Press Releases: Billions and billions

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Billionaire John Henry bought the Boston Globe earlier this month. Billionaire Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post just days later.

They’re following a path blazed by billionaire Sam Zell, who bought the Tribune Company, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, in 2007, and ran it into bankruptcy; billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Wall Street Journal the same year; and billionaire Warren Buffett, who in 2012 bought two groups of newspaper companies: Lee Enterprises, publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Media General, whose flagship is the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Also on that path is billionaire Donald Sussman, who bought the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, the Kennebec Journal, and the Morning Sentinel in 2012.

Folks with that kind of money often aren’t too fond of being told what to do, but they also didn’t get to the top by reinventing other people’s broken wheels. Where Sussman’s paper has paved the way, Henry and Bezos should consider following.

Here’s what these billionaires should do — not just because fellow ten-to-the-ninthers are doing it, but because it works.

First, take themselves out of the picture. Sussman, as a hedge-fund manager, is probably more used to this sort of thing than Henry, who owns media-magnet properties including the Boston Red Sox and the Liverpool Football Club. And Bezos, as founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is hardly a stranger to the spotlight. Zell, for his part, kept putting the spotlight on himself; Murdoch can’t seem to duck away. Buffett’s holdings are too far-flung for him to be in the local mix too regularly. But then, if Bezos allots his attention according to financial proportions, the Post will take up 1 percent of his time — that’s how much he spent of his $25-billion fortune to buy it.

The more the news, and the paper as a whole, are independent of the heavy hitter behind the scenes, the better for all involved. Readers will appreciate getting information through an editorial process with integrity (which should definitely include ownership disclosures in every story where that’s relevant). Journalists will dig for truth and understanding rather than spin and marketing. Advertisers will come to understand they simply don’t carry enough financial clout to sway coverage. And the owners themselves will avoid all sorts of questions about ethics, improper influence, and messing with the public trust. They should hire respectable, reputable journalistic leaders to helm their operations — whether keeping existing staff in place or seeking new blood.

Then, they should not expect to make much money. In fact, calling newspapers, as Sussman has, an “important community resource” — not a business — would probably be a good idea. ewspapers are no longer a license to print money, but they can make a modest profit. And much of the past financial pressure on newspapers was debt, of which all these papers are now free.

Next, they need to make the product better. Sussman has invested in editorial content, and it’s paying off. Witness major pieces by Colin Woodard, for example, shifting the political conversation around government hiring lobbyists to be regulators.

Sussman is also investing in internal systems improvements, smoothing the editorial process and allowing actual financial tracking in near-real-time. But those should only be in service to improving the finished product, which is what the general public sees.

Which leads to the final suggestion: The new owners must remember they still answer to the public. Amazon.com depends on having a good reputation among millions of customers — and the same is true of the Sox. With newspapers, the ownership still answers to the audience, and depends on its trust and support. These billionaires got rich by collecting other people’s money; they should not forget transparency and accountability, especially as employers of the key enforcers of those principles.

Renovations: Getting Congress (Square) to work

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Five years after launching a citywide effort to redesign Congress Square, the city of Portland is launching a citywide effort to redesign the area around and including Congress Square. But all is not as lost or absurd as that sentence may suggest. Rather, it seems a modicum of common sense may have invaded City Hall and resulted in this new twist in the saga of the city’s most beleaguered, maligned, and steadfastly defended public space.

In 2008, the City Council set up a 15-member committee, the Congress Square Redesign Study Group. As originally proposed by councilors David Marshall and Kevin Donoghue, it would have looked at not just the park but also the public and open spaces around it, including sidewalks and roads. But the council limited the group’s scope to just the park area. Now that august body has seen the sense in the initial idea.

Since 2011 the redesign study group has been the focal point of controversy over whether the city should sell a portion of the park at the corner of Congress and High streets to the new owners of the former Eastland Park Hotel, soon to reopen as the Westin Portland Harborview. (See “Congress Square’s Controversial Facelift,” by Deirdre Fulton, May 24.)

While all parties agree that something must be done to change the park’s current underused, sunken hardscape (which city officials are now terming a “plaza”), the debate has been hamstrung: As even the city’s own Parks Commission pointed out in correspondence with the City Council back in May, a proper choice would not be between the RockBridge proposal (which itself has had several major variants) and the park as it is, but
between the RockBridge idea and other real alternatives, “such as a re-designed park in the same space, a fully designed smaller plaza, and other building or architecture options.”

Which is where this new citywide effort comes in. Many ideas have come forth from many parties about what could go there instead of a privately owned event center (including our own suggestion for an amphitheater with greenspace and benches, in Calvin Dunwoody’s “Reimagining Portland,” August 24, 2012), but there hasn’t been one centralized place to view and discuss all of these proposals.

Now, at last, there is. The city is calling it a “visioning process for the redesign and programming of Congress Square,” including not just the park but also the streets at that intersection, “the public spaces in front of the Portland Museum of Art and the H.H. Hay Building, and surrounding sidewalks and traffic islands.”

City spokeswoman Nicole Clegg says the new conversation is a “holistic view,” but indicates that any outcomes will not stop negotiations with RockBridge (which the City Council has directed city staff to undertake), nor another process under way to determine whether it makes sense to make High Street a two-way road.

But it could serve as an umbrella conversation that may affect how those other efforts develop over time.

That’s the hope of Frank Turek, a leader of Friends of Congress Square Park, a group fighting the sale of the park to RockBridge. He’s  keeping “a cautious eye” this new effort. “The word is that they’re pretty set to go ahead with the park” — selling it to RockBridge, that is — Turek says. So this could be a diversion, “to sort of show that they’re open to all views but really they’re not.”

On the other hand, he hopes that city leaders are taking the advice Ethan Kent of the Project for Public Spaces gave in a talk at the Portland Museum of Art back in June. “His idea was that we should step back . . . and get an idea of what does the city want this whole area to be,” Turek says. “It’s the important question that no one’s ever bothered to ask.”

His group, which has already begun collecting suggestions for how to make the park better, will participate in the process, though Turek stresses that is not a signal of a changed position. “We want to keep the park. This isn’t a road to compromise,” he warns.

Marshall, for his part, is pleased his original idea has finally been approved by the council. And while he favors keeping the full park public, he indicated city officials may already be leaving that debate behind. “This is designed to open up the conversation to be much more than the park itself,” Marshall says. “Regardless of what happens in that little corner of Congress Square . . . we need to work on some of the issues,” including vehicle and pedestrian traffic, and the overall layout of the area.

You can contribute to the community discussion in several ways. First, and perhaps most easily, propose your own ideas, and vote on others’ suggestions, at neighborland.com/congresssq (yes, that’s three Ss).

Or take an online survey about your use of the area at portlandmaine.gov/planning (it’s in a tiny one-word link in very small print in the upper left corner of the Planning Department page, just beneath “p&d news”).

Also, tweet thoughts with the hashtag #CongressSquare.

If you’re more into meatspace, attend the public meetings that will be scheduled in August and September (check the city’s website for times and places), or go to Congress Square and write down your ideas on signs posted there.

All these ideas will be collected into a report for the public, and distilled into a request for proposals in the fall, seeking an urban-design person or company to develop a master plan of the area.

While an original timeline had data collection happening through September 6, the process is now more “rolling,” says Jeff Levine, director of the city’s planning department. “We’re trying to see which sources of input are the most fruitful,” he says. So keep the ideas coming.

The Friends of Congress Square Park will meet Tuesday, August 27, from 6 to 8 pm, at Portland City Hall, room 24.

Investigations: Book, film reveal the Third World War

Published in the Portland Phoenix

United States commandos answerable directly to President Barack Obama are killing countless innocent civilians every night in dozens of countries around the world.

Rather than fighting terrorism, these missions to kill alleged militants often come before the intended targets have ever done anything violent or illegal. And even if soldiers are lucky enough to hit their target — and often they don’t — these attacks, by covert raid or submarine- or drone-launched missile, also kill and maim innocent bystanders, turning actual and potential American sympathizers and allies into blood-feud sworn enemies of the United States.

Under the George W. Bush administration, and vastly and secretly expanded under the Obama administration, the US has created a self-perpetuating cycle of secret worldwide combat, robbing families in this country and around the globe of loved ones, peaceful futures, and the numberless benefits of security at home and abroad.

These are the theses — and the undeniable conclusions — of Jeremy Scahill’s newest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield (Nation Books, $32.99) and its companion Dirty Wars film, directed by Richard Rowley, which SPACE Gallery is bringing to screen at the Portland Museum of Art four times this weekend.

In many ways the 83-minute film, distributed by indie-movie kingmakers IFC Films/Sundance Selects, is a trailer for the book. Taken on its own, the movie is a slow, dark procedural, following pieces of Scahill’s extensive multi-year investigation into how the Joint Special Operations Command, “the most covert unit in the military, and the only one that reports directly to the White House,” has taken charge in the fight against terrorism. In the process, JSOC has gotten Obama’s permission to kill anyone anywhere in the world — even US citizens — without specific allegations of wrongdoing, any functioning oversight or real spending limits, and in ways that only inflame international anti-American opinion, ensuring a steady supply of potential targets for a neverending war.

The film has compelling moments, to be sure. In the first ten minutes, for example, we meet a man who was at a party that was raided by US Special Forces, killing his wife and other family members, including an Afghan police commander who had extensively trained alongside the US military. The man tells of seeing the soldiers dig the bullets out of the bodies — even from people who were still alive — with their knives. Then the man himself was taken prisoner and held for several days. Upon his return to his village, he had been radicalized: “I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and blow myself up among the Americans,” he tells Scahill.

The corresponding scene in the book is stronger, by far. Of course it lacks the visceral video of a man dancing with friends and family only hours before he is killed by US Special Forces. It doesn’t include the actual sobs of a grieving woman. And the text also doesn’t let you hear the sweet, high-pitched voice of a six-year-old Afghan girl as she recites the names of family members Americans killed that night.

What it offers instead is page after page of an organized, sequential play-by-play of the events, explained clearly and vividly (including the important detail that the bullets were dug out of the bodies to cover up evidence that American troops had been there). The movie was filmed during Scahill’s reporting, so some quotes appear in both places, but the book uses them in better and more complete context, making reading them more effective even than seeing and hearing the tearful voices of the survivors of the attack.

And that gets at the basic difference between the two, and the reason the film is only really powerful when viewed as a selective sampler of the book. The movie is about the life and experience of being a war reporter digging this stuff up, as opposed to the book’s focus on what Scahill uncovered. And without question, the latter is more important than the former.

It’s certainly interesting to hear the inner dialogue of an investigative reporter’s brain — to hear how such simple questions (“Who were these American soldiers?”) require so much hard work to answer and untangle into a cohesive story.

Yet it is much more useful to read in full the stunning mosaic Scahill is able to put together than to watch small bits of his experience of locating the tiny pieces of that whole.

Scahill’s reporting on these issues, like his previous best-selling bookBlackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army(Nation Books, 2007; excerpted in the Portland Phoenix March 23, 2007) and his reporting in the Nation, on Democracy Now!, and elsewhere is a call to action, if not to arms, for Americans who still believe their country should be governed by its people, for its people.

What the film blasts through but the book explores — and explains — in depth is possibly the most terrifying development in the war on terror: Obama’s decision, made by him personally, that it was legal and permissible to kill American citizens overseas without trial, in direct contravention of the Fifth Amendment, which says “no person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

As Scahill notes, even John Walker Lindh, an American citizen who joined the Taliban and actually engaged in combat against US forces, was given a trial under the Bush administration after his capture in 2001. Anwar al Awlaki, who had never done anything but write and speak passionately about how he saw the world, was not given the same rights by the Obama administration before he was killed in a drone strike in 2011. (Nor was Samir Khan, another US citizen killed in the same strike that targeted Awlaki.)

And neither was Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, also a US citizen, killed a few short weeks after his father, while having lunch with some teenage buddies.

The US explained away the teen’s killing, calling it “collateral damage” of a drone strike targeting someone else, but didn’t apologize for the death. And the government downplayed the facts that the attack failed to kill any actual confirmed terrorists, and that it happened in Yemen, a country not publicly acknowledged as an American war zone.

Scahill’s conclusion is chilling: Abdulrahman al Awlaki was killed not for what he had done, but “for what he might someday become.” Even today, the American attacks continue, and continue to turn people around the world — and at home — into opponents of US government’s World War Three.

Dirty Wars | directed by Richard Rowley | 83 minutes | at Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland | Aug 2 @ 7 pm, Aug 3 @ 2 and 7 pm, Aug 4 @ 2 pm | $7

Press Releases: Here's the RS problem

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Rolling Stone made a massive error last week when it released the image of its cover featuring accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But to be clear, the error was not putting Tsarnaev on the cover, in a photo the young man (he turned 20 on Monday) took of himself in quieter days, in the style of so many online selfies.

The error was depriving that cover of its proper context. Yes, the image was released as part of a blog post with a selection of highlights from the upcoming story. But that wasn’t nearly enough information on which to judge the work of RS, which has a long and proud tradition of alternative journalism — featuring both entertainers and newsmakers, fan-like coverage and investigative reporting.

For those who criticize the selection of the image and say they “expected” something else of RS, I suggest that the view RS has of itself is probably different than the one harbored by occasional readers. This sort of thing happens at the Portland Phoenix, too. From time to time, people profess themselves surprised to learn that we cover important news issues, or say they’re disappointed by a viewpoint they don’t expect to see presented in our pages.

Surprising readers, providing new perspectives and provoking them to think about important topics in different ways, is what alternative journalism does, and has always done. (And those topics are intentionally wide-ranging: across music, art, film, food, and, yes, the news of the day.)

But another hallmark of alternative journalism is its context. We tell you not only what is happening, but also why you care. (At times we acknowledge you probably don’t care, and then try to persuade you otherwise.)

And that’s what was missing from the initial reveal. The RS article (which many protesters did not read before taking up arms) paints a more complete portrait of Tsarnaev than we’ve seen before, and includes the very details of his 21st-century teen life that most befuddle those who knew him best. He was, as the full story puts forth, seen and experienced by friends and coaches as a normal kid, feeling idealistic, looking dissipated, taking selfies that look like pop-culture images of rock stars.

To illustrate that with one of those images, showing if nothing else how Tsarnaev viewed himself, is a brilliant move that — when seen in its proper context — startles us into confronting our own view of the younger half of the duo who allegedly bombed the Boston Marathon finish line, killing three and injuring scores of others, some who are permanently maimed. In our minds, we see a monster; he — and those of us who look at the cover — saw a regular guy. And that’s not just the face he presented to himself — it’s the face those around him saw, as the RS story extensively documents.

It’s a truly great way to illustrate the story’s overall point: Tsarnaev really was the terrorist next door. The problem is that in attempting to promote its upcoming strong scoop, RSforgot to provide the proper context, and suffered a massive and public backlash as a result of that failing. And yes, the magazine did respond swiftly, releasing the full story online as the frenzy grew. But by then they were by definition behind the curve and playing defense. 

On an unrelated topic Would that the international press covered climate change, poverty, hunger, homelessness, and war with the breathless and undivided attention — not to mention massive expenditures — with which they cover the impending birth of a person who, like his or her grandfather, may never actually become an actual British monarch. 

As thinker and writer Esther Dyson regularly argues, people’s attention is the most limited natural resource available. The frenzy of what has been dubbed “the Great Kate Wait” is a colossal waste of that valuable supply. Media outlets that spend any time on this highly personal piece of triviality (which, yes, is very important to the immediate family) are harming their audiences by failing to tell them about actual news that will deeply affect their everyday lives.

Un-Flash: California company trades in fake spontaneity

Published in the Portland Phoenix

We know: Flash mobs are so ten years ago. But it turns out the craze whose entire point is an underground do-it-yourself surprise has gone corporate. And rather than celebrating creativity, community, and spontaneity, it’s now a business model profiting in part off the energy of unpaid performers.

Yes, there’s a company called Flash Mob America. It’s based in Los Angeles, and has produced what it calls “flash mobs” for major TV shows, including Today, Modern Family, and The Bachelorette.

FMA’s “sole purpose,” according to its marketing materials, is “creating joy through surprise.” Oh, and making money by getting hired to put on staged events largely carried out by volunteers.

That’s what’s happening here. See, FMA employs a public-relations firm, Hollywood fave MWPR, which has worked with Oprah, Martha Stewart, People, Us Weekly, and more. Some poor intern from MWPR called the Phoenix (and, apparently, other Maine media outlets) on July 18 to announce that a “flash mob” will happen at 5 pm on August 5, somewhere in Portland. Surprise!

After cutting through some promo-talk the announcement boiled down to this: Would we at the Phoenix be interested in running a story, to tell people they could volunteer to perform? The company needed these unpaid workers, or it wouldn’t be able to actually provide the service for which it had been hired by an as-yet unidentified Portland client.

Now that’s a surprise.

The original flash-mob ethos was pretty different — fully DIY and organic, often created by groups of artists. One of the earliest academic studies of flash mobs, published inFibreculture Journal in December 2005 by Judith Nicholson, then a graduate researcher at Concordia University in Montreal, found that flash mobs specifically avoided traditional media, in favor of mobile communication among participants directly.

The movement’s credo, she wrote, was “the power of many, in the pursuit of nothing.” And it was deliberately created and intended as a criticism of capitalist society, designed to empower citizens over governments and corporations. In fact, she wrote, “While flash mobbing was being popularized, a fear that someone would appoint himself leader of the mob or that the trend would be appropriated for specific political or commercial purposes was expressed frequently” by those involved. (With a leaderless reclaiming of public space for use by the people, it might be seen as a celebratory precursor to the Occupy movement.)

Of course, something can hardly be called “flash” if it’s being planned from across the country several weeks in advance. And with “more than 50 professional performers” in the mix, along with somewhere between 100 and 200 unpaid workers, it’s not quite sounding like a spontaneous fun thing. “It’s a really detailed full-scale live production,” FMA co-founder Staci Lawrence told me.

Though the event will be “in a really public place,” the audience is preselected — by the paying client. There’s “a specific group of people that we are surprising,” Lawrence says, hoping that anyone who figures out the details wouldn’t share them, for fear of ruining the closely guarded, highly manufactured spontaneity.

FMA gets permission from relevant authorities — a far cry from an upstart art form that used to call for outright cancellation of the event if property owners or police got wind of it beforehand.

But then, what should we expect from a company “founded . . . in tribute to Michael Jackson” anyway? Yes indeed, in the promo materials’ “About Flash Mob America” section is a heartwarming little gem: “In July 2009, Staci and Conroe [Brooks] — moved by Michael Jackson’s emotional memorial — produced the first American tribute to the late King of Pop by recreating Sweden’s ‘Beat It’ flash mob.”

You read that right: this is a company whose founders got their start by reenacting an actual flash mob, put on by a group of Swedish street dancers just two weeks after Jackson’s death.

And then, FMA did it again. And again. Back to the press release: “The following month they again honored Jackson with a flash mob on what would have been his 51st birthday. And then the unexpected: Universal Music Group hired the team to produce a flash mob to surprise the late pop icon’s sister, Janet Jackson.”

That led to bigger gigs, including somehow working with Oscar Mayer and Charmin, and leading to their self-description as “the industry’s flash-mob experts.” Lawrence says on big corporate jobs, she does try to make sure the non-professional mobbers get paid; for the upcoming Portland show and most others, though, “there’s not that kind of budget.”

That’s no surprise.