Editor and Publisher Reports

As live conferences return and industry moguls get a chance to mingle again, there is no question that Borrell Miami on March 6-8th at the Miami Hilton will once again be a "who's who" of C-suite executives from all sectors of media. This year's event is entitled "The Path to 2032," with a predicted audience of 300 or more, and promotes itself online as the “skip the hype/follow the money” conference with “crisp information that flows from the stage that’s chocked full of new data.” E&P is proud to be the media publication sponsor and is offering readers a $200 discount code of “EP200” when they register at: https://borrellmiami.borrellassociates.com. In addition, all who attend will receive a complimentary full-year subscription to Editor & Publisher Magazine. In this 116th episode of E&P Reports, Publisher Mike Blinder welcomes Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, who offers a preview of what to expect at Borrell Miami 2022.          

In this 115th episode of "E&P Reports," Mike Blinder the Publisher of E&P chats with David Chavern, President / CEO of the News Media Alliance and Lee Wolverton, VP News/ Executive Editor at HD Media about the latest developments in the class action lawsuit naming both Google and Facebook as defendants in a federal antitrust lawsuit. Also on the panel is Gretchen Peck E&P's Contributing Editor.

Howard Owens published his first newspaper in fourth grade, which is likely why soon after graduating from Point Loma Nazarene University with a degree in literature, he and a partner became owners of The Beacon, a biweekly newspaper in the City of San Diego. After that, he decided to branch out to other publishing companies as a reporter and editor. In 1995, he and a partner founded East County Online (ECO), the first chain of weekly newspapers with Web sites. ECO featured not only content from six community weeklies but original content, a Web directory of local businesses, reader submissions (now called user-generated content) and a community club (now called virtual community). In 1995, a Wired Magazine poll found that ECO was the 66th most popular news Web site in the world. After Owen's success in pioneering digital publishing at East County Online and holding senior management positions in digital media at the Ventura County Star and Bakersfield Californian, he was hired by Gatehouse Media as Director

In this 113th episode of “E&P Reports, Alan Leveritt publisher of the Arkansas Times and ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Brian Hauss join Editor & Publisher’s (E&P) publisher, Mike Blinder, and E and P contributing editor  Gretchen Peck to talk about a two year battle, that has gained international prominence, between the Times and the state of Arkansas, on the newspapers’ refusal to sign a pledge to support Israel in order to continue receiving advertising dollars from the state university. Also, on the program appears award winning film producer Julia Bacha, who has just completed a documentary on the impact of state legislation designed to penalize individuals and companies that choose to boycott Israel due to its human rights record.

In 2018, news media analyst Ken Doctor penned a column that, in part, read: “Alden Global Capital is making so much money wrecking local journalism, it might not want to stop any time soon.” Now, fewer than five months since the ink dried on Alden Global Capital’s acquisition of the Tribune titles, it’s making a formal play for Lee Enterprises, a digital marketing services company and publisher of local newspapers across 26 U.S. states. The initial offer was for $24/share. The news sent Lee Enterprises stock upward. As E&P’s Publisher Mike Blinder assembled a panel of news media experts on November 23rd to discuss the bid, LEE stock was at $24.10/share. On this 112th episode of E&P Reports, Host Mike Blinder speaks with Gordon Borrell, founder and principal of Borrell Associates; Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for Poynter Institute; Steven Waldman, president and co-founder of Report for America; and Gretchen A. Peck, contributing editor at E&P, about the hedge fund company's intentions. Th

For the past 30 years, Jim Doyle has been helping salespeople make more money as one of the top sales trainers for the broadcast industry. His latest book, Selling with a Servant Heart, outlines ten lessons that ultimately lead to greater joy in sales while also increasing income. Doyle describes the concept by saying: “When you commit to serving customers as a ‘Servant Heart Seller,’ you’ll find more success, greater customer loyalty, and far less churn. And you’ll have a lot more fun, too.” He goes on to add: “Lots of good sellers would describe themselves as 'Customer Focused.' But think about a level that is even above that. ‘Servant Heart Sellers’ would better be described as 'Customer Obsessed.' Obsessed that the products they sell and their work personally provide the absolute best outcomes for the client. They are outcome-focused, not just customer-focused.” In this 111th episode of “E&P Reports,” Publisher Mike Blinder goes one-on-one with Jim Doyle to learn more about the concept of “Servant Hea

On this 110th episode of "E&P Reports," Publisher and Host Mike Blinder sat down with the National Newspapers Association’s (NNA) chair, Brett Wesner, and E&P contributing editor Gretchen Peck to talk about the urgency for advocacy for the Local Journalism Sustainability Act (LJSA). On Friday afternoon, November 5th, word had come that at least part of the LJSA — payroll tax credits for newsrooms — remained in the Build Back Better Reconciliation bill being bandied about in Congress. It’s legislation that the NAA, America’s Newspapers, Report for America and other industry associations have tenaciously lobbied for in Washington, DC, and perhaps to everyone’s surprise, got traction and even a little bipartisan for it. Community newspapers serve an obvious role that most people inherently understand. Their local newspaper — whether they read it in print or online — is the very best source of local information about what’s happening in the community around them and why it should matter to them. A local n

While a student at Southern Methodist University, Adam Darsky was bitten by the "journalism bug" writing for "The Daily Campus," so upon graduation, he took an entry-level job as a sports reporter at a small newspaper outside of Dallas. It wasn't long before he jumped from newspapers to broadcast, landing an internship at the Dallas all-sports radio station. Darsky leaped from radio to TV, beginning his 25-years as a broadcast TV news producer running the prompter and ripping scripts at KXAS-TV in Dallas to producing and management jobs in Savannah, Tucson, Houston and Charlotte. Finally, he wound up in New York City as Executive Producer of the nation’s #1 TV morning show. Today, you'll find Adam Darsky as the new Director of Content for the much-talked-about local news disruptor, TapInto. TapInto is a network of over 90 hyper-local franchised, online-only news websites most in New Jersey, one of the nation's most populated and media-saturated corridors. In this 109th episode of "E&P Reports," Publisher

There are over 550 federally recognized tribal governments and more than 300 Indian reservations in the United States. Tribal reservations are sovereign nations and are not required to comply with many federal or state laws, including freedom of information and open meetings laws. Legally, tribe members enjoy the same constitutional rights as every American, but there is no independent safeguard on reservations to protect those rights, such as freedom of the press.   Since tribal councils own the vast majority of the approximately 200 Native American newspapers, little leeway is given to any analysis of government activity. Reporters are often prohibited from writing critical stories about tribal leaders, and access to tribal records on most reservations is nonexistent. As a result, reporters who dare to question the tribal government will often find themselves out of a job or their newsrooms shut down.   Native American journalists often complain that government ownership of the tribal press runs counter to

As live events slowly return, America's Newspapers' Senior Leadership Conference took place live at the Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs. Just under 200 attended sessions on growing audience, maximizing revenue, building a better internal culture for our operations and more. On Monday, October 18th, 2021, Editor & Publisher's participation included the announcement of the 2021 Publisher of the Year recipient: Judi Terzotis, followed by the moderation of a robust lunchtime panel discussion by news publishing leaders on their views and predictions on the future of the industry.   Topics covered during this lively discussion included: Print frequency and what it may look like in the years to come Should Google & Facebook be made to pay for the content they monetize from our journalists? The future of funding our newsrooms and can local journalism survive on just ad and reader revenue? Finding talent and what it will take to recruit and keep employees The return of local ownership and how this impac

In September of 2021, Cherry Road Media, a Parsippany, New Jersey-based technology company, announced it had acquired 20 newspapers from the Gannett company, bringing their total count of publications owned to 27. Their list of titles now stretches across seven states: Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota and Alabama. Cherry Road CEO Jeremy Gulban stated in a recent press release that "This was his way to give back to local communities by supporting media houses that add so much value to our daily lives but are suffering the brunt of a digital age by losing subscriptions." In the October 2021 E&P cover story entitled: "Under New Management," Sara April, from Dirks, Van Essen & April, the media merger and acquisition firm that represented Gannett in the sale of the 20 properties to Gulban, described the current mergers-and-acquisition landscape as "dynamic," noting that buyer trends have changed in the past three years. April stated: "Before that, the industry saw a lot of large corpor

Raw Story is an American progressive news website founded in 2004 by John K. Byrne. It describes its mission as bringing attention to stories they see as downplayed or ignored by other media outlets. Raw Story’s recent reporting has focused on homegrown extremism. One such story entitled “We’re gonna kill Congress”: Trump’s far-right supporters promise violence at today’s DC protests,” was published the morning of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, predicting exactly what would happen on that fateful day. A few years ago, Raw Story began a partnership with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston and the website he founded, DCReport.org, as part of a significant push into increasing their investigative reporting. DCReport’s team of journalists produces content for RawStory.com’s ad-free subscription program. In return, Raw Story funds (through donations) DCReport. Raw Story hosts exclusively this content first, but then allows any publisher to use it (with attribution) after 72 hours. In this 105th Epi

For decades many federal agencies have been prohibiting reporters from talking to anyone without first requesting access through a public information officer (PIO). And over those years, these “PIO chokepoints” have gotten tighter and tighter, including oversight on conversations and demands for questions ahead of any interview.  Reporters today are often not allowed to speak to anyone, even after acquiescing to censorship and controls. First Amendment attorney and head of the Brechner Center, Frank LoMonte, wrote in a 2019 article: “Although the practice of gagging public employees from giving unapproved interviews is pervasive across all levels of government, decades’ worth of First Amendment caselaw demonstrates that blanket restrictions on speaking to the media are legally unenforceable.”   In July, twenty-five journalism organizations, including the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) ,  called on the Biden administration to end these prohibitions

With a mission to help Black-owned newspapers to "survive and thrive," ten Black newspapers have joined forces to create Word in Black, a platform to “amplify the Black experience by reporting, collecting and sharing stories about real people in communities across the country,” The initiative is part of the Fund for Black Journalism, founded last year by the Local Media Association (LMA), who initially received funding from the Walton Family Foundation to do stories about COVID-19 and education. The idea was to create a national site to house the ten newspapers' stories about the issues. That site became WordInBlack.com, which soft-launched in May and covers racial equity, K-12 education, police reform, healthcare disparities, social justice, politics, opinion, sports and LGBTQ issues and rights. The ten participating newspapers include: New York Amsterdam News Atlanta Voice Houston Defender Washington Informer Dallas Weekly Baltimore/Washington Afro Michigan Chronicle Seattle Medium Sacramento Observer Loui

JournalList.net is a non-profit membership organization that originated and currently maintains the trust.txt reference document. Trust.txt is a simple page of code with the goal that it would be used worldwide to distinguish legitimate news organizations from non-legitimate ones. The idea of having a universal code that achieves mass adoption by digital platforms is not a new one. Back as early as 1994, before the internet reached widespread use, a company called Nexor initiated the robots.txt reference document to aid early search engines, like WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista, to correctly crawl and index page contents correctly within any Website. Today it is estimated that over 90% of global sites have this file placed within their route directly that anyone can see (https://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt, https://www.cnn.com/robots.txt ). Just a few years ago, the ads.txt file was created by The Internet Advertising Bureau to allow online buyers to check the validity of the sellers from whom they buy for int

The Radically Rural Summit started in 2018 as a partnership between The Keene Sentinel and a local non-profit called The Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship. This organization provides space, tools and connections to assist in the successful development of entrepreneurs who are committed to building a vibrant community. Each year Radically Rural hosts an event with a mission to help share ideas and build networks tailored to rural communities and give a stage to those who have found solutions to rural problems so that others can learn and implement them in their communities. This year’s event will take place on September 22 and 23rd, 2021 and will specifically feature sessions focused on sustaining community journalism, which will include Building Trust: Measures to secure faith in local journalism Funding News: Media organizations successfully find philanthropic help for their missions Crazy Good: Tools to make you a better – and more efficient – journalist In this episode of E&P reports, Publis

Perhaps you know Henry Scott from years in senior management positions at the New York Times or as VP/ CMO at Creative Loafing. However, you may not know that Henry decided in 2012 to move to West Hollywood, California to start a digital-only local news presence he called WEHOville.com. In 8-years, he built a viable, profitable business with a sizable audience consuming award-winning content across multiple platforms. Then, just a few months ago, Scott sold the site to enter the world of media consulting, hoping to help others gain the same success he did as a local "news disruptor."  As part of this mission, he has crafted a lengthy, fact-filled manifesto he calls: "Want to Launch a Local News Website?  Been There. Done That. Here’s What You Need to Know.” In this 20-page, 11,000+ word document, Henry Scott offers actionable, real-world advice for anyone who wants to enter the world of news publishing as a pure play digital-only platform. Sections within the document include: “Where’s the Money?” “What is

With a mission to “investigate inequality with and for the people who are affected by it,” The Center for Public Integrity(CPI) is one of the oldest nonprofit investigative news organizations in the country. Over the years, their reporting has led to hundreds of law and policy changes, forced the federal and state governments to release information critical to the public interest, and held corporations to account for abuses of power.  It was also recognized with the Pulitzer Prize and countless other news publishing industry awards. CPI collaborates with other organizations, particularly local news outlets, to publish data-driven and narrative journalism that reveals the causes and effects of inequality and exposes discriminatory systems in employment, housing, health care, education, and access to democracy. Recently CPI announced the appointment of Paul Cheung as their new Chief Executive Officer. Cheung's background includes 20 years of experience in leading industry digital transformation working for NBC

Overstory Media Group (OMG) is a startup media group that operates newsletter-based local media outlets and currently manages ten local brands in British Columbia, Canada. Recently they announced plans to hire 250 new journalists and launch 50 new outlets within the next 24-months. The growth is financed by Canadian tech entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson who partnered with a local digital journalist Farhan Mohamed to manage OMG.  OMG will provide salaries, benefits, and legal support for the journalists they hire and rely exclusively on local advertising as their primary revenue stream and hopes to add an audience revenue model in the future. In this episode of “E&P Reports,” Publisher Mike Blinder goes one-on-one with Canadian digital news disruptor Observer Media Group’s CEO and Co-Founder Farhan Mohamed about their business model, editorial focus and plans for expansion across North America. Related Links: Overstory Media Group (OMG) OMG’s flagship platform: Capital Daily Editor & Publisher’s July 202

Greg Little has been a journalist since his first efforts at a small newspaper while he attended junior high school. His career has spanned five decades, winning a number of awards for reporting that helped an Indian reservation in Montana stop violent crime to stopping illegal dumping of sewage sludge in Tennessee. He has worked for large companies and family owners and spent time teaching journalism. Today he currently lives in Mariposa, California, with his wife, Nicole where they own the Mariposa Gazette, the oldest continually published weekly newspaper in the state of California.  Greg recently published a book called “-30- Why Small-Town American Print Journalism is Anything But Dead,” a book he describes as an “outline on how the road of journalism can sometimes be bumpy. But along the way, the business of small-town journalism can also be rewarding.” The book also speaks to why local journalism is so important in America and why it must survive. Little gives real-world advice to up and coming journal