Author: Terry Ganey

Post-Dispatch not tired of Ferguson

By Media

BY TERRY GANEY// Since Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown on Saturday, Aug. 9, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has published more than 625 stories, editorials and opinion pieces about the incident and its aftermath.

Perhaps no other local event in the region’s history has required such sustained, intense effort by the news organization. And since the results of two government investigations into the incident—one by a St. Louis County grand jury and another by the U.S. Justice Department–have yet to be released, the “Michael Brown case” will be the focus of the newspaper for weeks, months and maybe years to come.

Guild leader says Lee Enterprises’ workers deserved bonuses

By Media, , ,

The head of the union that represents reporters and other workers at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch says employees of Lee Enterprises – rather than its chief executives – deserved bonuses. In March, Lee Enterprises refinanced $800 million of its debt relating to its 2005 purchase of Pulitzer Inc., owner of the Post-Dispatch, extending the time in which its loans must be repaid. Employees at Lee’s 46 newspapers shouldered a major share of that loan repayment through layoffs, furloughs and buyouts, frozen wages, elimination of some benefits and higher costs for others.

Missouri film wins Chinese ‘Oscar’

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A film that recounts the Joplin Globe’s coverage of the deadly tornado that devastated that southwestern Missouri city in May 2011 has won the China Academy Award for Documentary Film in the Foreign Language category. The Missouri film, “Deadline in Disaster,” beat competition that included a National Geographic project that focused on the decade of the 1980s and a BBC documentary on the history of the world.

Reporters get ethics, law wrong in vacated murder sentence

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When Ryan Ferguson was released from prison Nov. 12 where he had been serving time for the murder of a newspaper sports editor, television journalists from across the country swooped down on Columbia, Mo., home of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. The big story provided a teaching moment for one professor, concerned about accuracy, media ethics and the appearance of objectivity. A lesson was to be learned, too, about convergence, and how an event can be transformed or amplified by the various forms of media buzzing around it.