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Posts published in “Day: June 20, 2013”

A great newspaper’s lousy spin

June 20, 2013
stapilus RANDY
STAPILUS
 
The View
from Here

The news of what the Oregonian will be doing, and not doing, by and on October 1, was bad enough. But do they have to insult our intelligence, and do a really bad job of dodging the facts in a hail or corporate bafflegab, at the same time?

Here's how the Oregonian story on the new developments begins: " A new, digitally focused media company, Oregonian Media Group, will launch this fall to expand news and information products in Oregon and Southwest Washington. The new company, which will launch October 1, will operate OregonLive.com and publish The Oregonian and its related print products. A separate company, Advance Central Services Oregon, will provide support services for Oregonian Media Group and other companies. Oregonian Media Group will introduce new and improved digital products, including enhancements to Oregon's largest news website, OregonLive.com. The company will provide up-to-the-minute news and information, when and where readers want it - on their desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets. At the same time, it will continue to publish Oregon's oldest, largest and leading newspaper."

Sounds fine, doesn't it? Doesn't sound very significant to the average reader, does it?

Of course, what's really happening, and what's not even really hinted at in those opening sentences, is this: The paper is cutting back home delivery from seven to three times a week (there's a fig leaf about a "Saturday edition," but evidently it will be delivered with the Sunday paper). There will be layoffs - no specific word on how many, but word circulating is that they will be large. The paper will move out of its long-time building gently uphill from Portland's downtown, to some smaller digs, no longer needing the space. And so on.

You can find an actual comprehensible news report about what's happening and what its significance is, at Willamette Week.

What it comes to is this: The Oregonian will no longer be a true daily newspaper (at least not in any sense that distinguishes it from every weekly newspaper that also runs a 24/7 website, as most of them do). It will have a far smaller reporting and editing staff and so - the limitless capacity of the web notwithstanding - there will be less local and regional news coverage. News consumers in Oregon will be taking a major hit.

So, long term, I suspect, will the Oregonian, and its parent Advance Publications, based out of New York; Advance (not in Portland) was where the cutback decisions got made. (They are similar to the approach which gouged the papers in Cleveland and New Orleans, which Advance also owns).

Not long ago I talked with a veteran and successful newspaper publisher outside Oregon curious what I'd heard about what was going on at the Oregonian. I said there was talk about the three-day-a-week model and major cutbacks, but also hearing about blowback in Ohio and Louisiana, with the possibility of some rethinking about at the approach at Advance. He and I agreed the big cut approach would be disastrous, and hoped it would be reconsidered.

But evidently not.

Lincoln and Idaho

June 20, 2013
mendiola MARK
MENDIOLA
 
Reports

Linking Idaho to Abraham Lincoln’s four greatest speeches, David H. Leroy - former Idaho lieutenant governor/attorney general who has collected 1,500 historic Lincoln-related items - said the nation’s leaders in Washington would be wise to study and respect the U.S. Constitution as did America’s 16th president.

Lincoln signed the bill creating the Idaho Territory on March 4, 1863, effectively blocking the spread of slavery to the West during the Civil War. Idaho’s gold and silver mines, in turn, helped finance the Union’s war against the Confederacy.

Lincoln appointed Idaho’s first three territorial judges, including Samuel Parks who had practiced law in the same Illinois courts as Lincoln. The Republican president mentioned the Idaho Territory in his State of the Union addresses to Congress in 1863 and 1864 and approved the name “Idaho” for the territory.

lincoln

Leroy told the City Club of Idaho Falls that those in the federal government’s executive and legislative branches need to focus on their constitutionally defined roles as the nation once again finds itself divided.

Speaking at the club’s June 13 annual dinner about Lincoln and the birth of Idaho, Leroy said individual rights and the concept of privacy need to be jealously guarded. In response to a question, he urged elected officials to comply with the oaths they take to uphold and defend the Constitution, which underwent a severe crisis during the Civil War.

A Republican and practicing attorney in Boise, Leroy served as Idaho’s 28th attorney general from 1979 to 1983. He was the Gem State’s 36th lieutenant governor from 1983 to 1987 and unsuccessfully ran for governor against Cecil Andrus in 1986. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush appointed him U.S. nuclear waste negotiator, a position he held for three years.

Leroy chaired the 2009 Idaho Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. When the Idaho History Center in Boise opens a “Lincoln Legacy” exhibit in September, it will permanently display books, letters, photos, relics, paintings, cartoons, statuary and campaign items donated from the extensive collection of Leroy and his wife Nancy.

“After 45 years traveling the breadth and length of the land, I suggest to people that Idaho more than any other state is related to Abraham Lincoln,” Leroy said, even more so than Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana.

In 1913, a University of Oxford vice chancellor in Great Britain listed the three greatest speeches ever given in the history of the English language. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address were two of the three, Leroy noted.

In February 1860, Lincoln delivered his Cooper Union speech to a capacity crowd of 1,500 in New York and noted that 21 of the 39 signers of the Constitution believed Congress should control slavery in the territories and not allow it to spread. At the time, the nation was in danger of splitting apart.

“What is the frame of government under which we live? The answer must be: ‘The Constitution of the United States.’ That Constitution consists of the original, framed in 1787, (and under which the present government first went into operation,) and 12 subsequently framed amendments, the first ten of which were framed in 1789.” (more…)