Press Releases: Pressure is on

Published in the Portland Phoenix

The execs over at the Portland Press Herald are notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to talking about their newspaper to other media organizations. Publisher Chuck Cochrane and editor Jeannine Guttman don’t normally seem to notice that other media outlets exist — they don’t take phone calls from reporters even when they’re in the office, and never return phone calls or e-mails.

Lately, though, Guttman has not only noticed, but also responded to, comments about the paper published by a less traditional outlet — even holding a meeting with her staff to claim that certain comments were all wrong, and that she did not, in fact, engineer the ouster of MaineToday.com chief Web honcho Joe Michaud, as a PPH-watching blog reported.

Who provoked this startling development? Local blogger and Munjoy Hill resident “Thomas Cushing Munjoy” (not his real name) with a post on his daily-updated blog, PressingTheHerald.

Munjoy “started out sort of simply,” he says in a phone interview. Frustrated with the quality of the local daily, he would send Guttman roughly one e-mail a week with feedback, occasionally asking her questions. But he never got responses, and after a few months, he started blogging instead, hoping public shame would work, as indeed it did.

Many of his critiques are basic editing questions, seeking — or providing — missing context and perspective. Since taking a month-long hiatus in which he dealt with some sudden and severe medical problems, Munjoy’s tone has been more positive, though still strongly critical. A recent post slammed a reporter for failing to look at the facts in a January story that claimed Maine’s home-foreclosure rate was better than the rest of the nation's. But that same post praised another reporter’s more recent story, which disclosed that Maine actually has more foreclosures than the national average.

Munjoy's efforts have even attracted competition of sorts; several months after his debut “T. Flushing Funjoy” appeared, blogging at PortlandPressHarried.blogspot.com with a more acerbic tone (including referring to the Press Herald regularly as “the snooze organ of record”).

All Munjoy wants is for the Press Herald’s leadership to “start taking the coverage of local news seriously,” and not just pay lip-service to it, touting their “commitment” while ignoring waterfront issues and running wire-service stories about days-old international events on the front page.

“These guys just can’t get out of their own way,” says Munjoy, who says he uses a pseudonym because he works locally — not in journalism — and occasionally encountersPress Herald bigwigs at professional and social events. (The ethics of using a pseudonym while trying to make the paper more transparent are questionable, though Munjoy says he has no present or past connection to the Press Herald or any of its corporate siblings in Maine or elsewhere.)

It’s his frustration — amplified by the fact that Guttman still won’t return his e-mails — that has led Munjoy to seek to draw even more attention to the Press Herald’s shortcomings.

He has repeatedly reminded his readers that the Press Herald is in bed with the Plum Creek Timber Company CEO (who sits on two boards that supervise the paper’s parent companies; see “Plum Creek Watchdog,” by Jeff Inglis, December 21, 2007) and that the paper failed to disclose that fact for 18 months, during which it reported extensively on Plum Creek’s plans for the largest land-development project in Maine history.

But in late January, he asked the American Society of Newspaper Editors to weigh in on the ethical implications of issue. Nearly two months later, he has received no responses, and suspects the reason is that the ASNE board includes an exec from the Seattle Times — the Press Herald’s parent paper.

But it still disappoints him. “I just don’t understand why they won’t try to improve,” Munjoy fumes.

Maine's journalist-shield law on MPBN's Maine Things Considered

Aired on Maine Public Broadcasting Network's Maine Things Considered

Sidebar: Slow lane

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Under the terms of the deal, by 2013, 90 percent of FairPoint’s customers in northern New England will have access to DSL Internet service. (Unless, of course, FairPoint takes the extra year Maine regulators have allowed with no penalty, which would mean waiting until 2014.)

In that time, FairPoint plans to provide exactly none of its customers with the option for fiber-optic connections, which is the real high-speed Internet, already available to 10 million homes in the US, but none in northern New England (except a handful around Portsmouth, New Hampshire; see “Internet Disconnect,” by Jeff Inglis, August 24, 2007).

DSL is the slowest of all the services that can be called “broadband,” though it is faster than dial-up. In 2007, as many as 40 percent of DSL customers were dissatisfied with the speed of their service, according to a report by Michael Render, a fiber-market analyst for RVA Market Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Imagine how many people will think DSL is too slow in 2014!

By 2010, three (or four) years before FairPoint’s rollout of DSL will be complete, 25 million homes nationwide (22 percent of all homes) will have access to fiber, Render says.

As everyone else is eagerly awaiting the connection of fiber-optics, we in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont will have our feet up, enjoying life in the slow lane.

A bad idea triumphs: Verizon: $500,000,000 — Public: $0

Published in the Portland Phoenix

From time to time, we all wonder how bad public-policy choices make it through “the democratic process,” being vetted and scrutinized by “the appropriate agencies,” and incorporating “public input.”

The Verizon-FairPoint Communications deal (in which Verizon will sell its landlines in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont to FairPoint for $2.4 billion) is an ideal case study. It’s roundly criticized by nearly everyone. Even the regulators who were asked to approve the deal are wary. At first, Vermont’s regulators rejected it outright, then later voted to approve a revised version. Maine Public Utilities Commission chairman Kurt Adams made it clear he was holding his nose while voting to approve it, and New Hampshire PUC chairman Thomas Getz declared that the initial version was “not in the public interest,” though his board voted 2-1 to approve a revised proposal Monday. (The dissenter, commissioner Graham Morrison, wrote that “the public interest ... requires something more than ... good intentions.”)

Apart from Morrison in New Hampshire, regulators in all three states have chosen the devil they don’t know over the devil they do, by agreeing to let Verizon sell out (and avoid tax obligations of more than $500 million) in the hope that promises from a financially strapped communications company (FairPoint) will give us something better than neglect from an incredibly wealthy communications company.

Bad ideas like this one survive first and foremost because someone thinks they’re good ideas. Not surprisingly, FairPoint and Verizon love the idea — FairPoint gets to collect more money from more customers and pass it on as dividends to shareholders; Verizon gets to keep $500 million it would have paid in taxes and use that money to invest in fiber-optics and cellular technology elsewhere in the country. (Those of us in mountainous rural areas are stuck with older, slower technology, and that’s just our bad luck, as far as Verizon is concerned.)

But even more important to the survival of bad ideas such as this merger is that state utility regulators behave like powerless functionaries whose job is to moderate corporate rapaciousness, rather than seeing themselves as empowered defenders of the public interest.

Even when regulators are presented with fundamentally terrible deals that endanger the public interest, threaten economic development, and may end up risking people’s very lives, they see their responsibility as exacting just enough concessions from massively wealthy companies to let the regulators claim they got something for the people, even when they have given away much more.

It’s not as if they haven’t been warned. Union representatives and industry experts have been railing against various aspects of the deal since it was announced back in January 2007. Customers have expressed significant concerns, in letters, e-mails, and phone calls to regulators in Augusta, Concord, Montpelier, and even Washington DC. And the consumer advocates who represent the public in utilities proceedings in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont have all expressed reservations about this deal in uncharacteristically bold language — saying FairPoint’s assumptions are “inappropriate” and “do not reflect reality.”

Wimpy regulators
One member of the three-person Maine PUC didn’t even ask any questions of Verizon or FairPoint during the public hearings. Sharon Reishus remained silent, even though this deal is the largest and most controversial piece of business to come before Maine utilities regulators in state history, and despite the fact that the telecommunications sector is the one that state officials, economists, and activists alike see as a key to Maine’s prosperity for decades to come. But her silence is not the problem: It’s the symptom of the real problem.

Regulators have expressed frustration with Verizon’s well-documented lack of attention to serving residents and businesses in northern New England. The solution, though, is not to hand Verizon a pass on its $500 million tax liability on profit from the sale. Regulators have standards (and can increase the standards), and they have enforcement tools to punish companies that don’t meet the standards, such as fines and penalties.

They have not used these tools very much, or very well. And they don’t seem to feel they are in a position of strength, with Maine officials making the “demand” that if North Carolina-based FairPoint does not roll out its slow-speed “broadband” Internet service, DSL, to enough homes by the end of 2013, the company would get an extra year to meet the same goal, with no penalty. “Our history with some utilities enforcing merger conditions after we issue a decision has not been great,” Maine PUC chairman Kurt Adams admitted in a January 3 hearing.

But rather than hold themselves to a higher standard of performance and actually enforce their rules, regulators have passed the buck — hundreds of millions of them, really — to us, by letting Verizon off the hook. And it is we, the public, who will pay for their complacency.

In the first place, FairPoint’s economic projections were shockingly optimistic (see “No Raises For Seven Years,” November 16, 2007, and “No Raises — It Gets Better,” November 20, 2007, both by Jeff Inglis). And those fragile projections were made before we entered the economic downturn most economists now believe we are in.

Financial peril
There has been a lot written about FairPoint’s financial problems, both current and future. Normally, when seeking to impose conditions on a sale, regulators ask for financial guarantees from the buyer.

Not this time. State officials are so worried that FairPoint is — or will be — in financial peril, that they’ve wrung more money out of the seller, Verizon, making the multi-billion-dollar behemoth throw a few bucks our way as it heads out the door, almost like a charity contribution for the privilege of abandoning northern New England.

Indeed, when Vermont’s Public Service Board initially rejected the deal, it ruled that “FairPoint had not demonstrated that it would be financially sound” after the sale went through, and could end up incapable not just of expanding phone or Internet service, but even of keeping service at the current, below-standards level.

Put charity aside: we are paying Verizon to leave. State officials will probably deny that, but think again. The cost to us is more than just the missing $500 million in tax revenue.

FairPoint is taking on more than $2 billion in debt to do this deal, and the company is expecting not only to pay off that debt, but also to make a profit. Every dollar the company spends on Verizon’s landlines will have to come back in, paid by the customers in our monthly bills. The more FairPoint pays, the more we, the public, will ultimately have to pony up over time.

If FairPoint isn’t making enough money to make its executives or shareholders happy, the company will come back to regulators in all three states, crying poor, and asking for higher rates. Of course, FairPoint really will be cash-strapped and poor, so the regulators will find it hard to refuse. And if they approve rate increases, they and their agencies won’t feel the pinch; we will.

The regulators may even forget that Verizon overcharged telephone customers in Maine more than $30 million in 2005 alone, and that our state made FairPoint promise to cap its rates for five years to help make up for those excess charges. The only way the regulators could abandon their duties more would be to develop amnesia in addition to their weakened spines.

Beat the clock: Does anybody really know what time it is?

Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix

“The Earth is a terrible timekeeper,” says Geoff Chester, the spokesman for this country’s official clock-master, the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC.

The first problem is the Earth, but the second problem is us. We cheat to make the movement of the Sun and Moon match up with the calendars on our office walls, and, at a more rarefied level, we cheat so that physicists and astronomers can synchronize their scientific watches.

The Earth doesn’t rotate exactly 365 times during a full revolution around the Sun. (It rotates 365.2422 times, on average, if you must know.) To make up for that, since the time of Julius Caesar (45 BC), we have added a LEAP DAY to the calendar every four years. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII made a slight modification, saying a leap day would not be added in years that are evenly divisible by 100, unless the year was also evenly divisible by 400 (which is why 2000 was a LEAP YEAR; 1900 was not, and 2100 won’t be, either).

That’s still not good enough, though, so we need more cheating.

The Earth doesn’t cooperate with physicists’ super-specific definition of “one second” (derivation of which is so complicated we’ll just mention the outermost electron in a cesium-133 atom and skip the parts about microwave radiation, vacuums, and magnetic fields). That definitely doesn’t change, but the Earth’s rotation is generally slowing (because of resistance from ocean tides and the movement of molten rock at the planet’s center). From time to time, to keep things matching, we need to add a LEAP SECOND. The last one happened on December 31, 2005; the next may happen on December 31, 2009, but maybe not, Chester says, depending on how much the Earth’s spin actually slows between now and then.

We could avoid leap seconds altogether if we were like the physicists who want time to run based solely on the atomic clocks. But that would force some other adjustment at some point. Some propeller-heads have proposed passing the buck to future generations via a scheme requiring someone to add an entire LEAPHOUR to some year a little more than 1000 years from now. Not likely. So we’re probably stuck with leap seconds. Adjust your watches accordingly.

Could be worse: some people are burdened with much, much more. Accountants and other people who need a fixed number of exactly-seven-day weeks per year use an occasional LEAP WEEK, giving some years 52 weeks and some 53. That makes them happy, but is too confusing to the rest of us and generally of very little import.

And then there are the people who use a LEAP MONTH. “The Moon does not go around the Earth exactly 12 times in a solar year,” says Chester. It’s about 11 days behind, which is why events on a lunar schedule (such as Easter in the Christian calendar, and nearly every holiday in the Jewish calendar) are “movable feasts” — i.e. their dates move around a bit from one year to the next. The Hebrew calendar uses a leap month every two or three years to keep itself relatively close to the solar calendar.

Perhaps you’re ready to give up. (I know I am.) If so, try out the Islamic calendar, which is a purely lunar calendar, and ignores the solar calendar completely, not using leap days, weeks, months, or years. Happy February 29!