Still shaking my head about the #menews panel. Here's why.

Published at thePhoenix.com

I'm still shaking my head in dismay and disbelief after Monday's panel convened, allegedly, to discuss the future of Maine's newspapers. (Here's the video.) I've spent many years in the alternative and community press, and am well used to seeing frequent examples of the outright cluelessness and lack of vision at mainstream daily newspapers. It's helped form part of my theory about what's wrong with today's newspaper industry. (In brief, it's that they don't realize what strengths they have, they value what they shouldn't, and are too full of themselves to look around at the wreckage they inhabit and decide to clean out the pigsty.)

But after Monday, I'm actually reconsidering my view that the larger players in the media industry - even the larger players in Maine's media industry, who are tiny specks in the global media universe - are out of touch with reality. Now, I have begun to think they're operating in a fully alternate universe than the one in which I've been reporting and editing - and living - for my entire career.

Here are a few of the moments that continue to really shake me, and, in italics, why.

Tom Bell, Press Herald reporter and president of the paper's union, said the paper's plan for self-improvement now that it has been purchased by hedge-fund mogul Donald Sussman is to double its news staff from 8 to 16 reporters. In my professional life, I've never worked for an organization with that many reporters - and I've always worked at papers that scoop dailies on an extremely frequent basis. It's unclear to me that the solution to failing business models is to put out more of the same stenography mainstream dailies are famous for. That said, the PPH has hired two crackerjack reporters: Steve Mistler and Colin Woodard (the latter a now-former member of the Phoenix's freelance crew). If they're the mold for what's coming next, then that does bode well. But their advantage is their actual skill, not how many of them there are.

Bell also said, as he has in the past, that the reason Sussman bought the company is for "philanthropic reasons." So a daily paper that is still allegedly profitable (though less so than in years past) is now a charity? It's certainly unclear that charities are big innovators in the news space. Even "new" models like ProPublica and the anemic Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting (MCPIR here) aren't doing anything that has never before been done in the news business. They're operating investigative bureaus at a loss, seeking subsidy from other, profit-making endeavors. (In past cases, it was the classifieds department of the same company; here it's whatever their donors actually do to earn money.)

Tony Ronzio, director of new media at the Lewiston Sun Journal's parent company, Sun Media, said news organizations will survive because they're unbiased sources of information. I'd love to think that's true, but it's not a business model - and especially not in our present society, where people debate seemingly obvious facts like whether the Earth is getting warmer, or whether trickle-down economics ever actually help the people they're supposed to trickle down to. It's almost impossible to find unbiased information - and mainstream daily papers are one of the least likely places to find it, since their reporters' workloads are too high to allow genuine inquiry, and editors' stomachs are too weak to allow more than he-said-she-said-he-said exchanges on even the most basic of recounting of events.

Todd Benoit, director of news and new media at the Bangor Daily News, said that the BDN is offering blogs to important thinkers in Maine, such as political-science professor Amy Fried at UMaine. Those are people who would previously be sources for reported stories, he observed, who now can weigh in directly to the newspaper's audience. That is indeed an interesting model, and one many other papers have attempted. The problem is the potential for a newspaper's website to turn into an environment like a TV talk show, where allegedly important people pontificate without regard for the facts. Perhaps it was lack of time causing Benoit not to talk about an editing process, or the means by which the BDN picks its bloggers, but he seemed to be saying that the value of the newspaper reporter as an intermediary is diminishing, not remaining valuable.

Ronzio talked briefly about the economic impact of newspapers and their employees, observing in passing that printing and production jobs in newspapers are "nothing to do with the newsroom or news gathering. Those are blue-collar jobs." It was barely a decade ago that most reporters considered themselves blue-collar workers too. He's right that reporters now are more inclined to think of themselves as distinct from the working classes, and see more in common between themselves and the corporate-government elite that's been running amok since the 1980s. Those efforts have gathered speed in the last 10 years, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the lack of scrutiny has come at the same time as the detachment of daily journalists from their audiences.

Bell, responding to an inquiry about getting more young people reading the paper, suggested having a beat focusing on young people, rather than a geographic beat structure, like the Press Herald has. Perhaps he's choosing to forget the days Justin Ellis's "Generation NXT" column regularly made the rest of the Press Herald appear even more out-of-touch than expected by "the young people" (as Ellis's blog called those he intended to cover). Ellis is a nice guy, who had good ideas that were often hamstrung and neutered by myopic leadership. Maybe new ownership and management at the PPH would help. But that still ignores the fact that young people want to know about health care, the economy, education, politics, the environment, culture, and government. Which seems a lot like what non-young people want to know about. (And, for that matter, what people care about no matter where they live in a geographic beat structure.)

Bell also admitted that the Press Herald staff look at the Bangor Daily News and the Lewiston Sun Journal regularly, and said that's a change from the past. This is something that should give me hope, and should help me feel better about the state of Maine's newspapers. But the idea that the state's largest paper didn't even bother to regularly look at the second- and third-place papers is distressing. And the fact that it's new enough to be notable suggests it's not happening nearly enough yet. Bell also didn't mention that PPH reporters are well known for reading the community weekly newspapers in their coverage areas, and pretending they didn't get scooped by days or weeks when writing their own stories on subjects long since covered locally.

Benoit provided one of the only moments with a sense of urgency, when he said, "if newsrooms are evolving then advertising and marketing should be in full-scale revolution." Nobody talked about that at all, and from what's evident on the market and on the surface, Maine's mainstream newspapers are not even close. In fact, their newsrooms are farther ahead than their advertising and marketing. Which isn't actually saying much.

Terry Carlisle, general manager of the Ellsworth American, was perhaps the most obviously out-of-touch person on the panel. She outright scoffed at the idea of citizen journalism: "We're professionals . . . we don't need the help of people who are not trained to do it." It's never been clear to me that treating your customers as if they're helpless is a good business model. (Even hospitals know better than that.) And to outright refuse help? That's just stupidly arrogant. Admittedly, she works at a community weekly, rather than a mainstream daily. But none of the people sitting next to her even blinked when she said this, nor at her even more startling remarks.

Carlisle also claimed that young people aren't interested in newspapers; they only get interested later in life. National surveys show otherwise - and strongly otherwise. And that's in addition to the decades of success of alternative newspapers around the country, like the Portland Phoenix, whose core audience is in the group of people Carlisle suggests don't care about newspapers.

Carlisle also, separately, said that 18- to 24-year-olds "don't buy anything." Any of us who have ever been 18- to 24-year-olds know that's silly. If you're looking for expert advice, though, try the example of credit-card companies. They're extremely good at targeting people from whom they can make money, and they have for years been absolutely insane about getting college students to sign up for credit cards.

And Carlisle said she was dismayed by all the attention to lost circulation, saying that even after the drops, the Ellsworth American still has more readers in Hancock County than anyone else. She may be right about that - though the daily circ figures for the "mainstream" BDN and PPH are only barely above the circulation of the "alternative" Phoenix - but the problem is in how the circ drop combines with advertising rates. I'd bet none of the Maine papers has lowered ad rates, even while selling fewer eyeballs. Rather, they're in the position of trying to sell fewer eyeballs at higher rates. Sure, an ad in the Ellsworth American will reach more people in Hancock County than in any other publication, but why should it cost more than it did in the past, when it was an even better deliverer of advertising?

Carlisle had a very lucid moment at the very end, in which she said, "Nobody covers what we cover." This should give me hope - that perhaps people leading Maine's media outlets understand what they have that is valuable. But even Carlisle didn't seem to notice the importance of what she said. And certainly nobody else did. Of course, that statement isn't true for the PPH, BDN, and Sun Journal - not only are they all heavily reliant on wire copy (and on stories from the other papers under a shared-coverage agreement), but even the stuff they do cover is commonly covered by the local weeklies, often well before the dailies bother.

Bill Kuykendall, a senior lecturer in new media at UMaine (and a professor of mine when I was in grad school at the University of Missouri), observed that high-speed Internet access is expanding rapidly across Maine, thanks to the Three-Ring Binder project and UMaine's involvement in Gig-U. This is also something that should give me hope, except that none of the panelists even responded to this observation. That shows they don't understand the significance of the change that will come as their audiences move online even more quickly, and as mobile access to high-speed Internet gets even more widespread.

Kuykendall also asked the panel about moving to mobile apps, and what was possible for them to afford. Carlisle was the only one who answered the question -the Ellsworth American does have some mobile presence, she said. The folks from the dailies changed the subject. It's impossible to talk about the future of news without talking mobile, but that's what Maine's three largest daily papers are doing. Maybe they have something up their sleeves, but there was no sense along the lines of "we'll have something, but we can't tell you yet what it will be." Rather, the sense was, "Mobile? Who cares?"

There were a couple of bright points, though.

First was Bell's observation that Maine's papers are privately owned, carry little debt, and have owners who are involved locally. All of these are good starting points for organizations seeking to make changes. They're less likely to get bogged down in choosing a direction, more flexible at adapting, and largely unconstrained by outside economic forces. But being at a good starting point right now is WAY behind the rest of the industry's pack, and risks leaving Maine's media market - like its industrial market - as a backwater of little note.

And second was Ronzio's observation that the local community is what's going to support the newspapers, rather than any sort of national or regional advertising base or readership. He's right, and if even some of Maine's newspaper leaders are realizing this, they are approaching the starting gate on real positive change. But being at the starting line is still very far behind.

While I'm reluctant to end on a low note, the fact is I have a worse view of the mainstream press in Maine than I did before Monday. Not least is because I asked a question of the panel that I've been asking since 2009: Given what they're talking about as future changes (connecting with young readers, using social media, providing context and depth rather than just stenography), how will they compete with those news organizations, including the Portland Phoenix, that are already doing all of those things, and have been for years? There were jokes and criticisms, but no real ideas. As one person said afterward, it produced a lot of squirming, but no substantive responses.

Seeing the future: Small cities poised to thrive

Published in the Portland Phoenix

The future of America can be found not in its largest cities nor its deepest wilds, but in the small cities dotting its landscape, recovering from decades of neglect and economic ravaging. So writes Catherine Tumber in Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World, published late last year by MIT Press.

Tumber, a former senior editor at the Boston Phoenix, will be reading from her book and speaking about what her premise might mean to Maine, the country, and the world, at Longfellow Books on Thursday, April 26, at 7 pm. We caught up with her to get a taste of the future; here's an edited transcript of our conversation.

I KNOW YOU DIDN'T WRITE ABOUT MAINE IN THE BOOK, BUT IT SEEMS LIKE A LOT OF THE PRINCIPLES APPLY. Some of the principles apply. My book really tries to offer a vision for cities of smaller scale. One of the purposes is to restore cities on the size of Portland to their place as cities in the way that we think about cities.

WHEN WE THINK OF CITIES, WE THINK OF THE FIVE OR TEN LARGEST CITIES IN THE US AND THEY'RE BIG, BUT HOW MANY PEOPLE LIVE IN SMALL CITIES? I'M WONDERING IF IT'S NOT MORE THAN LIVE IN THE MAJOR CENTERS. It's hard to say, because demographers don't really collect the information in ways that make it simple to get at that number; they collect it based on the metropolitan area. Estimates have been as much as a third of the American population lives in smaller cities and their suburban areas, smaller metro areas. This affects a large number of people, who tend themselves to think they live in small towns.

Portland fits that profile but most of the cities that I look at have troubles that Portland doesn't have, so that's very much to Portland's advantage.

YOU TALK ABOUT AS BEING IMPORTANT TO REVITALIZING THESE RUST BELT CITIES FOOD SYSTEMS, ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS, "INTERESTING PEOPLE" — WHICH MEANS NOT JUST IMMIGRANTS AND PEOPLE FROM OTHER CULTURES BUT ALSO A PLACE THAT PEOPLE WITH CULTURAL INTERESTS AND INVOLVEMENTS WANT TO BE. THOSE STRIKE ME AS THINGS THAT PORTLAND HAS AND HAS WORKED TO DEVELOP. Portland has been unusually attentive to its cultural institutions and its support of artists and art institutions; because the city depends so much on tourism, that makes sense. That is very much a strength.

Also though much of the economy is based on tourism, in the age of global warming, which is nipping at our heels, we aren't going to be able to sustain the sort of long supply chains that have been a part of globalization and that have allowed us to outsource so much of our work. Portland may be in a position to recapture some of its older 19th century productive work.

One of the casualties of thinking of these places as small towns is that it misses the fact that a city of 66,000 is a significant urban market. If you only think in terms of large markets like New York City or Chicago you miss the opportunities to market for a local economy.

Certainly large cities can support more competing services. One of the strengths of smaller cities based on their industrial history and the skills that still exist in their population is that they're suited more for the productive green economy. They could produce for the foreign export market while also participating in a more localized consumer-based economy.

Corporate Welfare Watch: King-BIW deal resurfaces during tax-incentive scrutiny

Published on thePhoenix.com

Bath Iron Works staff subsidize their own jobs as a result of a 15-year-old deal now coming under criticism from a national watchdog group. In 1997, Bath Iron Works threatened to leave Maine in search of greener pastures. In exchange for staying — and agreeing to invest $200 million in its shipyard here — lawmakers and then-governor Angus King agreed to pay BIW as much as $60 million over the years between then and 2018.

The payment comes even more directly from state coffers than if Augusta sent BIW a check. The company deducts state income tax from workers' paychecks, but from July 1 to the end of each year, BIW pockets the money, rather than the usual practice of turning it over to the state treasury.

Six years before that deal ends, it has been pinpointed as one of the biggest such handouts by Good Jobs First, a national watchdog group studying economic-development incentives. A recent report says the BIW tax break is the 14th-largest nationwide case of workers subsidizing their own corporations.

BIW is the only recipient of the state's custom-made Shipbuilding Facility Tax Credit, which is capped at $3.5 million per company per year. Nearly 100 other Maine companies take advantage of similar deals, under Employment Tax Increment Financing arrangements, which this year are slated to let companies keep $7.1 million of their workers' tax withholdings.

Maine is one of 16 states that has such a program (and one of six that has two), projected to cost Mainers $10.2 million in tax revenue this year alone — cash that would ordinarily be sent to the treasury but instead is kept by companies.

Good Jobs First research director Philip Mattera admits that it's "kind of an abstract issue" his group is worried about in this study. In other studies, he observes, "We're critical of a lot of these subsidy programs in general. They often go to companies that don't need them." He calls the tax-withholding rebates "even worse" than other kinds of corporate welfare because it opens up the opportunity for even more, and larger subsidies; states get much more money from income-tax withholding than from corporate taxes, and so have more cash to hand out if they can tap that source before it ever arrives in the state treasury.

He says the structure of the tax break — requiring specific investment over a specific timetable, and expanding or contracting the annual amount of the rebate depending on actual employment levels — means it's better than it might be, but is still too closely linked to workers' earnings for his group to be comfortable.

Jay Wadleigh, vice-president of Local S6, the biggest union operating at BIW, says workers are well aware of the arrangement. "We lobbied with (the company) to get it," he recalls. "What (lawmakers) did helped the shipyard," promoting investment and saving jobs. He notes that BIW's chief competitor, Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi, also gets state subsidies.

He observed that while Good Jobs Now criticizes the form of the tax break, Maine could have given BIW the same amount by collecting all the workers' taxes and then sending a check from Augusta, and workers wouldn't object then, either.

Todd Gabe, an economics professor at the University of Maine who studies economic development, says business leaders care less about taxes than politicians often think, and says studies of government-subsidy programs are "mixed" as far as effectiveness.

The BIW and ETIF credits are the only corporate handouts in Maine that are actually tied to employment numbers and salaries. State officials have for years given loan guarantees, tax rebates, and other financial incentives to companies without promises of new jobs or decent wages.

The biggest such program, the Business Equipment Tax Reimbursement plan, is designed to reward investment by refunding from state coffers money companies pay in local property taxes for their equipment and machinery. In 2011, BETR gave companies a total of $55,263,656. Eleven companies got more than $1 million each in refunds from the state; of those, only LL Bean ($1 million) is headquartered in Maine. Six are out-of-state, including the biggest winner, Verso Paper ($4.3 million), BIW ($3.2 million), and Walmart ($1 million). The remaining four are owned by companies in other countries, like Nestle Waters North America (owner of Poland Spring; $1.9 million).

And these are hardly the only handouts the state offers. There are dozens of tax breaks on the books in Maine, all detailed in Maine Revenue Services reports (issued every other year, most recently in 2011). Lance Tapley analyzed the first such report on these so-called "tax expenditures" for the Portland Phoenix in 2008 (see "Tax Break Heaven") and found that of the state's $3.4 billion in tax breaks that year (an amount almost exactly the size of the state's actual spending), companies got $682 million, and wealthy Mainers got $808 million. Poor people got $157 million in tax breaks, and the middle class saw about half the total tax-break benefit, or $1.7 billion.

Press Releases: More questions, some answers

Published in the Portland Phoenix; additional info published at thePhoenix.com

We know a lot more now about the deal that handed Donald Sussman, the hedge-fund mogul, progressive philanthropist, and husband of Chellie Pingree, 75 percent of thePortland Press Herald and its siblings.

First, we know HOW THE DEAL CHANGED, in less than two months, from a $3.3-million loan worth five percent of the company into a $3.3-million cash purchase of three-quarters of the equity. Greg Kesich, a columnist for the Press Herald who is the vice-president of the Portland Newspaper Guild and holds one of two union seats on the company's board of directors, says Sussman's proposal for a loan "didn't work for the private-equity investors," who wanted "a lot of guarantees about how they were going to get out." So the company diluted existing shares — including the employees who own part of the company. "We're part of the 25 percent that just shrunk, that used to be 100 percent," Kesich says. How come? Easy: "Everybody's betting that a smaller share of something is better than a big share of nothing."

Second, we know THE BUSINESS PLAN HAS NOT CHANGED. While union president Tom Bell was dismissive of a proposed takeover plan by Chris Harte, a former PPHpresident and heir to the Harte-Hanks media fortune, because it was "too reliant on print" and didn't include enough investment in new technology. (Also, it would have required crushing concessions from the union.) It's clear the existing model isn't working: circulation and ad revenue have declined for years. Kesich says the company will invest the new cash in a major technology upgrade that union president Tom Bell has described as integrating online and in-print publishing, as well as modern software for advertising sales and accounting. Bell suggests the move will take the company from running way behind in the media industry to being in front of the pack.

Third, UNION-SOUGHT EMPLOYEE RAISES HAVE NOT YET BEEN NEGOTIATED. Wage increases were tabled until this year in the contract approved last year. Kesich says they'll come up in the middle of this year. The rest of the contract is still in force as well, Kesich says, until its original expiration date in June 2013.

Fourth, we can be reasonably sure SUSSMAN ISN'T DOING THIS TO CONTROL A MESSAGE or push a political agenda. (Seriously, as has been noted by others, if he wanted to push a political message, would he buy a newspaper or ads on television?) "He says that he's investing in a community asset and he considers journalism to be a public good, as well as a business," Kesich says. "It benefits everybody whether they read it or not." (So declining circulation shouldn't bother Sussman.) In fact, Kesich suggests, "this is more a philanthropic move" than a business one, though he says Sussman wants the paper to be "self-sustaining."

• That's a lot of good info, but questions remain:

The Bangor Daily News has reported that CRG Partners Group, a Boston-based firm "specializing in restructuring troubled companies," was brought in to reorganize in the wake of Connor's departure, and was looking for $10 million in investments to pay off debt, and an additional $5 million for operating cash. SUSSMAN'S CONTRIBUTION IS TINY compared with those goals. (Not to mention a pending lawsuit over $125,000 in allegedly unpaid bills for paper.) Will $3.3 million be enough to turn a struggling company into a successful one?

While we take Sussman at his word that he'll stay out of editorial decisions, Kesich says "he's going to have a hand in making business decisions." WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BUSINESS CHOICES IMPACT EDITORIAL coverage? That's unclear — while Sussman has said in a written statement that he'll trust the editors and managers hired by the previous owners, at some point they'll leave and he'll hire their replacements. Kesich asks skeptics to "look at what we do and evaluate what we do."

Read this story online to learn more questions — some with answers.

Jeff Inglis can be reached at  jinglis@phx.com.

Addendum

My column this week has some questions — and some answers — about the new incarnation of MaineToday Media, the owner of the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, the Kennebec Journal, and the Central Maine Morning Sentinel.

I ran out of room in the paper to give you all the info I had, so here’s an addendum. (Also, I’m attempting to get an interview with Donald Sussman; fingers crossed on that!)

There’s been a lot of talk about EDITORIAL INTEGRITY as a result of this deal, in which Donald Sussman has bought 75 percent of the company for $3.3 million. We take Sussman at his word that he won’t get involved in the editorial board and daily news operations; if he proves us wrong, we’ll let you know. Also, Greg Kesich, the union veep and PPH columnist I spoke to this week promises, as union prez Tom Bell has in other interviews, that the union will advocate for journalistic principles if issues arise.

On that note, we already know that SUSSMAN WILL BE IN THE NEWS A LOT MORE than he is used to, as a result of this deal. He’s normally just a good-guy character, donating millions to progressive and community causes around the state. Now he’s opening himself to criticism, ridicule, and general widespread attention. The paper is looking at how best to handle DISCLOSURES ABOUT HIS OWNERSHIP when dealing with stories that might relate to him or his interests — or his wife and her political career. While under Richard Connor, that sort of owner-disclosure was rare (“we were told not to do it,” Kesich says), but since Sussman has gotten involved, that information has been regularly inserted in stories about Pingree.

What does the purchase price mean for THE COMPANY’S TOTAL VALUATION? Probably very little. It’s definitely not as simple as saying if $3.3 million equals three-fourths of the company, then the whole thing is worth $4.4 million. For one thing, the company owns land and a building in South Portland, valued by that city at $12.1 million (despite that number, it sold in 2009 for $7 million as part of the Blethens’ exit). The building is home to a printing press and other equipment valued at $6.8 million. And there are subscriber and advertiser databases, which are worth money to marketers, as well as the archival records, which are worth something to collectors and libraries. In the end, though, any company — like a home — is actually worth what it can be sold for, at the future date when it actually sells. So any calculation is unclear at best.

SUSSMAN HASN’T BEEN TO THE PRESS HERALD OFFICES yet. “He hasn’t set foot in the office yet,” Kesich said Friday. “I’m hoping that he will,” because employees whose jobs he saved want to meet him.
Say what you will about Richard Connor (we’ve sure said a lot here) and no-longer-prospective owner Chris Harte: both are extremely experienced at running profitable news operations. Their plans (Connor’s as implemented; Harte’s as proposed) included major changes that reduced the power, scope, and financial commitment to the union and its members. Which means they either saw NO WAY TO PROFITABILITY WITHOUT CUTTING union-related costs, or saw other ways but chose extended combat with the union as the easiest. Sussman has no experience managing a media company; will he find a way to preserve the union that the other guys, with decades more experience, couldn’t?

And lastly, WILL RICHARD CONNOR GET AWAY WITH HIS PLUNDER? He purchased the company for cheap, sold off almost all its real-estate, cut costs, allegedly rearranged the books to his own advantage, and then left town. Does he have personal — or criminal — liability for changes at the paper that slashed jobs, the salaries of those remaining, the paper’s reputation, and ultimately the community’s well-being?

Kids on film: Big top on the small screen

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Circus Smirkus, the Vermont-based youth circus that visits Maine every summer, will appear on Maine televisions in a documentary highlighting both the performances and the struggles — physical and financial — of a small traveling show.

Circus Dreams will be shown in two versions — the 90-minute full-length film and an edit of that footage down to one hour — on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network's television stations this month.

Signe Taylor, a producer for PBS's Zoom, has put together her second child-related documentary (the first was about the Iraq war's effect on Iraqi families), following the 2006 summer season of the circus from auditions through training, and on to 70 performances over seven weeks. The twist of this circus is that performers are between the ages of 10 and 18, which obviously improves the show's appeal to children, and is part of the draw to its annual performances in Freeport and Kennebunkport (this year August 6-7 and 9-10, respectively) as well as elsewhere around New England.

None of what's shown is truly startling or eye-opening; the film is simply a view into a world where teenagers put on makeup and costumes and run around a show ring trying to get other people to enjoy themselves. Which is very much like simply being a teenager.

As you might expect in a story about teenagers, there are a goodly amount of clichés. Some lines, for example, have likely been spoken by anyone who ever went to camp as a teen and really connected with the people who were there: "It's kind of relaxing to know that there are other people in the world who are as strange as you," says trouper Jacob Tischler of his first summer with the circus. And there are tears at the finale as the performers part ways at summer's end and return to places where they again feel like outcasts.

It's worth checking out this weekend, but in truth, the better version to see is the longer one (both feature cameos by Maine's Fritz Grobe, of Eepybird). The shorter version (which I watched first, as people who watch both showings on MPBN will do) feels rushed. Even just the extra 30 minutes in the full-length piece allows significantly greater depth and insight.

It introduces more of the performers as characters, shows more of the backstory behind these kids and their summer-long run-away-to-the-circus exploits. It also spends more time with the adults, paying attention to things like casting, logistics, and finance — but the central drama is really just the kids challenging themselves.

There is a subplot showing the financial tenterhooks by which the company clings to existence, but it seems added in an attempt to inject dramatic tension into this otherwise heartwarming, smiley film.

Circus Dreams | by Signe Taylor | one-hour version on MPBN's regular TV stations: April 5 @ 10 pm, April 7 @ 11 am | 90-minute version on MPBN's World channel (10.3 on the digital spectrum and TimeWarner channel 173 in Cumberland and York counties; see mpbn.net for channel information elsewhere): April 24 and 25, times TBD | mpbn.net | circusdreams.net

The Church on Marriage: Over two thousand years, an argument against same-sex matrimony has been built. We break it down.

Published in Out In Maine


It may surprise you to know that the Catholic Church teaches that marriage isn’t actually about the two people who are “joined in holy matrimony” on their wedding day.

Nope — it’s about their offspring. This is perhaps some of the common ground the Church has found with theological apostates (evangelical Protestants and Mormons) with which it has allied in the past decade, spending immense amounts of capital — moral, political, and financial — to block the incoming tide of same-sex marriage.

Nevertheless, it’s worth exploring the reasoning behind the Church’s objections to same-sex marriage. Partly this may count as what political operatives call “opposition research” — a Sun Tzu-inspired attempt to truly understand the opponent, the more easily to emerge victorious. But more than that, the Catholic Church has been talking about marriage longer than just about anyone. Its arguments have been ground by the ages, sharpened by insights of thousands of scholars, and honed into a fine edge by experience. Let’s see what that effort has produced.

Appealing to tradition
Brian Souchet, director of the Office for the Protection and Defense of Marriage with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland (which covers the entire state of Maine) opens what will become a nearly two-hour interview by enumerating the social ills that the Church sees in the modern world: high cohabitation without marriage, single parenting, kids without involved fathers, kids born out of wedlock. He calls these all “results of a breakdown in marriage,” by which he means the modern American societal tendency to “ignore the fact as men and women that [marriage is] not just about us men and women.”

In one sense he’s right. Despite Church teachings to the contrary, the divorce rate is as high as ever; couplehood, pregnancy, and childrearing are happening outside married male-female couples all the time.
Beyond the possibly self-evident reason that not everyone believes what the Church teaches, not even all Catholics do, it turns out.

“If the faithful don’t understand the significance of marriage . . . that’s where we need to start,” Souchet says, beginning to lay out the history of the Church’s teachings on marriage. In sum, they are that “love and commitment is necessary but not sufficient” for marriage. What’s required are a man and a woman together permanently, with “openness to bringing new life into the world,” he says.

He correctly observes that Catholic teaching has expressed this view since almost the very beginning, and refers me to Pope Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii — which itself refers to an 1880 encyclical by Pope Leo XIII, a 1789 letter of Pope Pius VI, the decisions of the 16th-century Council of Trent, and to Saint Augustine’s writings in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The contribution of Souchet’s own employer, Bishop Richard Malone, to this 1600-plus-year history is a pastoral letter entitled “Marriage: Yesterday — Today — Always” in which Malone argues that marriage is defined in the universal “natural law” as between a man and a woman, and expresses concern that people are trying to change that.

“We can look throughout antiquity and see marriage as between a man and a woman,” Souchet says — and he’s right. Here again, though, he — and Catholic doctrine — chooses not to observe the same-sex relationships that were present “throughout antiquity,” though admittedly those couplehoods may have lacked the specific label of “marriage.”

Following the thread
Souchet claims that “the true test” of same-sex marriage is: “Can this new notion of marriage . . . stand up on its own without being forced on people by the law?” Same-sex attractions and relationships have endured and recurred through the ages, despite being outlawed for most of the last two millennia. The answer to his question is “Yes.”

Bishop Malone’s pastoral letter also asserts that marriage has always been about children. He cites as evidence “the writings of the third-century jurist of the Roman Empire, Modestinus, who captured the common understanding of marriage with the following definition: ‘Marriage is the union of a man and a woman, a consortium for the whole of life involving the communication of divine and human rights.’ ” No mention of children there.

Then Malone cherry-picks United Nations proclamations to his advantage. He cites the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to support his claim that children are “meant to have a mother and a father.” (In fact, the Convention mentions only “parents.”)

Malone goes on to claim that marriage “is not a ‘right’ that can be given or denied.” That ignores another UN document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states clearly: “Men and women . . . have the right to marry.” (The Declaration says nothing about same-sex marriage, but its inclusive intent is obvious, since it confers the marriage right “without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion.”)

Malone also formally declares what most people already know — that biological ability to procreate is not, in fact, a precondition for marriage. This is in keeping with longtime Church teachings, but undermines the notion that a marriage can only be between two partners whose sexual intercourse can fertilize an egg. “An infertile couple continues to manifest” the full blessings of marriage, he writes, including being able to care for children by adoption or volunteering.

Why does the Church care this much about marriage? There is a worldly reason in addition to the holy ones, and it’s self-perpetuation of the Church itself. Pope Pius XI makes this clear in Casti Connubii:

“God wishes men to be born not only that they should live and fill the earth, but much more that they may be worshippers of God,” he writes, going on to say that children are “a talent committed to [parents] by God . . . to be restored to God with interest on the day of reckoning.” (It’s worth noting that Casti Connubii also puts the Church squarely in support of a living wage, redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, and government programs to help the needy.)

Idealism versus realism
Beyond its logical failings, though, the fundamental flaw in the argument espoused by the Church (and Souchet) is that their ideal of marriage is substantially different from how marriage is actually entered into, carried out, and experienced in the world today.

For example, Souchet says, offering a quaint picture unreflective of an America in which even a large majority of Catholic women use some form of birth control, “given enough time, a male-female relationship will produce children.”

Certainly the Church is entitled to teach that its followers adhere to a certain standard, real, ideal, or otherwise — and to deny membership to dissenters.

The problems arise when that standard is applied to civil law. The Church is well aware that this distinction exists, and hasn’t objected though (to choose an example relating to marriage) civil law lets non-Catholics be just as married as Catholics, despite Church teaching to the contrary.

In writing about Church law and civil law, Malone writes that both descend — independently — from what philosophers have long called “natural law,” the unwritten Way Things Actually Are. He says our best clues about what natural law truly is are in Church law and civil law, noting that both have evolved — separately — toward what their respective leaders have come to believe are more perfect reflections of universal truths.

That’s when he gets his wires crossed. While the Church hierarchy gets to set policy in its realm, the people of a democracy are where that system’s power lies.

A reader can almost hear Malone thundering as he winds down his letter: “Those who would attempt to redefine marriage to include or be made analogous with any other kind of human relationship are suggesting that the permanent union of husband and wife, the unique pattern of spousal and familial love, and the generation of new life are now only of relative importance rather than being fundamental to the existence and well-being of society as a whole.”

In reality, society has the power to, and may well in November, decide at the ballot box that there are, in fact, other relationships that are of equal significance to marriages recognized by the Catholic Church.
Souchet argues that such a decision would move Maine law farther away from natural law. So I ask: Did the Church — and civil law — get the natural law wrong?

“We sure had a long time to get it right,” Souchet laughs. He pauses. “If we did, we’ve been getting the natural law wrong for millennia.”

Half-lives: Mad Horse's cutting choice of Zindel's Gamma Rays

Published in the Portland Phoenix

When a group of tender seeds are exposed to toxic radiation, the ones receiving the smallest dose develop normally; those that are moderately exposed mutate into larger-than-life oddities, and the ones getting the heaviest dose wither and die. That's the finding of the science experiment that gives The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds its title.

It is also the heartbreakingly human lesson imparted by watching Paul Zindel's Pulitzer and Obie-winning play, produced by Mad Horse Theatre Company at Lucid Stage, under the direction of Chris Horton.

In an intricately run-down apartment converted from a former market (designed by Stacey Koloski), Beatrice (Christine Louise Marshall) is raising her two teenage daughters — shrinking-violet Tillie (Veronica Druchniak) and her older sister, the mercurial Ruth (Ruth Gray) — with an attitude that could easily be called radioactive. Self-absorbed, neglectful, and angry at the world, Beatrice is also mocking and belittling of her daughters — and, as written, even more darkly menacing when she's been drinking.

She blames her daughters for her life not turning out how she hoped: widowed, unemployed, and forced to take in elderly boarders on the brink of death for the pittance of cash it earns, Beatrice goes so far as to call her children "two stones around her neck."

In a play that is as allegorical as it is expository, it is the radioactive Beatrice herself who lives a self-professed "half-life," and condemns her daughters to the same. She cuts them in half with her mockery; she keeps the bright, science-fascinated Tillie home from school; she allows Ruth to discover one of the boarders dead — a trauma that gives Ruth recurring convulsions.

When Tillie is announced as a finalist in the school science fair, Ruth becomes her biggest cheerleader, berating her mother with excitement about the family's sole success. The revelation also ignites a spark of pride in Beatrice, brightening her countenance — until her past returns to haunt her, extinguishing the flame and sending the family into a deeper spiral as the play ends.

The contrast between Beatrice's moods, however, is not as sharp as it could be; Marshall's character is too upbeat at the beginning — and not in the "killing with kindness" sort of way that would end up making her creepier. She's also not dark enough in the middle and the end, leaving the menacing shifts largely in the audience's interpretation of the language, rather than in the emotional energy coming from the stage.

When Nanny (Muriel Kenderdine) appears, serving the play only as an early target for Beatrice's scorn and derision — the role has no lines, and only a couple of facial expressions: blankness, and a smile (twice) — Marshall's tone and face are too friendly to give weight to her biting threats and scorn. And a laugh line about murdering the family pet and causing Ruth more convulsions got some chuckles, but carried none of the sinister intimidation it should have dripped with.

Marshall has been darkly menacing to great effect many times on Portland stages; the choice to moderate her character's extremism has another casualty, too: flattening the performance of the only experienced actor on the stage for most of the play. Druchniak and Gray are high-school students, and talented ones: Druchniak's ability to utterly disappear on stage borders on Cheshire-like; Gray's flip-flopping moods seem very genuine teenager. While their characters have some irregularity written in, their inexperience accounts for some additional unevenness.

Mad Horse has chosen a play that is both strong and deep enough to make the production powerful, and the final scene, just after the dread moment arrives when the effects of the toxic radiation truly begin to blossom, is both poignant and pitiful — leaving the audience to ponder, after the blackout, what in fact remains of these half-lives.

THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS | by Paul Zindel | directed by Chris Horton | produced by Mad Horse Theatre Company | at Lucid Stage, in Portland | through April 1 | 207.899.3993
 

Driving forward: Behrens's solid second effort

Published at thePhoenix.com


If there is a male equivalent to "chick lit," Peter Behrens's latest novel, The O'Briens, is probably it, a detail-rich, character-driven historical novel that lightly touches issues of family loyalty and individual aspirations. Less weighty, and less gripping, than his 2006 debut novel, The Law of Dreams, the present tale follows Joe O'Brien, the patriarch of the title family, from childhood in the late 19th century into his dotage in 1960.

Industrial and military history appear almost as characters — as does New York City, regularly and sometimes jarringly — guiding the human players along their courses, which are more beautifully embellished straight lines than twisting paths of plot.

Sadly, the deep echoes of Joe's failure to make his peace with a merciful action taken in his youth require Behrens to shallow out other aspects of his story. An early metaphor serves as an example: Joe gets engaged and then, moments later, he and his fiancée literally watch two people die in a plane crash. The moment is beautifully drawn, though, with precision and grace amid the tragedy.

THE O'BRIENS | by Peter Behrens | Pantheon Books | 384 pages | $25.95

Living history: An object lesson in research as storytelling

Published in the Portland Phoenix


John Brown's body may now lie a-mouldering in his grave, as the song suggests, but in life the Connecticut-born Kansan settler who led an assault on a federal installation in Virginia almost never stopped moving in his passionate zeal to rid the United States of the scourge of slavery.

In Midnight Rising, historian and master narrator Tony Horwitz tracks Brown, who was the country's most famous domestic terrorist until Timothy McVeigh, on his tireless travels between the western frontier where he began his campaign, the northeastern cities from which he drew financial support, and finally to the all-out strike near the national capital that led to his hanging in 1859.

In a meticulously researched account, Horwitz demonstrates his first-rate ability to weave documents together to form a compelling, well-rounded picture of how Brown's life, actions, and legacy resonated such that two years after his execution, he achieved his goal: to spark an armed conflict that would sweep slavery from America's shores, an epic battle that ensures Brown's soul is indeed marching on, even up to the present.

MIDNIGHT RISING: JOHN BROWN AND THE RAID THAT SPARKED THE CIVIL WAR | by Tony Horwitz | Henry Holt and Company | 365 pages | $29

Press Releases: Distant view

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Of all the coverage of Olympia Snowe's decision not to run for re-election this year, the Maine media should have been expected to handle it best. Close to home, with insider knowledge available and solid connections to sources on the ground — that's the best preparation for a breaking political story.

Sadly, though, the in-state coverage was neither as thoughtful nor as comprehensive as were the news items produced by out-of-state outlets. As I've said before, the Lewiston Sun Journal, mostly in the person of tireless reporter Steve Mistler, has had the best coverage in Maine (see thePhoenix.com/AboutTown for more).

But the cost of the other papers' sluggishness (and Mistler's comprehensive updating of lists of people taking out petitioning papers from the Secretary of State's office) has been a lack of exploration of the mess all these prospective successors to Snowe are vying to get into.

POLITICO broke the story of intra-party warfare going from cold to hot about the same time as Snowe's announcement, with Utah Senator Orrin Hatch targeting Snowe in a mailing seeking support for his reelection campaign, suggesting her moderation was undesirable even to a longtime friend and Senate colleague.

North Carolina political scientist Jonathan Weiler noted in the HUFFINGTON POST that reporting of Snowe's complaints against partisanship unfairly placed blame for polarization across the political spectrum, when it squarely belongs in the Republican column, where "right-wing extremism has gone mainstream."

STATE OF ENLIGHTENMENT political blogger Joe Joffe observed that Snowe's decision came in the midst of a massive battle over women's health and related issues — a set of questions that had largely been settled in moderate ways under the George W. Bush administration but have resurfaced because of rabid extremists' opposition to Obama's continuation of those policies.

And Maine's media also refused to depart from Snowe's own narrative that she was successful at being a moderate and in creating opportunities for real progress. Jonathan Chait in NEW YORK MAGAZINE, however, argued that while Snowe has been given great power in many political debates, "She has used it, on the whole, quite badly." That piece specifically criticized her for using the concepts of moderation and centrism not as a means to a public-policy end, but as "a matter of political self-preservation."

It takes a broad media diet to uncover reporting on all the various ways in which Snowe's decision either changes the political landscape or sheds light on how that landscape has already been indelibly altered. But you won't hear about that from any of Maine's daily newspapers, who repeatedly act as if they can — and should — be the only places Mainers get their news. (Distressingly, they often are.)

• Also missing from the local media was much digging into WHY SNOWE MADE THIS DECISION when she did.

The best summary of that reasoning came in a single paragraph at the end of a front-page New York Times article by Congressional reporter Jonathan Weisman, published the morning after Snowe's bombshell. It's worth reproducing in full:

"Ms. Snowe may have just grown fed up. At raucous Republican caucuses in February, her name was greeted with jeers from some Tea Party activists. Republicans had seized control of the governor's mansion and the State Legislature in 2010, but for the most ardent conservatives, it was not enough, Ms. [Georgia] Chomas [a cousin and close confidante of Snowe] said. Ms. Snowe had turned 65. Ms. Chomas's mother, who was like a mother to Ms. Snowe, had died, followed by the mother of Ms. Snowe's husband, John R. McKernan Jr., and the mother of her late husband, Peter Snowe."

Elegantly presented, well-reported information with strong sourcing close to the senator. That's what Mainers got by seeking media from farther afield.

Rating the #Snowe coverage - print and online

Published at thePhoenix.com

In the hours and days following last Tuesday’s shocker announcement that US Senator Olympia Snowe will not seek a fourth term in the Senate, the breaking-news ability of Maine’s mainstream press has been stretched in ways it hasn’t been in recent memory. This was no disaster/fire/accident story, where flames are visible and the players all gather in one place.

Rather, it was a political story, touched off by an email blast, with players around the state (and around the nation, if you count the major parties’ senate-campaign power brokers). And much of the early reporting was gut reaction (the governor swore; Dems rejoiced) followed by speculation about what it meant for not only the US Senate race in Maine, but nationally for the balance of power in the Senate, as well as statewide, regarding Congressional seats, and legislative ones too, as every political climber in the state saw real daylight above them for the first time in many years.

As such, it was a prime opportunity for the daily newspapers to step up and embrace what mainstream media outlets still quaintly call “new media.” Which is to say, the power of the Internet to reach and engage their audiences.

Unsurprisingly, it was the Sun Journal, led by energetic “new media director” Tony Ronzio, that led the pack, posting an early collection of reaction and preliminary analysis on Storify. (It included the pair of tweets breaking the news, from former SJ political reporter Rebekah Metzler, now at US News and World Report.)

The day after Snowe’s announcement, he hosted a CoverItLive chat with various political-watchers and several readers. The conversation was kept moving by interjections of facts, often provided by Sun Journal political reporter Steve Mistler (who also blogged up a storm) and regional editor Scott Thistle, but also supplemented by UMaine Campus editor Michael Shepherd. It was also supplemented by a series of ongoing polls on thought-provoking questions — about who can win (Michaud and Cutler tied, then Pingree, Summers, and King; Raye’s got no shot ), who in DC will miss Snowe most (Collins over Obama, with Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid tied for third), and who Snowe’s announcement hurts most (GOP over Dems, independents not at all)

The Bangor Daily News came in second, with strong contributions from the political blogs PineTreePolitics and PollWays (though neither is written by a staffer, and PollWays writer Amy Fried, a UMaine political scientist, was in the Sun Journal’s online chat), and a rudimentary — and uninteresting — online poll asking if readers were “sad to see Olympia Snowe leave her Senate seat.”

The Press Herald had a weak online showing, with several reported stories and columns, but for online-extras, there was just a slideshow of file photos of Snowe through the years and MaineToday Digital executive editor Angie Muhs’s Storify collection, which started about five hours after the news actually broke, leaving her posting just a bunch of reactive and speculative tweets, though admittedly grouped by theme (“caught many off guard,” “political speculation,” “reaction from those already in the race,” “Snowe was quickly praised,” and the like).

In related news, the TV stations’ general managers just saw their finances perk up considerably. Whatever happens, there’s going to be a massive amount of money spent on TV ads. How much? Snowe herself had about $3 million in the bank — to defend a secure seat. Now that it’s open, the numbers will be astronomical.