's hottest bachelors is living right here among us.

No, shockingly, it's not Mayor Phil.

www.tempe12.com

The soon to be "Miss Howard T.V. November," Paulina Sherwood.

​The self-proclaimed "King of all Media" will be honoring one of our own this month for her groundbreaking cancer research and selfless humanitarian work.

Just kidding, it's Stern. She's not a cancer researcher, she's going on the show to be honored for being hot.

www.timpowers.com

92.3 (KTAR) morning man Darrell Ankarlo

When you're a radio talk-show host, it's fairly important that you're capable of formulating rational thoughts and not speaking like Maricopa Community College's Colleen Clark as she's drunkenly reciting her ABCs.

Not to say Darrell Ankarlo's thoughts were ever all that rational, but someone ought to share this concept with the 92.3 FM (KTAR) morning man.

Nearly a week after returning to the airwaves after a five-month absence, when he spent time recovering from a car wreck, the sheriff of morality and Christian values is still slurring and stumbling over his words.

Oh, not to mention promoting violence against people for no apparent reason.

The wreck left Ankarlo with a traumatic brain injury, and if you heard last week's over-the-top tribute from KTAR patriarch Pat McMahon, Ankarlo seemed ready for the broadcast mic.

But if you listened to his show this morning, or are someone who eats cheeseburgers, you would probably beg to differ that he should be back on the air.

www.unconfirmedsources.com

Doesn't McCain look like he'll do just about anything to get the political kryptonite standing next to him to release his hand?

​This month's GQ is the forum for the newest embarrassing tell-all about the Bush White House, with ex-presidential speechwriter Matt Latimer telling readers what the ex-prez really thought about the John McCain campaign and a pathetic showing at a Phoenix campaign stop.

Latimer describes telling W about a McCain campaign event right here in Phoenix that only drew about 500 people.

To be honest, we think that was probably a lot for the maverick for a routine stump event around here, but the President seemed shocked over the low turnout.

Here's an excerpt:

KTAR Morning Man Darrell Ankarlo

​The ultra-"moral" morning man for 92.3 FM (KTAR), and often-deserved punching bag of this paper, Darrell Ankarlo, returned to the airwaves with a vengeance today, after a five-month absence resulting from a car accident that nearly ended his career.

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In the news business, we like to check our facts, spell names correctly -- you know, just the basics to try to keep our integrity in tact.

Well, Melissa Gonzalo, a reporter for Channel 12 news (KPNX-TV), must have missed that class at journalism school, or wherever she received her talking-head training courses.

Gonzalo did a story yesterday about the H1N1 flu virus, and how it is affecting students at Arizona universities. Check it out here.

Like any diligent reporter, Gonzalo interviewed students, medical directors, and even a professor -- well, kinda.

In the last portion of the video, aired yesterday, Gonzalo interviewed a man identified as "Professor Keivon Hobenherdar," to get the faculty perspective on the dramatic pig-flu "epidemic."

The "professor" told Gonzalo that profs are urging students to do the basics; use hand-sanitizer, don't share drinks...

What does Hobenherdar teach? Absolutely nothing.

​If video killed the radio star, the Internet has absolutely demolished the newspaper "star," and the publisher of the East Valley Tribune is the latest to feel the wrath of the Web.

Freedom Communications, the publisher of the Tribune, and countless other newspapers including the Orange County Register, filed bankruptcy in a California court today.

Freedom is currently about $1 billion in debt, $770 million of which is owed to a collection of banks headed by J.P. Morgan.

"Reaching this agreement with our lenders provides us with an orderly process to realign our balance sheet with the realities of today's media environment," says Freedom CEO Burl Osborne, who took the reigns of the declining company about two months ago.

The publisher has been struggling to repay its debt for more than a year, despite ordering a 5 percent pay cut for all 8,200 of its employees, and mandatory furloughs.

Freedom officials say that despite filing for bankruptcy, the publisher still has enough cash to keep the lights on, but the question is for how long.

An Arizona blogger is having a "Joe the Plumber" moment.

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He's not quite Joe the Plumber -- but a local blogger named Peter Fleckenstein is still in the midst of something akin to his 15 minutes of fame. And as Joe the Plumber would learn, that's both a good thing and a bad thing.

For one thing, he's famous.

For another, he's getting attacked.

Now, we'd never heard of Fleckenstein (despite being a regular reader of some of the bigger conservative blogs in town). But he's apparently a Phoenix-based father of two with close to 7,000 followers on Twitter -- and the New York Times thinks he's responsible for some of the most "persistent falsehoods" in the health care debate.

The Times story, which you can read online here, ran in its hugely influential Sunday edition. It basically accuses Fleckenstein of being at the center of a vast, public-option hating conspiracy.

As reporter Michael Mason wrote,

Ever wonder how some of the most persistent falsehoods about health care legislation keep re-incubating? Look no further than a scary memo that's been landing in e-mail inboxes nationwide. Apparently based in part on the colorful tweets of a conservative blogger in Arizona, the e-mail purports to be a page-by-page, section-by-section dissection of the House health care bill. But according to two independent fact-checking organizations, most of its allegations are false.

Photo by C. Stiles

Our sister paper in Florida does it doggy style.

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It's apparently not bad enough that Arizona is being portrayed as the home to gun-toting extremists and that Arthur Frommer is canceling his vacation plans.

Now New Times' sister paper in Ft. Lauderdale, New Times Broward-Palm Beach, has published a story about zoophilia -- a.k.a. people who are attracted to animals. We're not just talking about petting the family dog. We're talking about heavy petting, and even intercourse, with animals, ranging from dogs to horses to dolphins.

And, go figure, Exhibit A in the Florida newspaper's report is a guy from Arizona.

Mayor Elaine Scruggs

​Glendale Mayor Elaine Scruggs was convinced that Channel 12 reporter Brahm Resnik misquoted her in a July 17 post on www.azcentral.com, city records show. In fact, Scruggs was angry enough to tell other city officials she wanted to demand a retraction.

But the tale of the tape scuttled that idea.

At issue was a piece Resnik did about the ongoing Phoenix Coyotes imbroglio. Resnik reported that Jerry Reinsdorf, who hopes to keep the team in Glendale, was seeking $15 million in incentives from the city. He quoted Scruggs as saying, "That's far beyond anything we would be willing to do regardless of our means."

According to internal city emails recently released by the city thanks to a lawsuit from the Goldwater Institute, after seeing the blog post, Scruggs emailed City Spokeswoman Julie Frisoni, City Manager Ed Beasley, and the city attorney on August 3.

"I know the statement he has attributed to me is not as I said it because I heard myself saying it to him on the Channel 12 news last night," Scruggs wrote, a bit huffily. "I want him to correct the record and print it exactly as I said it, as I heard it last night. The way he has it below, I am speaking for the entire council -- as if we had discussed a request for $15 million in concessions and rejected it.

"What I said was something to the effect that in my own opinion I thought the council would not be favorable toward such a request, even if we had the means."

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Not an actual picture of marketing guru David Leibowitz.

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We're not suggesting he's off to a galaxy far, far away or anything, but we can report that David Leibowitz is on the move.

Leibowitz, a former Arizona Republic columnist and KTAR talk show host, has limited his journalism lately to freelancing. His main gig has been serving as the vice president/ creative director at the oh-so-cool downtown ad agency Moses Anshell. (And yes, when we write "oh-so-cool," we really mean, "this freakin' company actually has a beer cart for its employees!")

But Leibowitz is now heading out on his own. He tells us that the split is amicable, but his last day at Moses Anshell is September 11. After that, he'll be at his own one-man startup at 12th Street and Missouri.

He's calling it Leibowitz Solo. And yes, the name is a play on the character Harrison Ford made famous.

Image: www.yellowsheetreport.com

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Veteran Arizona Capitol Times reporter Phil Riske has been fired from the Yellow Sheet, a paid-subscription politics rag, says an Arizona Republic blog post by Matthew Benson.

Riske had been with the Cap Times for seven years and planned to retire at the end of August, but he got in a fight with Ginger Lamb, the paper's publisher, over the possibility of doing future freelance work, Benson reports. The Yellow Sheet reporter sent Benson a statement describing his "humiliating" termination:

 

"The publisher and I had a disagreement on Aug. 7 over promised freelance work for Arizona Capitol Times after retirement. She demanded I leave immediately," Riske wrote the Insider in a statement. "The publisher appointed a friend to stand over me as I cleaned out my desk, all in front of two dear, perplexed colleagues. It was a humiliating and scarring way to end a 43-year career in journalism."

 

Image: Republic Media Services

John Zidich, publisher of the Arizona Republic

​It sounded like an interesting story -- at first.

Dave Hendershott, chief deputy of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, told us last night that his agency's criminal investigation into what's going on with the county computer system might involve the Arizona Republic.

Naturally, we were a bit suspicious of the info.

After all, the last time we heard the sheriff's office was investigating a newspaper, it was this newspaper. And that sorry affair resulted in New Times executives Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin being rousted from their homes by deputies and arrested. Lacey was thrown in jail. Andrew Thomas, the county attorney, ended up eating crow and dropping the questionable charges against our bosses.

Still, a tip's a tip, and we felt compelled to check on it. What Hendershott told us was this:

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As our readers know, we corrected misinformation yesterday about whether the takeover of a computer system by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office gave Arpaio and his minions access to judge's e-mails they aren't allowed to have.

But someone forgot to send the memo to the Arizona Republic's editorial writers, who penned an opinion piece about the situation today. Though we wouldn't argue with 90 percent of the piece, the following passage is apparently incorrect:

Arpaio previously sought to look through privileged Superior Court e-mails in the system. An appellate court ruled against him. By seizing the entire system, Arpaio gains access to these e-mails, and much more.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

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Newspaper articles that contain the word "may" in the nutgraph, the "what's this article about" paragraph, should often be considered suspect from the start.

It's a J-school basic, and it makes sense. After all, the casual reader can easily turn that into an equally accurate "may not" phrase, which renders the entire story moot. Such is the case with the Arizona Republic article today headlined "Side issue emerges in Liberian rape case."

The article, by reporter Jahna Berry, speculates (through her sources) that although the Liberian refugees involved in a shocking July 16 rape case in Phoenix and police investigators were all speaking English, "the police inquiry ... suggests that not everyone tied to the case may have clearly understood what was being said during the investigation."

The article makes two major blunders, in our humble opinion.

The first is that by using part of interview with the 8-year-old rape victim's father so prominently, Berry requires readers to believe the reporter who conducted the earlier interview (Repub reporter Richard Ruelas) did not make the same linguistic screw-ups the article accuses police of doing.

A number of good follow-up questions, not a linguistics seminar, might have cleared up the meaning behind the following passage:

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One of the masked brokeback mountaineers at the Sonoran Alliance blog, Cincinnatus, has become something of a burr under state schools chief Tom Horne's saddle. Horne, who is running for state attorney general, even took the time to reply to one of Cincinnatus' articles (though he wouldn't return a recent call from New Times).

So who is Cincinnatus and does he or she work for Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, who also reportedly aspires to be Arizona's top cop? More importantly to taxpayers, are these anti-Horne attacks being written by a county employee on county time?

Commenters to the SA site claim Cincinnatus is Rachel Alexander, a right-wing blogger who works under Thomas. She denies (and denies) the allegation. Even Shane Wikfors, the guy behind SA, felt compelled to help her deny it. We have no idea whether they're telling the truth or not, but we do often wonder:

www.eastvalleytribune.com

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God bless those busy bees over at the East Valley Tribune.

These days no one's got time for massive enterprise projects -- and we mean no one! Some times we're jumping on news so fast, we feel like we're literally going to keel over from the sheer insanity of journalism in the Internet age.

But the Pulitzer Prize-winning Trib, despite massive cutbacks and a heightened focus on local coverage, has just done it again: Reporters Ryan Gabrielson and Michelle Reese unveiled a giant project Saturday, Rigged Privilege, probing Arizona's use of tax credits to give scholarships to private-school students.

​New Times and the Arizona Republic used to be fiercely competitive -- and we used any slip-ups on their part as an excuse to point out how much better we were.

Today, in this brutal time for newspapers, we're just mourning their losses. Which is why we found a story in yesterday's New York Times so damn infuriating. Basically, the Times reports, those corporate bastards at Gannett are no longer giving any severance to the employees that it lays off -- meaning those employees are now reliant on the State of Arizona for unemployment benefits. Gannett is paying some "supplemental employment benefits," but only in some cases.

That means some of these poor ex-journalists are getting $265, max, per week. As the Times explains, Arizona has among the lowest unemployment benefits in the nation. Shocker!

Teen Radio Project

Jesus Castro and Celestina Munoz recording a story about teen pregnancy.

 There's always a lot of news coverage about so-called "teen issues" -- in the paper, on-line, on TV and on the radio. From teen pregnancies and homelessness to video-game violence and, of course, teen shopping habits, it's an endless topic of debate and discussion...among adults.

That's about to change.

KJZZ (i.e. 91.5, the talk radio station that airs NPR and some of the best local coverage around) is about to let teens speak for themselves...about themselves.

 

When writing an article about the country's most famous newsman (not to mention the namesake of ASU's School of Journalism and Mass Communication) you'd think a New York Times reporter would double-check all of the facts, if for nothing other than a bit of post-mortem respect.

Guess not. Take a look at this mind-numbing correction today for an July 17 article about Walter Cronkite written by the habitually sloppy Alessandra Stanley, (which we first spotted today thanks to Jim Romanesko's Web site):

Correction: July 22, 2009
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite's career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite's coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. "The CBS Evening News" overtook "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents' reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of "The CBS Evening News" in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

Yikes.

A local group's taking its plea for the Arizona Republic's survival to the same "new media" that's taking a huge toll on the daily's business.

The group on Facebook has set sights on bringing new business to the publication that recently suffered another round of layoffs.

"Rescue the Republic" is comprised of about 1,200 ex-reporters, journalism students, and concerned citizens who claim, "The mission is simple. Save our News Source. Rescue the Arizona Republic."

However, the discussion board has become more of a complaint department/obituary for the fading daily, and a forum for horrible ideas.

"Me and my family used to have a subscription to the Arizona Republic but when they went as far as to give commentary on the personal family troubles of two officers that were killed in the line of duty...they went over the line of what is decent," comments group member Brad Weekely. "To be blunt, I smirked when I found out that this newspaper was going under."

A young man with a talent for cooking up food and tall tales managed to trick the Ahwatukee Foothills News into publishing fiction.

This journalistic embarrassment began over the spring, when Vinayak Gorur of Ahwatukee contacted the paper with a compelling community success story -- about himself.

He told reporter Krystin Wiggs and managing editor Brian Johnson how he was awarded a scholarship to the Scottsdale Culinary Institute, won a big award from the American Culinary Federation and had been hired as the youngest sous chef at the posh Compass Restaurant on top of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Phoenix.

The article ran in the May 13 print edition of the newspaper and also on the paper's Web site. Recently, one of Gorur's buddies called the paper to let the reporter know the 21-year-old chef was, how shall we put it -- totally full of shit.