Sloppy Post-Star's death by a thousand (self-inflicted) cuts

I know quality control at the Post-Star has become pretty close to non-existent but this is inexcusable even by their standards.

They ran a front page graphic earlier this week which claimed that teachers at Warrensburg missed an average of 10.6 days per year per teacher. This was far higher than any other local school, so obviously it gave the district a black eye.

Then the paper ran a correction - buried in middle of the paper in a tiny segment - stating that OOPS they had used an incorrect data point and that Warrensburg teachers had actually missed only 3.27 days per year per teacher. This was well within the norm of local schools. 

So what did they do yesterday? The print edition* re-ran the old graphic with THE DATA THAT THEY THEMSELVES HAD STATED WAS WRONG.  

(*-this has been corrected in the online edition)

Incidentally, this discredited table was paired with a deceptive editorial using a troubling national statistic and implying that it was a problem locally, even though local numbers are 1/2 to 2/3 lower.

This is what you get in product whose price has doubled in recent years. 

Mainstream journalists like to tell themselves that newspapers' implosion is due to the increased desire for commentary and contempt for objective journalism. And to a large extent, that's true. But there's also a large number of people who see sloppiness like this and no longer see the use in spending their money on an entity with a credibility suffering a death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts.

Glens Falls daily continues its death spiral

Here’s a headline you won’t read in the paper: Post-Star jacks up newsstand price by 50%.

 

Yes, the Glens Falls daily is now charging $1.50 for its daily product. I assume the Sunday paper, with its extra fluff and higher price, will face a similar price rise.

 

I was told by people I know that the paper yanked up their home delivery rates pretty significantly earlier in the year. The people cancelled their subscription after about 40 years of uninterrupted service.

 

Why doesn’t the Post-Star follow the advice it dispenses from its high horse to municipalities, counties and school districts. Just tighten your belt, mark hard choices and cut the fat, rather than jacking up what you charge. They make it sound so easy. Lead by example.

 

Your paid readership is shrinking so you jack up rates by 50%. The technical term for this is a death spiral.

I spent the last week in northern New York. Reading the Massena-Potsdam Courrier-Observer, I was struck by the fact that it contained virtually no wire service copy, aside from one or two sports items. It was almost entirely local content.

This unique content that can't be found for free in 100 other places is exactly what a newspaper in the 2015 media landscape should focus on if it wants people to pay money for its product.

 

But there’s no reason to think we can expect such forward thinking – really no more than common sense and a little bit of openness to change - with the Post-Star’s current senior management.

After all, I wrote almost the same essay five years ago.

 

 

Why should you pay money for newspapers?

Glancing at a copy of The Post-Star in Stewart’s today, I got a good insight as to why the industry is struggling. 

Grand pooh-bahs like Ken Tingley, so eager to pat themselves on the back, intone that newspapers are still valuable because of one thing: editorial judgment. You can get news for free in countless places. But what distinguishes the newspaper from the “Internet” is editorial judgment. That vaunted editorial judgment of the paper allegedly ensures that’s what's published in a newspaper is not only accurate and verifiable but also relevant to its audience. Editorial judgment is why they charge you a dollar.

The editorial judgment of the local Post-Star deemed worthy of front page coverage four stories today. One was about whether 4/20 should be a legal holiday in Colorado. One was the Vatican welcoming an Easter crowd. And one was about the Zimbabwe regime seizing land.

This is what the paper’s leadership thought would be relevant enough to entice upstate New Yorkers to view their product as good value for money.

The only local story was about a historic clock in Saratoga Springs.

Suffice it to say, I did not view this as worth a dollar of my hard earned money.

County Counting: Accuracy (if not openness) Counts at PostStar.com

by contributor Mark Wilson

Part of a series on the troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises.


Glens Falls Post-Star Editor Ken Tingley is having difficulty with arithmetic again. On PostStar.com last week, his Front Page blog post titled "Showing you is different than telling you" referred to "all 58 counties in the state" (NY). The post appeared Thursday afternoon. A reader comment pointing out the error Friday morning was never posted, and yet by noontime the error disappeared without a trace, replaced by the correct number (click image to enlarge).

As has been mentioned before in this series, the Post-Star and Mr. Tingley have an on-again-off-again relationship with professional journalism standards, particularly where online content is concerned. The About Us page at PostStar.com still promotes the newspaper as a "twenty-nine-thousand circulation, daily newspaper" even though the newspaper’s daily circulation dropped well below that level in 2010 (yet the same page has updated the awards the paper and its employees have received at least through 2011).

Of course this is not the first time Mr. Tingley has made mistakes on his blogs. He most famously twice used the term "proof readers" in a post (and comments) scolding commenters and letter writers for lax grammar. This, though, is the first instance we know of where a factual mistake was corrected after the fact without acknowledgement.

The level of professional journalism to which Mr. Tingley aspires has a low tolerance for ethical corner cutting. In its section devoted to accountability, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Code states: Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.*

Treatment of online errors is not a new issue to the profession. The American Society of News Editors addressed the subject in 2001.

In 2008 the Columbia Missourian devoted an entire blog to the topic, complete with historical context and a common sense comprehensive policy statement. It also addresses how severely the credibility of news organizations is damaged by lack of candor and transparency.

Three years ago, a commentary at the Columbia Journalism Review referred to an article at MediaBugs.org that advanced another set of common sense standards for correcting factual errors in online content, many of which had already been widely adopted throughout the industry.

None of the best practices advanced by journalism’s ethical watchdogs condone the sort of surreptitious content scrubbing that happened last week at PostStar.com.

For a newspaper that sells itself as a model of professional integrity and has built a reputation for shining light on less than transparent operations in public offices, the honorable and consistent recourse would be for Mr. Tingley and the Post-Star to adopt a firm set of online correction standards and post them prominently at PostStar.com. And then, of course, adhere to them.

Failing that, here are a few handy poses Mr. Tingley might strike while defending or explaining future lapses, should the question of New York State counties arise again:
The Global/Universal Posture: Its so hard to count them when they keep moving around—the constant rotating on the earth’s axis, and revolving around the sun. . .and don’t get us started on the ever-accelerating expansion of the universe!
The Hyperlocal Posture: Our news coverage is so close-to-home that we don’t give a hoot how many counties lie outside our circulation radius!
The Nativist Posture: We refuse to acknowledge the existence of Oswego, Otsego, Otisco and Otasco Counties until they give themselves English names!
The Where’s Waldo Posture: Dude, for a moment there we thought we were living in California.
The Taught-to-the-Test Posture: 58 out of 62 is 93.5%. We still get an "A."

Of course, when all else fails, there’s always the truth: Hey, I’m human. I made a mistake. I thought I knew a fact and I didn’t and I didn’t bother to have another editor read it before I sent it out over my name and under the Post-Star brand.

(Mark Wilson is an editorial cartoonist and illustrator living in Saranac Lake, NY. Since 1999 his work has appeared in news media across upstate New York, including, from 2000-2003, the Post-Star.)

*Note to readers: Links to charts and graphs from earlier postings in this series were broken in December 2012. They have been restored.

Beating a dead horse at The Post-Star

by contributor Mark Wilson

Part of a series on the troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises.

Post-Star Editor Ken Tingley is charging into the Valley of Death once again. In the latest effort to rescue up the battered image of daily newspapers, Mr. Tingley’s Sunday column contrasted newspaper reports on unfolding events in the Boston area last week with information posted to social media outlets. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, he generalized that, “the beauty of print journalism is [that] you get to check and recheck your facts. There is time to evaluate and debate the context of a news story, where it should be played and even which words should be used.”

Even if you discount the obvious embarrassment of the New York Post's two glaring front page falsehoods, Mr. Tingley seems to have already forgotten the mistake made by the Associated Press—the service that the Post-Star relied on heavily for its coverage of the bombing, siege and manhunt—when it erroneously reported the imminent arraignment of both suspects on Wednesday. Had the rumor moved over the wire at press time, it is likely that understaffed newspapers like the Post-Star would have run it. Mr. Tingley also conveniently ignores the fact that his editors, under the Post-Star brand, retweeted the AP’s announcement of the bogus news story, immediately and without independent verification or subsequent retraction.

The real lesson from last week—one evidently lost on Mr. Tingley—is that in news gathering nothing beats an eye-witness account. Sadly, it is a resource that newspapers and their hired wire services are less and less able to afford. Fortunately, if you can tolerate all the derivative nonsense, such accounts may often be found on the internet.

In concluding his Sunday column, Mr. Tingley expressed his hope that “maybe there is a place for a plodding old war horse like the daily newspaper after all.”

It is a fittingly dated metaphor: The last US Army horseback cavalry charge took place seventy one years ago on the Bataan Peninsula, Philippines. Today’s military horses are used for reenactments, parades and funerals.

The insidiousness of lazy, casual bias

In a rapidly changing landscape, there is one article of faith among the pooh-bahs of the press: the main reason that traditional media are better than the new media is trustworthiness. Blogs, Twitter and other Internet outlets merely echo rumor and speculation, often because of an ideological agenda. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters are superior because they always verify claims before publishing them. Or at least that's the contention.

The actions of the Glens Falls Post-Star give lie to this claim and also highlights the daily's rapidly declining standards. 

The Post-Star has long been a divisive part of the community with its editorials reflexively hostile to teachers unions. These editorials wrongly demonize teachers for wanted to be treated like high-qualified professionals when the real culprit for high school taxes is a completely insane structure of education funding in the state. However, a recent editorial highlights just how lazy and casual this bias is.

Its October 1 "Boos and Bravos" section, which states the paper's formal editorial opinion, deplored the 16-month contract impasse between the teachers union and the school board in Warrensburg. Pretty vanilla stuff. In the past, the paper has also called for more transparency in budget negotiations. No objection there.

But the paper goes on to declare that because of the wording of state education law, it can only surmise that this is a stall tactic by the teachers union...

Wait, what?

I thought they were a newspaper. Why do they have to "surmise"?

If they wanted, they could do some actual journalism to try to reveal whether the impasse really was because of a "stall tactic" or whether there was some other reason. 

What would a responsible news outlet would do? Do in a little digging, find out the truth and then let that reality guide their editorial opinion 

Instead, the paper does exactly what the pooh-bahs so often convict the new media of doing: publishing reckless, inflammatory speculation to suit an ideological agenda.

The previous week, the paper did publish a news article on the impasse. But the article did not quote district or union officials as to their positions. 

The paper may or may not have reported on such details in the past, but if it had, then it could have cited those details rather than just "surmising." 

It just assumes that this particular impasse is the teachers fault -- a position that conveniently correlates with its past editorials against teachers unions -- for no concrete reason. This sort of lazy, casual bias is the most insidious kind.

The gutting of The Post-Star's staff and the economic straits of its parent company have been widely chronicled in this blog.

Maybe The Post-Star doesn't have the resources to do decent journalism of the sort that getting to the bottom of this story might require. But if they can't inform the public about what's going on in Warrensburg, then it should remain silent until it's willing and able do its job. Reckless speculation with no stated basis in fact is beneath what a purportedly responsible news organization should be engaging in.

An inconvenient truth

Earlier this month, The Post-Star's Will Doolittle published a blog entry regarding a Syracuse Post-Standard article on the Adirondack Park Agency and the Adirondack Club and Resort in Tupper Lake. Doolittle, a long time harsh critic of the Agency and of green groups, criticized the central New York daily for shallow, 'he said, she said' journalism. He goes on to add further 'context' that the Syracuse paper should have, in his opinion, included about how the environmentalists were wrong.

I left a comment on the PostStar.com blog saying that Doolittle was essentially attacking the Syracuse paper for not pushing his personal viewpoint. I also pointed out that the shallow 'he said, she said' transcription (not journalism) is a staple of most newspapers and broadcast outlets, including The Post-Star itself. Maybe that's why the daily doesn't do any reporting on Fred Monroe's taxpayer-funded anti-APA activist group.

I guess the comment hit too close to home. The comment has not been published more than two weeks later.

Post-Star paywall gets bigger

The Post-Star seems intent on making its reach as small as possible, somehow calculating this will help their bottom line. Despite plummeting quality, such as managing to misspell the name of its own hometown in a baseball box score yesterday, and a rapidly shrinking workforce, the Glens Falls daily has seen fit to nearly triple its newsstand price in the last few years.

On May 1 of this year, the paper announced that it would be imposing a paywall on its website. Users would be limited to 15 free article views per 30 days.

Apparently without warning (I can not verify this due to the restrictions), the paper at some point recently has reduced this to 10 free articles.

How the media priorities can prevent an informed citizenry

Why do fewer and fewer people think the local newspaper is relevant enough to fork out a dollar of their hard-earned money? 

Here’s a clue. 

The front page of Thursday’s Post-Star contained a wire service article about the sports program at Penn St. (a college hundreds of miles away) and a millionth generic wire service ‘analysis’ of the presidential race (as usual ignoring 2/3 of the candidates).

The front page did not a word about a significant boil water notice affecting 14,000 people in the paper’s hometown. That was deemed too minor to make the front page and was relegated to the local section. 

This is a pretty accurate reflection of the editorial judgment of the paper’s decision makers.

The national media is little better. The Progressive reported on a study by Media Matters. The study noted that in the last 18 months, the Kardashians have received 40 times more coverage in newspapers and television than ocean acidification, one of the major consequences of climate change.

Only in America would more people believe in the Kardashians than in climate change. Though for people who rely on the corporate media to be informed, it's easy to understand why.

Buy A Falling Star

by contributor Mark Wilson

Part of a series on the troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations has released paid newspaper readership figures for the six month period ending March 31. The report brings more hard news for the Glens Falls Post-Star. With average daily circulation standing at 24,578, the paper showed a loss of 1,455 paying readers since last October. Compared to a year ago, the average daily circulation is off 1,029 or roughly 4 percent. This places the Post-Star in the middle of the pack of nearby newspapers—the Albany Times Union showed a slight gain in paid readership over last year, while the Saratogian and Troy Record reported heavier losses of 5.7% and 7.5% respectively. Of the four regional papers, only the Post-Star showed deteriorating numbers in the second half of the past twelve month period.

With the latest report, the Post-Star has officially broken below the 25,000 average daily circulation level, a threshold which many organizations recognize when bestowing annual newspaper awards. With the general collapse of newspaper circulation over the past decade, the number of newspapers occupying the under 25,000 category has swelled, far surpassing occupants at higher levels.

While the Post-Star’s circulation losses are middling in comparison with neighboring papers, its performance against the rest of the newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises were considerably worse. Over the past six months, the Post-Star suffered the third highest percentage circulation losses of all fifty papers owned in whole or part by Lee. Perhaps of greater concern, against the firmament of Lee papers, the Post-Star has dropped farther than any other over the past five-and-a-half-years, dropping from the twelfth largest Lee property in October 2006, to twentieth (the ranking figures in the accompanying table take into account the various Lee properties that either merged or were sold over the years).

The Post-Star’s harrowing circulation drop might well explain why the newspaper moved so suddenly at the end of April to subscribed access for its online content: while plenty of people may be reading the Post-Star, fewer and fewer are buying it.

Arrogant Post-Star launches outrageous campaign against privacy

The Post-Star engages in a lot of self-righteous crusades, perhaps as reflection of the paper's increasingly desperate attempts to stay relevant in the midst of a changing media landscape and self-cannibalization. One of the most prominent is related to teen drinking/binge drinking/drunk driving, which the paper dishonestly conflates as a single issue - a crusade so carefully demolished by Mark Wilson here and here.

More recently, the daily has taken the Lake George School District (LGSD) to task on a pair of controversies.

At a public hearing on the budget, LGSD asked for people who wanted to receive budget information *from the district* to sign up to an email newsletter. Those interested provided their email addresses (*to the district*).

But a critic of the school board inexplicably felt he was somehow entitled to those email addresses, so he could give these people his version of things. The Post-Star, even more inexplicably, backed his Freedom of Information request, under some demented notion of "transparency."

Apparently, private citizens who want to stay informed actually owe transparency to the presumptuous newspaper. Who knew?!

Eventually, a quasi-public, two-person body called the Committee on Open Government (COG) decreed that these private emails were in fact public information.

In a recent blog piece, the daily's pooh bah Ken Tingley again denounced LGSD superintendent Patrick Dee for "playing games." He agreed with the COG that decreeing the email addresses public information did not constitute "an unwanted invasion of privacy."

According to Tingley, the superintendent made the issue about privacy when it should be about transparency. There is no privacy risk here.

Dee should not have dithered or played games. Instead, he should've been direct. He should've said HELL NO. He should have said that the district will not give the paper the email addresses of private citizens. He should have told the paper that since the *private* emails weren't given to The Post-Star, IT'S NONE OF THEIR DAMN BUSINESS.

I believe in transparency for public officials and generally agree with most of the COG's decisions. But I also believe that private citizens should be able to maintain a level of privacy judged by their own discretion, not by an unaccountable newspaper or a mysterious two-person panel.

Mr. Tingley says there is no threat to privacy. He implied that the paper wants the private emails not for any actual newsworthy purpose, but just to set a precedent that they are public information.

He is dead wrong.

What the paper intends to do with the email is completely irrelevant. Once the precedent is set that private emails are public information, then anyone can get them via a Freedom of Information request and do whatever they want, including publishing them in print or online. Clearly, the activist in Lake George wants them so he can spam people with unwanted propaganda. How Tingley can say that this is not an invasion of privacy defies any sensible analysis.

I make no value judgment on the worthiness of the activist's campaign. If he wants to get people's private email addresses, he has every right to do what LGSD did: ask people for them so they can choose of their own free will who they want to share their private details with. Instead, he's choosing the lazy way of essentially trying to steal them.

Ironically, The Post-Star's crusade will deter participation more fully in civic bodies, the lack of which it often bemoans. Many people may want to stay informed on public issues, but may want not to do so at the cost of potentially broadcasting their email addresses to the world's spammers.

If I were Superitendent Dee, I would appeal this via the courts. Anything else is a violation of trust given to the district by the people who voluntarily submitted their email addresses under the expectation that it would be for internal use only.

If The Post-Star really wants more transparency, they should do a little digging on the opaque workings of Fred Monroe's taxpayer-funded Local Government Review Board... though since the Review Board and the newspaper share the same activist agenda, that kind of "transparency" is pretty unlikely.

Hitting the Paywall: The Post-Star and other Lee properties resort to fee-for-online content

Part of a series on troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises

by contributor Mark Wilson

The Post-Star of Glens Falls announced in Monday’s editions that as of midnight May 1, they will charge a subscription for access to most online content. Officials at Lee Enterprises, Inc.—the Post-Star’s Davenport Iowa-based corporate parent—announced in late March that most of the company’s 48 daily newspapers would erect a paywall before the end of the year. The announcement comes at a precarious time for the Post-Star, Lee Enterprises and newspapers in general. Over the past decade, the industry has been staggered by numerous body-blows, many delivered by online and mobile technologies; some, sadly, self-inflicted. National, local retail and classified advertising, once roughly three quarters of Lee’s operating revenue dropped by over 40% between the second quarter of 2006 and the most recent second quarterly report released in early April. While part of that loss can be blamed on the national recession (income which may eventually return) most of the missing ad revenue has been steadily raided by national online advertising engines like Google, Groupon, Monster and Craigs List. That revenue is gone for good. As reported in earlier installments, much of Lee Enterprises’ financial woes stem from its wildly over-leveraged and over-priced purchase of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (and the rest of the Pulitzer chain of newspapers), overseen by CEO Mary Junck and CFO Carl Schmidt in 2005. The resulting debt landed the company in bankruptcy court at the beginning of this year. The court-ordered reorganization seems only likely to prolong a grim reckoning for another few years.

At the annual meeting of Lee shareholders in March, corporate directors rewarded Junck and Schmidt with $500,000 and $250,000 bonuses, respectively, for piloting the company through a “successful” bankruptcy. While this amounts to an insignificant fraction of Lee’s annual costs, at a time when Lee headquarters was ordering damaging layoffs at papers across the country, the bonuses attracted unwelcome attention.

At the local level, the fiscal mess in Iowa has translated into increased layoffs (diluting valuable local content) and increased prices passed along to the consumer. Either one of the increases would be a tough sell to a readership in the grips of a national recession. Combined, they constitute an assault on even the most dedicated or dependent audience.

In April 2010 the Post-Star doubled the newsstand price of its print editions, little more than a year after laying off 15.5% (25) of its listed staff (business and editorial). Post-Star circulation losses of 4.62% the year of the layoffs ballooned to 10.58% after the price hike—the fourth worst circulation losses in Lee’s entire portfolio. Needless to say, loss of paying readers only compounded advertising revenue losses.

Of course, two years ago much of the paying Post-Star readership could easily retreat to the free content available at PostStar.com (visits to which have been growing steadily for years). The hope underlying yesterday’s erection of the paywall is that the paper will manage to reconvert enough of these online free-readers into paying news consumers, thereby reversing circulation revenue losses (which—in context—are still only 6.6% of advertising losses).

The success of this plan or its failure—a potentially accelerated migration of readers—hinges on the outcome of two major uncertainties: The first is what role increased free-print and online competition in the Post-Star’s circulation region—NCPR, Adirondack Almanack and Denton Publications to the north, Saratoga Today, WAMC, the Times Union and YNN (Time Warner Cable) to the south, and the Chronicle within the city—will have in providing Post-Star readers with satisfactory alternatives. The second is how the Post-Star’s most recent layoffs—including the closure of its Saratoga Bureau and the attenuation of its northern coverage—might undermine readers’ loyalties in those vulnerable regions.

Statistically, the answer to these questions will begin to emerge in six months when the Audit Bureau of Circulations reports semi-annual circulation and online activity numbers.

Anecdotally, the answer may be more immediate. The Post-Star’s report yesterday of the paywall’s imminent introduction drew a high volume of comments from online readers. By six o’clock yesterday 82 readers had registered 94 reactions. A casual count of those comments showed roughly three of every four commenters objecting (a majority forcefully) to the move with one of every eight either resigned to or tepidly in favor of the move.

Post-Star to go behind paywall

In news predicted on this blog last month, The Post-Star announced that starting tomorrow, it was putting most of its online contentbehind a metered paywall, similar to the system used by The New York Times. According to the daily, readers will be to access for free 15 articles a month. Further articles will require an online subscription, whose cost varies depending on length and whether the user is also a print subscriber.

The gutting of The Post-Star's content continues

Mark Wilson has a post over at Adirondack Almanack on the further gutting of the news department at the Glens Falls daily.

The Post-Star war on underage drinking (part 2)

by contributor Mark Wilson

Also see part 1

New York State keeps detailed motor vehicle accident statistics, compiling them year-to-year and county-by-county. Those data as well as the aggregate state figures compiled since 2001 are available online at safeNY.gov. The standards for data collecting and reporting have remained consistent since 2003, the year New York lowered the blood alcohol content standard for drunk driving, and the year the Glens Falls Post-Star initiated its policy on publishing names of teenagers busted for drinking.

Data in the following comparison are derived from police-reported accidents—collisions resulting in fatalities, personal injury or property damage. These records are more uniform within each region and over time than DWI ticketing, for example (another standard measure), which varies regionally and seasonally, skewed by periodic local crack-downs, check points, etc.

To get a sense of how the Glens Falls region’s statistics for underage drivers involved in alcohol-related accidents stacked up against the average statistics across New York, we set the number of alcohol-related-accident drivers aged twenty and younger both regionally and statewide against the number of alcohol-related-accident drivers from all age groups and compared the resulting percentages. A consistent drop in the regional percentage against the statewide percentage would suggest that the campaign was influencing underage drinking trends favorably.

The results
While eight years of data form no solid basis for statistical analysis, the regional numbers—despite countervailing swings in the middle years of the range—seem to track overall with the statewide norms (even to the point of convergence with state figures in 2009 and 2010, the most recent years evaluated). While this may not be enough of a statistical sample to determine failure of the Post-Star’s policy and overall campaign, there is nothing here to encourage their advocates, either.

Not surprisingly Post-Star editors have not brought statistical analysis to bear on their policy of shaming teenage drinkers. Nor have they cited the statistics in their periodic recommitment to the campaign. If anything they seem to be spurred onward by their own often overheated editorial rhetoric on the subject: “Underage drinking is dangerous and if you don’t believe me, I will show you the headstones.”

Ken Tingley publicly declared his own immeasurable standard for continuing the crusade:

“If there is one young person who learns the lesson, if there is one young person who gets grounded for life for embarrassing their parents, if there is one young person who pauses to consider whether to accept a beer at the next party because they don’t want to see their name in the newspaper, then it is worth it.”

There is little doubt, given the power and range of the Post-Star’s editorial voice, that the shaming policy and Mr. Tingley’s angry bluster have successfully reached any number of kids (and/or their parents). On the same token, given the contrary nature of so many adolescents, can anyone doubt that as many kids may have reacted (sadly) predictably to Mr. Tingley’s bullying and ignored the grim statistics, or worse, headed defiantly in the opposite direction?

The lack of movement of the underage drunk driving numbers against the backdrop of statewide figures suggests, at the very least, that some neutralizing backlash may be at work here.

The broader picture
One of the more troubling aspects of the Post-Star policy is its selective and asymmetric targeting of underage drinkers for the sake of reducing the deaths of young people in motor vehicle accidents.

In 2010 alcohol was the primary cause of 30.5% of all motor vehicle fatalities throughout all upstate counties across all age groups. Speed, by comparison, was the primary cause of 29.2%. The statistics in the three counties served by the Post-Star were quite different: In Saratoga, Warren and Washington counties alcohol was responsible for 20.6% of motor vehicle fatalities, claiming seven lives, while speeding was responsible for 35.3% of motor vehicle fatalities claiming twelve lives. Moreover, in 2010 speed caused 439 injuries across the three counties (31.9%), while alcohol caused only 174 (11.3%).

When you add to that the fact that teenagers are far less likely to drive drunk (accounting for 9.3% of all drivers in alcohol-related accidents statewide) and far more likely to speed (accounting for 22% of all speeding-caused accidents statewide), the math becomes clear: speeding—and not drinking—is by far the deadliest behavior by drivers young and old on our roadways. It comes as no surprise that the Post-Star is devoting none of its diminishing resources to publishing the names of speeders in an effort to embarrass them and their families in a misguided effort—no matter how well-intentioned—to alter their behavior.

Two final thoughts on this subject
This challenge to (and argument against) the Post-Star’s policy of publishing names of teenagers fined for drinking should not be interpreted in any way as condoning the behavior. While it may be a rite of passage—as even Ken Tingley concedes—it remains reckless as it ever was. When combined with driving it has abundant potential to be life-destroying. The sole concern of this post is that the approach undertaken nine years ago by the editor of the Post-Star to combat the issue may simply have made matters worse.

The Post-Star is in many respects a fine newspaper. It is, to be sure, a troubled newspaper belonging to a troubled corporation in a troubled industry in a weak economy. The last thing the editors and publisher of the paper should be doing at this stage is alienating its future readers and subscribers in a way that from any angle looks like a double standard. The Post-Star needs to descend from the bully pulpit and get back to its number one responsibility to the community: reporting news.

This article was published as part of a collaboration with the AdirondackAlmanack.

The Post-Star's war on underage drinking (part 1)

by contributor Mark Wilson

Ken Tingley is back in his bully pulpit. Two Sundays ago in his weekly column, the Editor of the Post-Star defended his newspaper’s policy of publishing the names of teenagers ticketed for violating underage drinking laws. In blunt and patronizing language, the crusading editor took on a recent South Glens Falls High graduate who had dared to leave a comment on the Post-Star's Facebook page objecting to the policy:

Mr. Mumblo was probably playing video games and reading comics when we reported the death of 17-year-old Jason Daniels in Warrensburg on May 18, 2003, and four months later, the death of 19-year-old Adam Baker, also in Warrensburg.

The policy was best described in a harsh editorial that ran on June 12, 2011, nearly eight years into the campaign:

Underage drinkers get their names in the paper. We publish the names of all kids arrested for consuming alcohol. We hope the embarrassment factor helps serve as a deterrent to parents and their kids. Not only does the kid’s name go in the paper, it goes on our website. And the Internet is permanent. So whatever they get caught doing today will follow them the rest of their lives.

From this it is hard to tell if the editorial board is angrier at the kids or their parents. The editorial proceeds to insult the children it hopes to protect:

Kids fib... Kids are lightweights... Kids are reckless... Kids are terrible drivers.

The final line of the editorial—A dead child is gone forever—reveals that the true target of the editorial (and the policy for that matter) is the parents; the humiliation of the children is merely a baseball bat to the gut to get their parents to pay closer attention.

Some HistoryOn June 15, 2003, as New York State prepared to drop the DWI blood alcohol content standard from .1 to .08 percent, and after a succession of fatal underage drunk driving accidents in the region surrounding Glens Falls, Ken Tingley wrote a column outlining the Post-Star's policy on reporting crimes:

Here is what are (sic) policies are now:

• We don't use the name of the child under age 16 charged with any offense - even if it is a felony - but we include the age, sex and town of residence. One exception: We will publish the name of any minor who is being prosecuted as an adult.

• We don't use the name of the child age 16, 17 and 18 if they are only charged with misdemeanors or violations, but we include their age, sex and town of residence.

• We do use the name of minors age 16, 17 and 18 if they are charged with felonies.

• We do use the name of anyone 19 or older charged with any offense if the crime is deemed newsworthy because of unusual or interesting circumstances.

• We've also left it up to the discretion of the editor to print the name of a minor if major crimes or unusual circumstances are involved.

The column concluded with hints of transition:

With the recent debate over underage drinking in our communities, we debated recently whether it might do some good to start listing the names of teens arrested for underage drinking. We currently do not print those names unless there is a felony charge.One of our editors suggested that we should print the name of all teens arrested, that the embarrassment of arrest might be an appropriate deterrent for a young person, that it might even bring a weightier meaning to some parents who don't seem to take the issue that seriously.It is something we will probably be looking at in the future.

The future arrived less than five weeks later when the Post-Star published the names and ages of six minors from Corinth who were charged with “the noncriminal violation of possession of alcohol by someone under 21.” The policy has remained in effect ever since.

According to data compiled by New York State, in 2003 the number of underage drivers involved in alcohol-related accidents in Saratoga, Warren and Washington Counties stood at 19. The number rose to 25 the following year and dropped to 17 in 2004. In both 2005 and 2006 the number of underage drunk drivers involved in accidents shot up to 42 and has been declining steadily toward the 2004 level since. 2010 is the latest year for which the state has compiled statistics.

In June 2008 after another cluster of alcohol-related traffic fatalities involving minors, the Post-Star ran an exasperated editorial under the headline “Message is not getting through.” It began:

We give up.

No one seems to be listening anyway.

Sanctimonious and preachy? Out of touch with reality? OK, we concede. You're right. Underage drinking is a rite of passage. A tradition. We all did it as kids. There's nothing that can be done to stop it. Kids are gonna do what kids are gonna do.So have it your way.

Naturally, the editorial does not give up and charges once more unto the breach to deliver the message. It ends with a poignant appeal to the reader not to let the newspaper abandon the crusade.

By this point, nearly five years along, the policy of outing teenagers charged with non-criminal alcohol violations —despite the absence of any evidence that it was doing any good— was so conflated with the broader cause of stopping underage DWI as to be inseparable. For all practical purposes, under guard of the sharp hyperbole of the Post-Star’s editorial position, unquestionable.

This article was published as part of a collaboration with the MoFYC blog.

Next, Part 2: Questioning the Unquestionable

The curious intersection of journalism, editorial agenda and loss of faith in the media

It's pretty clear from anyone reading Post-Star editorials is that the paper's agenda is devoted to making people believe that Adirondack Park Agency regulations are suffocating the (human) life out of the Adirondack Park. This is despite the statistical fact that the Park's population is growing *faster* that New York's population as a whole.

However, that agenda is also reflected in its supposedly objective news coverage. I've written about this before so I won't belabor previous points. But more recently, reporter Jon Alexander described Hamilton County as 'on the endangered list.'

Now, this was tagged as 'analysis' (ie: opinion) but it does give some insight into his point of view, which happily corresponds with the editorial board's agenda. In a column in Adirondack Almanack, John Warren took serious issue with Alexander's 'analysis.'

Yet in a purportedly objective news story yesterday (doesn't seem to be available online), Alexander notes that Saratoga County's population is growing while Most of the North Country continues to hemorrhage population...

(Again, don't forget the data you'll never see the daily report on)

But the graphic accompanying the article showed that from 2010 to 2011, Hamilton County lost 0.8% of its population, Essex County lost 0.3% of its population,Washington County lost 0.2% of its population and Warren County actually *gained* population. (And even Saratoga County's 'boom' was a modest 0.4%)

While these numbers aren't stellar, they hardly constitute a 'hemorrhage.' But when there's a narrative to conform to...

Additionally, Hamilton County lost 42 residents last year. If the county continue losing that many people every year, it would take 115 years for the 'endangered' county's population to run out. And there's no indication yet that this decline is a long term trend. Hamilton County *gained* population in every census from 1950 to 2000. And since the county was founded, its population has increased in 14 out of the 20 censuses. The county's population has had modest ups and downs in its history, but mostly ups.

But this is not the only seeming intersection of editorial agenda and journalism.

Another of the daily's agendas is its crusade against school spending, which it attributes to malefic and greedy teachers unions.

In an article on Friday (also not available online), education reporter Omar Ricardo Aquije described a meeting between the Glens Falls school board and residents regarding the district's proposed budget.

According to the article, both in text and graphic, the overall tax levy would remain identical from the current fiscal year to the next.

And yet, the jump headline on the inside page B5 blared "Residents question raises, tax increases."

I questioned this discrepancy in an email; the reporter indicated that his figures were correct and that the headline (typically written by layout people... or copy editors, assuming they still have any) was incorrect. The reporter wrote the story honestly. But the headline writer's mistake, was it incompetence or outright deceit? Neither reflects well on the paper's declining standards.

A correction ran in the following day's issue, as usual in print significantly smaller than the original wrong headline.

I don't have any evidence that this was intentional deceit on the part of the paper's backroom staff (I don't blame the reporter, since his text was correct). But this is a very significant error, given how sensitive a topic school budgets are in this area. It certainly undermines what's left of the paper's credibility when these sorts of significant 'errors' in purportedly objective articles just happen to oh so conveniently jive with the paper's editorial crusades.


But for its faults, at least The Post-Star isn't stealing material from regional blogs and writers. More on that later this week.

Update: Today, managing editor Ken Tingley tells us that credibility is key to what they do. No wonder they're in so much trouble.

Layoffs at Post-Star while parent company gives CEO nice bonus

Part of a series on troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises

by contributor Mark Wilson

Following months of seeming good news for Lee Enterprises, Inc., The Davenport Iowa Newspaper corporation which owns the Post-Star, has launched another round of layoffs across its portfolio.

The staff contact page at PostStar.com, which yesterday listed fifty-eight employees in Editorial and Business positions at the Glens Falls paper, today lists only fifty-one. Among the seven missing names/positions are:

• Photographer Aaron Eisenhauer


• Copy Editor Christopher Fitz Gerald
• Saratoga and Washington County Reporter Thomas Dimopoulos
• Washington County reporter Jamie Munks
• Washington County reporter David Taube
• Sportswriter Mary Albl
• Sportswriter Larry Hall

Stacy Perrone has also left the Post Star advertising department, but her position has been filled by Jillian Vitagliano.

Of these seven, Fitz Gerald, Munks and Albl had the shortest tenure at the paper, joining the staff only last Fall. Taube's first bylines and Eisenhauer's first photos appeared in the summer of 2010, Dimopoulos joined the newspaper in March 2007 and Larry Hall, the longest-serving member of the group, dates back over a decade to October of 2001. Similar layoffs have been announced at newspapers throughout Lee's stable of 49 daily newspapers.

In other news, Lee Enterprise this past week filed papers with the SEC declaring a $500,000 bonus for Chief Operating Office Mary Junck, and a $250,000 bonus for Chief Financial Officer Carl Schmidt. The two were credited at last week's shareholder meeting in Davenport with seeing the company through chapter 11 Bankruptcy earlier this year, despite assuring investors less than a year ago that the publisher's dire economic straights were not bankrupting the company.

The two head officers have also staved off delisting of the company stock from the New York Stock Exchange, with the assurance that the company's shareholders would accept a reverse stock split. Last week, Shareholders gave Lee's directors authority to go ahead with the reverse split—a move that could multiply the price of stock shares. The directors must decide on the ratio of the reverse split sometime before June.

Lee remains under a second delisting threat owing to the drop of its market capitalization (the number of outstanding shares times the share price) below $50 million. While recent movement of shares has pushed Lee's market capitalization above the threshold, the company has until next year to strengthen investor confidence and maintain the higher value for the long term.

This week's layoffs and last week's announcement that the web sites of all Lee newspapers will charge visitors subscription fees by the end of the year are the first mobilizations in that effort.

Post-Star likely to go behind paywall this year

A reader pointed me to this press release by Lee Enterprises. In it, the Post-Star's parent company announced a paywall would be imposed on more Lee newspaper websites in the next three months and in most Lee markets by the end of the year. The New York Times recently announced that net surfers would only be able to access 10 free articles per month, down from 20; it is not clear if Post-Star readers will be able to access any free articles. The Iowa-based corporation certainly hopes this process goes more smoothly than the disastrous and quickly abandoned PostStar.net scheme of the early 2000s.

Newspaper undermines civic engagement

Just a warning... if you attend a municipal or school district meeting and sign up to keep informed about issues electronically, Post-Star managing editor Ken Tingley has issued a fiat that your private email address becomes public information. He won’t say for what purpose his paper wants your private email address, what public interests this serves or what right he has to information you're not choosing to give to him but we’re supposed to just trust him.

And if the government entity tries to protect your private information – not the contact information of public officials, but that of private, law-abiding citizens – they will be the ones denounced.

What a fantastic way to encourage the public to engage in civic issues.

Or maybe the corporate daily wants people to not be proactive and to just swallow their interpretation of events uncritically.