Gary Sawyer, editor of the Decatur Herald and Review in Illinois, knows a major factor in his paper’s customer loyalty is credibility.
While getting news to the customer quickly has always been a major goal of every news source, the digital age has brought forth a new level of delivery speed, which in turn has affected the credibility of news in general.
Arnie Robbins resigned as editor of the Post-Dispatch last week.
His resignation followed years of hard financial times that included a structured bankruptcy. The most recent circulation figures showed the Post-Dispatch losing circulation both weekday and Sundays. Robbins will be replaced by Gilbert Bailión, the editorial editor. Here are Robbins remarks to the newsroom:
There’s an interesting story coming out of the Wisconsin recall election. The latest polls show Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, in a virtual dead heat with Tom Barrett, his most likely opponent. This comes despite a huge advantage in advertising spending by Walker.
For a time late last month, Rush Limbaugh succeeded in abusing copyright law to get YouTube to take down a Daily Kos video stringing together the insulting remarks he made about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who became a featured player in the contraception controversy a few months back.
The video stitched together short excerpts of Limbaugh calling Fluke a slut and a prostitute who should videotape herself having sex. Limbaugh apologized (sort of) after he began to lose advertisers. But when Daily Kos helpfully put together a greatest hits of Limbaugh’s comments, Limbaugh used copyright law to demand that YouTube take down the video.
John Jackson, a veteran political scientist at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, recently told a room of newspaper editors that the media are partly to blame for the misperception held by most residents of Southern Illinois that they don’t get their fair share from the government.
Almost eight of ten residents of the 18 southern counties in Illinois told Simon pollsters that they got less than their fair share in state spending. Jackson says that clearly false belief results partly from shallow media coverage.