Wednesday Links: Happy Tax Day

BOULDER, Colorado -- Today we are going to ignore all of the teabagging that is going on across the nation, because those people are nuts and ignorant. Instead, we bring you news about race in America (the two stories may be linked, however), as well as stories about the dastardly deeds of the unhirable fools from the Bush administration and some urban ruins of bygone eras.

Colorado Matters: Come fly the racist skies. Until 1963, there were no black commercial airline pilots in the United States. Carriers actively discriminated against black pilots, claiming that racist passengers would refuse to fly with them if they hired blacks, or that they would not be able to put them up in hotels during layovers in segregated southern cities. Then Marlon Dewitt Green took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Green v. Continental Air Lines that the practice was unconstitutional.

Hartford Courant: Do-over! In more recent race-and-hiring-practices news, my hometown could be approaching a landmark Supreme Court case. A group of 15 New Haven firefighters have taken the city to court over its hiring practices. The men all took a test to determine promotions, and they received the top 15 scores - unfortunately, 14 were white, and one was Hispanic, and there were only 15 promotion spots available. Because there were no black candidates who scored in the top spots, the city decided to hire nobody. The Court will hear oral arguments in the case, Ricci v. Destefano, later this month.

NASHI: All deposed presidents of former Soviet republics may now begin boarding. Everyone's favorite government puppet right-wing youth movement, Nashi, demonstrated earlier this week at the Georgian embassy in Moscow to show their "solidarity" with the Georgian people who are clamoring for President Saakashvili to resign. They've even bought Mikhael a ticket to DC, where everyone (especially John McCain) loves him. It's worth noting that these are the same people who were baying for the blood of every last Georgian during last summer's war over South Ossetia.

The New Yorker: Mr. Feith, there are some men here to see you. They have a warrant. At looks like at least six members of the Bush administration can look forward to a life like Henry Kissinger - that is, they can never leave the country, and probably can't travel to some US states, for fear of being arrested. British attorney Philippe Sands first identified the "Bush Six" in his book Torture Team, and Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon has upheld the indictments of the former officials on charges of torture.

Strange Maps: The Rochester Subway. From 1927 to 1956, Rochester, NY, once one of America's most successful boomtowns, had its very own subway. The system consisted of a single line that was placed in the former bed of the Erie Canal, which had been diverted around the downtown. Today, all that remains are a few concrete trenches and overpasses.

New York Times: Keep smallpox alive. One of New York Cities oft-forgotten islands is the quaint Roosevelt Island, located in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. Perhaps it's forgotten because for most of its history it has been home to prisoners, mental patients, and people suffering from wildly-infectious diseases. Now the city is trying to keep part of that history alive by restoring the ruins of the island's famous smallpox hospital.

Online Journalists Keep Local Reporting Alive

BOULDER, Colorado -- Like in most other places in America, the newspaper industry in my home state of Connecticut is in a sorry state. The Hartford Courant is the state's paper of record, but America's oldest newspaper has fallen on hard times. It is owned by the beleaguered Tribune Company, which is undergoing a massive restructuring; this summer, the Courant announced that it would be cutting its newsroom staff by 25%, and it has reduced the number of pages and cut back on expensive local reporting.

In my hometown, the New Haven Register remains the second-largest paper in the state, and it is still locally owned, by the Journal Register Company. However, JRC's stock was recently de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange, and its share price has since fallen below one cent. Despite serving one of the largest and most important cities in southern New England, the Register no longer has a full-time reporter covering the state capitol in Hartford.

But not to fear - local reporting is not dead in Connecticut.

Even though I live out of state, I like to keep up with what is going on back home, and the resource I most regularly turn to is not a regular daily newspaper, but an online one, the New Haven Independent. The Independent is a small operation with about a dozen staff members; they typically run three to five stories a day, and they do not publish on the weekends. However, The Independent has been breaking stories on a regular basis, beating out the more established publications, especially to stories coming out of city hall. The Independent has become so adept at getting scoops that they have raised the ire of the mayor's office. City workers have at times been specifically instructed not to talk to their reporters, and the city tried to fire two employees who were quoted in the Independent speaking out against the closing of a senior center. If they are pissing off politicians, they must be doing something right.

I really appreciate the paper's intense focus on local issues. On their site, you can sort their archives by New Haven's 24 different neighborhoods; I didn't even know there were that many. They also did some very admirable reporting this past summer about the rash of gang-related shootings in the city, and their police beat is outstanding. But perhaps my favorite piece is their weekly video blog with editor Paul Bass, "direct from our newsroom, otherwise known as my compost heap." Here's the latest installment.



The Independent is part of a growing number of online, locally-based news organizations that are not run for profit, but instead rely on grants and donations. The paper's founders also created something called the Online Journalism Project, which aims to

"encourage the development of professional-quality hyperlocal and issue-oriented online news websites. Sites like this one. We aim to accomplish that by helping stand-alone journalists obtain grants or other financing to develop local news websites meeting professional standards of fact-gathering, accuracy, fairness; by sharing information about this emerging medium; and by adding our voice to the debate over the course of online journalism."

The Independent is their largest project thus far, but there are other organizations that are attempting to reestablish local reporting and investigative journalism by creating a new economic model for journalism, or at least, one that has been mostly restricted to the arenas of public television and radio (though not just to PBS and NPR - other important outlets like Free Speech Radio News and Pacifica Radio also rely on donations and grants to maintain networks of independent reporters). ProPublica is one such organization. It has a newsroom in New York staffed with 28 full-time journalists dedicated to investigative reporting. The newsroom produces stories that are distributed to other news organizations free of charge; they also work with other outlets to produce segments for radio and television.

With the entire print media industry apparently going into a death rattle, is the non-profit model the future of journalism? It is hard to say - perhaps traditional print outlets will develop better online revenue streams and turn their fortunes around. But in the meantime, small papers are going under and local reporting - even in big cities - is suffering dearly. I am thankful that I have a resource like the New Haven Independent to turn to, and I hope they keep up the good work.

PBS' Newshour ran a segment back in June about this new type of newsroom, and you can watch it or read the transcript here.

Map of Newspaper Endorsements of Presidential Candidates

BOULDER, Colorado -- The folks over at InfoChimps.org have put together this data set of newspaper endorsements from the upcoming presidential election. The data is presented in an interactive map, which also displays the endorsements from the 2004 election.



However, I do see a problem with one of their conclusions. They attribute the presence of papers supporting Republican candidates in traditionally liberal areas, and vice versa, to a market effect. Papers like the Boston Herald and the New York Post are appealing to a sizable conservative niche in their respective markets, while the major papers of record - in this case the Globe and the Times - are liberal.

This fails to acknowledge the importance of history. Market forces may certainly be responsible for the fact that some large cities have two major papers, and these tend to have opposing editorial stances. However, many cities have only one daily, and that paper's leanings may be difficult to predict based on regional voting patterns. Smaller markets tend to have only one paper - for example, the Hartford Courant has traditionally endorsed Republicans, despite Connecticut's overwhelming support for Democrats. In the past, cities supported many more daily papers. They disappeared for a variety of reasons, but with circulation dwindling everywhere, other market forces besides a paper's political slant will likely determine which survive and which do not.

They do make a good point that the party split falls largely along the rural/urban divide; major newspapers are by design an urban phenomenon, which may explain some of the lopsided support for Obama, even in safe Republican states. So, a paper's endorsement may not at all reflect the political posture of the region that it serves. What this map should show you is that newspaper endorsements are not a reliable indicator of election success, either within a particular state or nationwide. But it does serve to illustrate the absurdity of the red state/blue state paradigm, which seeks to create reified political divisions between people and regions where none really exist. It is still a pretty interesting map that can also tell you a lot about the perhaps-soon-to-be-extinct newspaper industry.