"To create the world they thought they were fighting for"
I nominate this as the motto and statement of intent for this board.
Thanks to this anon for articulating this so well; it acknowledges the falseness of the past and encourages goals for the future.
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Got a good one for us, anons, and it's thanks to an old buddy of mine who's a RETIRED reporter. He's got some red pills on the news he wants to tell us. He's smart as hell, mind like a steel trap, but not interested in getting on 8chan right now.
Fact: Newspapers are broke now because all their advertising revenue dried up when classified ads tanked post-internet. Oldfags will remember the giant section of classifieds on weekends - real estate, cars, you name it.
Fact: Newspapers are also broke because their biggest full-page and full-section buying advertisers, the old department stores in big cities, also tanked post-internet. Happened in every major US newspaper market.
Fact: Newspapers started offering buyouts to employees nearing retirement. The effect of that was to drain the talent and experience pool of reporters. Layoffs followed. TL;DR there are kids and interns writing every damn thing you read these days. They can't write, they wouldn't know grammar and spelling if it kicked them in the head, they won't work hard, and they don't care.
Part 2 coming up, and it's about the still-not-dead NoName.
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Sauce: http://ajrarchive.org/article.asp?id=687
From American Journalism Review, April 2000
A Story About Rumors That Didn't Pan Out
By Natalie Pompilio
Natalie Pompilio is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
"BIZARRE" SEEMS TO BE the word most frequently used to describe the Arizona Republic's investigation of a local businessman's murder and the resulting front-page story published in the February 6 paper.
The piece's headline read, "Killing weaves bizarre web." Arizona Sen. John McCain, one of the story's characters, dubbed the work "bizarre" in interviews with reporters. Even the Republic's executive editor and assistant managing editor agree with that assessment.
The story is unusual: In September 1999, two children stumbled upon a dead man while walking in the woods. Ronald Bianchi, 53, a former newspaper writer and high-profile, if often unsuccessful, entrepreneur had been shot multiple times.
Bianchi was known to higher-ups at the Phoenix paper. In February 1999, he'd sat down with Publisher John Oppedahl and Managing Editor Julia Wallace and had given them a tip: Republican presidential hopeful McCain was having an affair with actress/singer Connie Stevens, he alleged. The pair had met, he claimed, through mobsters. Republic reporters spent three months investigating Bianchi's story after his death. They found nothing to confirm the purported relationship. Both McCain and Stevens insist their relationship is strictly platonic.
A police official told the Republic at least twice that McCain and Stevens had been interviewed regarding the murder, but then he recanted, saying they had not. McCain was eventually interviewed, but police say he had nothing to do with Bianchi's murder.
Then the saga that couldn't get weirder did: The headless, limbless torso of another local businessman was found in a garbage bin, and the victim's widow was charged in his death. The murder suspect had spent time with Bianchi's widow after his death.
The Republic decided to publish an account of its investigation, which revealed no evidence of a McCain/Stevens affair and no tie between McCain and the Bianchi murder. In an editor's note that ran the same day, Executive Editor Pam Johnson wrote that the "compelling local tale" of the search for Bianchi's killer justified publication.
Not everyone agreed, including some Republic readers, reporters and editors, the paper's reader advocate and other professional journalists. "The inclusion of a farfetched and totally unsubstantiated rumor of an affair involving Sen. John McCain and Connie Stevens in last Sunday's front-page article regarding the Bianchi/[Ira] Pomerantz murders could only have been done to cast a cloud on Sen. McCain's presidential campaign," reader Karl Almquist wrote in a letter to the editor. "I question the integrity of The Arizona Republic in its decision to include such an unsubstantiated rumor in an inflammatory news article. An apology to Sen. McCain, Stevens and your readers is clearly in order."
Another reader, Judith Curtis, wrote that she was no McCain fan, but, "I think The Republic could have used more discretion in tying Sen. McCain's name to this sensational article."
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Among the paper's internal detractors: Dave Wagner, the paper's political editor. "It's no secret that some people were very upset by the story," says Republic Deputy Managing Editor John D'Anna. Wagner, he says, "was particularly upset." Responding to reports that Wagner had quit his job after the story ran but was convinced to return, D'Anna said, "He's still our political editor." Wagner could not be reached for comment.
Did the paper have an obligation to give the public the information it had, no matter how inconclusive? Why publish rumors about a presidential hopeful and the fact that the insinuations didn't check out?
Because, Johnson says, the story of the investigation wove a web that would fascinate the Republic readership. The paper's goal, Johnson says, was to present all the twists and turns that had come up during its reporting.
That includes Bianchi's debts, rumored ties to organized crime, and bizarre last days getting free meals from an El Paso mission. McCain was never meant to be a focus of the story, she says. "The McCain thing is what everyone outside Arizona focuses on," she adds, "but it's a story about the investigation. It's a very localized story."
And when the story ran, Johnson continues, "In coffee shops and gyms, the paper was being devoured that day. It was drawing them."
Republic reader advocate Richard de Uriarte's column that ran February 13 began: "They said we smeared John McCain. They said we lowered ourselves to tabloid journalism. They asked why we printed mere rumors. We dispatched three of our best investigative reporters to work months on the story. They found nothing to substantiate it. So why run it? readers asked. I agreed with them." (De Uriarte declined to be interviewed by AJR, saying his column spoke for itself.)
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