For the Record

Lee Enterprises Directors Reelected Amid Hedge Fund Fight:

Three directors of newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises "were reelected Thursday over the objections" of hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which "has been trying to buy the company since last fall," according to Josh Funk and Margery A. Beck of the Associated Press. Lee (which owns such publications as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Missoulian and the Wisconsin State Journal) "said its chairman, CEO and lead independent director were all reelected as expected at the Davenport, Iowa-based company’s annual meeting, with each receiving support from more than 70% of the votes cast." Although Alden "had urged shareholders to vote against Chairman Mary Junck and longtime director Herbert Moloney after a judge blocked its effort to nominate its own directors, [...] the rules of the election had made 'no' votes symbolic," the reporters added. Alden -- which owns the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News (through its Daily News Enterprises subsidiary), The Denver Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Boston Herald, The Mercury News of San Jose, the East Bay Times, The Orange County Register and the Orlando Sentinel -- "probably won’t abandon its effort to buy Lee after this latest setback, but it wasn’t immediately clear what the New York-based hedge fund might try next," according to Funk and Beck. The directors "were ensured they would be reelected because Lee decided to use a plurality standard in the elections," ensuring that they only "had to get one 'yes' vote to get reelected because that is more than any other candidate could receive because the directors were running unopposed." In a statement to shareholders prior to the vote, the The NewsGuild–Communications Workers of America union (which represents journalists at several Lee publications) condemned Alden's efforts: "We believe that Alden Global Capital has done more harm to the news industry than any single factor, including the online platforms. Within a few years of acquiring a news organization, Alden quickly hollows it out, taking a liquidation approach of selling off historic offices, shutting down printing plants and slashing staff, while hiking subscription prices."

Report: Gannett Gave Advertisers Inaccurate Information:

Newspaper publisher Gannett "provided inaccurate information to advertisers for nine months, misrepresenting where billions of ads were placed,"  Patience Haggin of The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. According to Haggin, advertisers "thought they were buying an ad on one Gannett site—very often the flagship USA Today—but actually purchased space on another, such as one of its many local outlets" in the real-time digital auctions that dominate the field. In a statement, Gannett said that "it provided the wrong information and that it regrets the error, which it said was unintentional." The underlying error "was added to Gannett’s ad systems by one of its employees in May 2021, and was detected and corrected by the company on March 4 as it worked with a partner to integrate new technology, according to Gannett executives familiar with the situation." Braedon Vickers, an independent ad industry researcher, worked with analytics firm Adalytics to discover the issue. "In a typical example of how ad space was mislabeled," wrote Haggin, "a reader of the Indianapolis Star was represented incorrectly in an online auction as a visitor to USA Today's site, according to the researchers. An advertiser seeking to target a national audience could have instead reached people in Indiana. Music-streaming company Spotify and financial-services company Ally were among the advertisers that bought ad space that purported to be for USA Today, the researchers said." Representatives for the firms did not respond to requests for comment. Other major brands affected by the error include Sears, Nike, Adidas, Ford, State Farm, Starbucks, Kia and Marriott. "Programmatic advertising relies on a lot of data being self-reported by those selling the ads," said Vickers. "That this issue went undetected for so long suggests that the processes in place to verify this information are not sufficient." 

Walter Mears (1935-2022):

1977 National Reporting winner Walter Mears died Thursday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. days after he was diagnosed with "multiple forms of cancer," according to Mike Feinsilber and Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press. He was 87. Born in Lynn, Mass., Mears graduated from Middlebury College (where he edited The Campus, its student newspaper) in 1956 and began working immediately thereafter as a newsperson for the wire service. Throughout his decades-long career with the AP, he covered 11 presidential elections and was notably featured in 1975 Editorial Cartooning winner Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip in 1973. "Walter’s impact at the AP, and in the journalism industry as a whole, is hard to overstate," said Julie Pace, AP executive editor and senior vice president. "He was a champion for a free and fair press, a dogged reporter, an elegant chronicler of history and an inspiration to countless journalists, including myself." Kathleen Carroll, a former Pulitzer Prize Board member and AP executive editor, echoed Pace's sentiments. "Walter was also a wonderful human being," she said. "He loved his family — being a grandfather was one of the great joys of his life. He loved golf and the Red Sox, in that order. He loved politics and he loved the AP." Although he was featured alongside such legendary opinion journalists as 1973 Commentary winner David Broder and Rolling Stone political correspondent Hunter S. Thompson in Timothy Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus" (1973), a seminal account of press coverage of the 1972 presidential election, Mears remained committed to neutral coverage and the primacy of fact checking throughout his career. He reflected on the state of contemporary journalism in 2016: "You can always make it better. But I think the information that the AP and other solid outlets are delivering is there, it's available. The problem is that you can write the best story in the world and if no one reads it, what difference does it make? And as I say, the attention spans have decreased to fit the size of the tweet. And it takes time to read an 800-word explanation of where a candidate stands on a particularly difficult issue. I think too many of us don't take the time to find out the facts and accept as the truth something that someone tells them. They accept opinion as truth." Although he ascended to the AP's executive editorship in 1983, Mears inevitably returned to his passion for deadline writing in every presidential election before nominally retiring in 2001; thereafter, he continued to blog and teach journalism at the University of North Carolina's journalism school and Duke University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. His wife, Frances, "died in January 2019," according to Feinsilber and Woodward, who noted that he was survived by two daughters. "His first wife and their two children were killed in a house fire in 1962," they continued. "Mears directed that a portion of his ashes be distributed with Frances' remains and the rest in Massachusetts with those of his first wife and two children lost in the fire."

Michele McNally (1956-2022):

Longtime New York Times visual editor and past Pulitzer juror Michele McNally died on February 18 in a hospital in Yonkers, N.Y. from complications of pneumonia, the newspaper's Sam Roberts reported Tuesday. She was 66. McNally "was named The Times’s director of photography in 2004 by Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time," according to Roberts, beginning a 14-year tenure in the role. "The next year," he continued, "she was promoted to assistant managing editor, becoming the first photo editor to join the top echelon of newsroom management known as the masthead." In a statement, Executive Editor Dean Baquet lauded McNally as a "transformational figure in photojournalism," adding: "She walked into newsrooms where photography had taken a back seat for too long, and forced it into the fore." When she retired in 2018, Baquet and Managing Editor Joseph Kahn "said in a memo that during her tenure The Times had won more Pulitzer Prizes, George M. Polk Awards, Overseas Press Club honors, Emmys and other citations for photography 'than most news organizations have won for their entire reports.'" She also "won the Jim Gordon Editor of the Year Award for photojournalism from the National Press Photographers Association, and in both 2015 and 2017 she received the Angus McDougall Visual Editing Award from the organization Pictures of the Year International at the Missouri School of Journalism." Born in Brooklyn, McNally graduated from South Shore High School in the borough's Canarsie section before attending Queens College and Brooklyn College. She "worked briefly in the audio and video division of the Brooklyn Public Library" until beginning her career in visual journalism as a sales representative for the Sygma Photo News agency in 1977. Although she "had never been a photographer herself," McNally was later employed as picture editor of Time Life’s Magazine Development Group in the early 1980s before serving as Fortune magazine's photo editor from 1986 to 2004. Former colleagues "recalled her immutable support for photographers in the field and her forthrightness in assessing" their journalism. "You never had to wonder where you or your work stood in her eyes," said Pancho Bernasconi, vice president for global news at Getty Images. "She loved great photography along with the brave and dedicated photographers who made those images." A resident of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., McNally is survived by two daughters, three grandchildren and a sister.

Insider, Parent Company Invest in Podcast Company, Other Ventures: 

Insider and parent company Axel Springer "are investing in a new podcast company called Spooler," Sara Fischer of Axios reported Monday. Under the agreement, Spooler "will co-produce a new podcast with Insider called 'The Refresh from Insider' using proprietary tech that makes it easier for producers to update podcast content with new segments after it's been published." The new company "will be the first of several joint investments from a new fund called 'Axel Springer Insider Ventures' (ASIV) that's focused on innovation in media," Fischer added. "We are likely to help start several new startups that will focus on different aspects of innovation in journalism," said Henry Blodget, Insider's chief executive. "And this is the first, but there will likely be others and we will put both some capital into them and give them operating guidance and strategic partners." According to Fischer, Spooler "is the brainchild of Blodget and podcast industry veterans Andy Bowers, co-founder of Slate Audio and Megaphone and James Boggs, formerly head of podcasts at Apple." Boggs will serve as chief executive, while Bowers will hold the title of chief creative officer and Blodget will serve on the company's board. The initial funding from ASIV is considered to be a seed round. Although Blodget says that the founders "decided it would be better to create a separate company to build the platform," Insider will work with Spooler on various podcasts. The venture's Refresh from Insider "will be a daily audio news brief that is updated throughout the day to keep pace with the news cycle," employing a proprietary technology that "stitches podcast episodes together in real-time from individually-produced audio segments." Blodget added: "There is a big hole in audio programming, which is real-time news and other playlist driven off programming. Currently we can't do that with podcast infrastructure because of the episodic nature of it."

Jury Finds Times Not Liable in Palin Suit:

A nine-person federal jury at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York "has rejected former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s libel suit against The New York Times, concluding that the newspaper is not legally liable for a 2017 editorial that she claimed unfairly linked her to a mass shooting six years earlier," Josh Gerstein of Politico reported Tuesday. The unanimous verdict came one day after Senior District Judge Jed Rakoff dismissed the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee's suit "because Palin had failed in his judgment to demonstrate actual malice on the part of the Times or its former editorial page editor James Bennet." Although Rakoff's announcement "prompted criticism from some legal experts," the judge said he "remained confident that the jurors had not learned of his decision." According to an earlier report by Gerstein, Rakoff "said he would continue to allow the jury to deliberate to a verdict, arguing that an appeal in the case seems inevitable and that the jury's verdict could be useful to the appeals court." His announcement "came after a trial that lasted a little more than a week and as the jury was in its second day of deliberations." In his ruling, Rakoff said that Palin's attorneys "failed to elicit enough evidence for a reasonable jury to conclude" that the politician "had met the 'actual malice' standard the Supreme Court established for libel suits against public figures in the landmark 1964 ruling New York Times Co. v. Sullivan." He added: "The Supreme Court made that balance and set a very high standard, and I don’t think that standard has been realized by plaintiff with respect to at least one aspect of the actual malice requirement. I don't think a reasonable juror could conclude that Mr. Bennet either knew the statements were false or that he thought the statements were false and he recklessly disregarded that high probability." According to Gerstein, the suit "was brought as prominent figures on the right [...] were expressing increasing frustration [with] the Times v. Sullivan framework" in the late 2010s; in recent years, United States Supreme Court Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch also "have called on their fellow justices to revisit that decision." However, New York's state legislature "adopted that Sullivan standard as the rule under New York state law," while "legal experts say that move makes the Palin case an unlikely vehicle for the high court to revisit the half-century-old rule."

Sanchez Succeeds Kovacs at The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate:

The Star Tribune's Rene Sanchez will succeed Peter Kovacs as editor of The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate, the publication announced late last week. Kovacs, who led the Baton Rouge-based Advocate "to an unprecedented expansion throughout southeast Louisiana" (culminating in its merger with The Times-Picayune) and the 2019 Local Reporting Prize, has decided to retire after nine years in the role. Sanchez, 56, has led the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune for the past eight years after serving as its managing editor, shepherding the paper to the 2013 Local Reporting Prize (for an investigation of infant deaths at day-care facilities) and the 2021 Breaking News Reporting Prize (for coverage of the death of George Floyd and its reverberations). A native of New Orleans' diverse Gentilly neighborhood, Sanchez graduated from Loyola University New Orleans and first worked in journalism for The Times-Picayune as a sports department clerk in the vicinity of Kovacs, then the newspaper's night city editor. Kovacs "was ousted in 2012 as the managing editor of the Picayune when that paper’s New York-based owner slashed its weekly print publication to three days and laid off half its news staff," the staff report added. "He and then-publisher Dan Shea, also a laid-off Picayune managing editor, spent the next half-decade building a powerful rival to the shrunken Picayune, The New Orleans Advocate." Prior to the 2019 merger, The Advocate "expanded westward with the Acadiana Advocate and built theadvocate.com as a state-wide news brand." After receiving the Pulitzer, the newspaper "launched a fundraising drive to underwrite investigative journalism, fulfilled its $1.5 million goal in 2021 — with support from the Ford Foundation — and doubled the size of its investigative staff" while also emphasizing environmental coverage through a grant from the Walton Foundation. "At a time of shrinking newsrooms, Peter was able to assemble a team that won a Pulitzer Prize," owner John Georges said. "It gives me added pleasure that while searching for a new editor, we were able to find a Louisiana native and Saints fan." Sanchez will begin work this spring alongside Kovacs, who will stay on for a year as a consultant and advisor.

Press Intimidation Suffuses 2022 Olympics:

Foreign correspondents "are speaking out after a Chinese security official pulled a Dutch reporter out of his live shot during the Olympic opening ceremony," highlighting renewed press intimidation in the country, Sara Fischer and Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of Axios reported Tuesday. Although the International Olympic Committee characterized the decision as an "isolated incident," the "press environment in China has deteriorated dramatically in the past two years," according to Fischer and Allen-Ebrahimian, as exemplified by the 2020 expulsion of journalists affiliated with several major American news organizations alongside other acts of "intimidation and physical violence." In a tweet, China-based BBC journalist Edward Lawrence added: "I'm sorry but this sort of thing is not an 'isolated event' and happens regularly to resident foreign media journalists based in China." The harassed journalist, NOS correspondent Sjoerd den Daas, offered his own account on the social media platform the next day: "[J]ust after we had gone live, I was forcefully pulled out of the picture without any warning by a plainclothes man wearing a red badge that read, 'Public Safety Volunteer.' He did not identify himself. When asked, they couldn't say what we had done wrong," he said. The broadcast eventually resumed from a nearby parking lot. Other journalists have reported the presence of "guides" assigned to follow their teams and security interference in potential interviews. "The atmosphere of intimidation is dramatically different from the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, when Chinese authorities made it easier for journalists all around the world to enter China for months leading up to the Olympics and allowed them to travel freely around the country, in what was seen as a sign of greater opening up to the world," Fischer and Allen-Ebrahimian continued. "In 2022, leaders in Beijing seem less interested in garnering approbation from Western democracies and their reporters and more interested in demonstrating that their rules matter most." Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong and former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post, also reflected on the change in tone: "In 2008 China still wanted to learn from the world even as it showcased its accomplishments and its civilization. Now they want the world to get used to Chinese power and to accept Xi's claim that his totalitarian rule is better than democracy."

Jason Epstein (1928-2022):

Venerable editor and publisher Jason Epstein died Friday at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. He was 93. Raised in Milton, Mass., Epstein moved to New York at the age of sixteen to attend Columbia University, where he stayed on for a master's degree in English. While employed as an editorial trainee by Doubleday in 1953, he devised the notion of republishing hardcover classics as more affordable paperbacks, precipitating the formation of the publisher's Anchor Books subsidiary. Over the arc of a lengthy career that encompassed high-profile editorial relationships (most notably at Random House, where he was editorial director from 1976 to 1995) with such luminaries as 1998 Fiction winner Philip Roth, Jane Jacobs and Gore Vidal, Epstein continued to chart a path as one of publishing's foremost innovators, securing the initial funding for critic Edmund Wilson's proposed Library of America venture in the early 1980s and later marketing the print on demand Espresso Book Machine as a co-founder of On Demand Books. During the 1962–1963 New York City newspaper strike, Epstein revived his long-germinating idea of founding an American version of the Times Literary Supplement as an alternative to the New York Times Book Review with a coterie of dinner party guests, including two-time Poetry winner Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick; after obtaining an appropriation from Lowell's trust fund, Epstein persuaded Harper's Associate Editor Robert B. Silvers and then-wife Barbara to serve as de facto co-editors. An "immediate literary success," according to the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times, the ensuing New York Review of Books was first published on February 1, 1963 and remains in print to this day, with Silvers and Epstein continuing to helm "the paper" for decades until their deaths; Hardwick, who died in 2007, was a relatively frequent contributor until the turn of the century. In addition to his editorial work, Epstein was an intermittent contributor to the Review and authored four books, including a history of the publishing business and “The Great Conspiracy Trial," an account of the Chicago Seven case. Following the dissolution of his marriage to Barbara Epstein (who later maintained a domestic partnership with 1985 Commentary winner Murray Kempton) in 1980, he was remarried to 2002 Explanatory Reporting contributor Judith Miller in 1993; she survives him, along with two children from his first marriage and three grandchildren.

Seattle Times Reaches Subscription Milestone Amid Revenue-First Goals:

The Seattle Times "now has 81,000 digital-only subscribers, establishing its position as one of America's leading metropolitan news titles for paid online readers," William Turvill of PressGazette reported Friday. According to Turvill, the newspaper (which was founded in 1891 and has remained owned by the Blethen family since 1896) "has grown its digital subscriptions total by 10% – from 73,000 – over the past 12 months" while also "[doubling] in three years from 41,000 in January 2019." Senior Vice President of Content Kati Erwert has asserted that the publication has managed to cultivate its pandemic-era growth without relying on discounts or other promotions. "I think that this is one of the follies of the industry – this volume chase," she said. "Strategically, we’ve looked at this in a very different way, where we talk about the sustainability of the size of our newsroom and the dollars that we need in terms of our long-term strategy. [We look at it from] a revenue standpoint, versus a 'we are chasing this volume number.' Because there are all kinds of terrible things that you can do to your long-term viability and sustainability that will drive that volume number. But deep, deep, deep discounting – is that strategically the right move in order to grow those subscribers, engagement, retain them and flip them to a high price point?” The vicissitudes of the business have forced many publishers to recalibrate expectations, with Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson eschewing the magazine's goal of reaching one million subscribers this year in favor of a $50 million revenue goal by 2023: "You can get to a million subs pretty easily – you can massively discount, right? If you set a goal solely on subscribers, it can move you in some harmful ways.” The Boston Globe (which implemented an early paywall, inspiring The Seattle Times' efforts) also has embraced a revenue-first approach. According to Huber, The Times "has always viewed digital subscription revenues as a replacement for declining print sales," forcing decisionmakers to contemplate the appropriate price point. "We realized that the end result was going to be digital and we needed to early on establish that our content is valuable regardless [of whether it is in print or online]," she said. "And from that standpoint we launched digital subscriptions – understanding that it’s worth a lot of money and we’re not going to discount it. We'd much rather have a lot less subscribers and a loyal base that paid a lot." Huber added that the publication's focus on one market offers an advantage vis-à-vis the "complexity" of managing chains. "I don’t envy them in the challenge of trying to identify those winds and then peanut butter them across your entire organization," she said. "I just think that that would be extraordinarily challenging because every market is so different. The kinds of content that resonates is just so different."