Executives at the Tucson Citizen and Tucson Newspapers said Wednesday that fewer than 12 employees will be laid off as a result of cuts ordered by their corporate parent, the Gannett Co.

Gannett in October ordered all of the newspapers in its U.S. Community Publishing Division to cut payroll costs by 10 percent.

That could have meant as many as seven Tucson Citizen full-time employees and 41 full-time Tucson Newspapers staffers would be laid off.

But Citizen Interim Editor Jennifer Boice said she was able to reduce the number of layoffs by reducing the work hours of some staff, eliminating open positions and implementing an across-the-board salary freeze for 2009.

Two Citizen employees were laid off and one employee volunteered to take a severance package. Boice did not want them named, “out of respect” for their privacy.

Tucson Newspapers President Mike Jameson said in an e-mail that he has yet to finish making cuts at his company, which performs the non-news functions, such as advertising sales, printing and distribution, for the Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star. The Star is owned by Lee Enterprises and was not affected by the cuts.

Jameson said in his e-mail that he used some of the same methods Boice did, including reducing hours and eliminating open positions.

Despite those efforts, the company will still have to lay off staffers, he said. Jameson said he expects the number of employees laid off at Tucson Newspaper to be “in the single digits.”

Jameson said some of the affected staff won’t be notified until Monday and declined to talk more about the issue until then.

There are more than 80 newspapers in Gannett’s Community Publishing Division and about 30,000 employees.

Company officials in October said the economic downturn was causing advertising revenue to plummet, prompting the need for the 10 percent cut, which followed a smaller cut in August. The company allowed each publication to determine how it would meet the mandatory reduction, Boice said.

Thursday, Tara Connell, Gannett’s vice president of corporate communications, told Editor & Publisher, an industry trade publication, that the company expects about 2,000 employees to be laid off by the end of this week.

Print outlets’ coverage has been proper. Network and cable TV? Not so much

The media, to their credit, never photographed President Roosevelt being hoisted into his wheelchair.

Has the media coverage of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin been proper?

The initial reaction if you’re a Democrat is, absolutely. If you’re a Republican, absolutely not.

As a kinda-sorta media observer, I say it depends on your definition of “The Media.”

McCain selected a virtual unknown to serve in the second-highest office in the land if elected, a heartbeat from the presidency.

Like it or not, it’s the press’ job to find out who Palin is and examine what she’s said she’s done and what she’s actually done.

Time magazine, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and, not surprisingly, the Anchorage Daily News, her home state’s largest newspaper, have written excellent, informative articles about Palin and her public record.

I can’t say the same for broadcast and cable news outlets, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Fox.

Broadcast news stories about Palin and her record have been few and mostly superficial. A great deal of opinion about her has been expressed on these channels by the so-called punditry, however.

Some of what’s been written on credible Web news sites, such as Salon or Politico.com, also has been excellent.

But most of it, as “reported” in the blogosphere, has been abysmal, childish and even vicious.

Much has been made about whether it was proper for “the media” to report on the pregnancy of Palin’s 17-year-old daughter. (I don’t say “fair.” Fairness is in the eye of the beholder, and journalists should expunge the word from their vocabulary when discussing news coverage.)

The proper answer is yes, mostly because Palin brought it up. She was responding to false rumors posted on several liberal blogs, including the popular Daily Kos, that Palin’s 5-month-old baby is really her daughter’s and that Palin faked a pregnancy to protect her.

Palin opened the door and “the media” piled in. But while responsible newspapers and news magazines have reported on the pregnancy only as it pertains to Palin’s admission and her effort to quash vicious rumors, the punditry have gone berserk with it.

Unfortunately, most Americans seem to have lost the ability to separate objective news reporting from subjective opinion making.

But can you blame them? They’re besieged by opinion every day.

Most of what’s presented on cable news outlets is opinion. Save NPR, radio “news talk” is all opinion.

Conservative blowhards – Rush Limbaugh and the gang – are outraged at Palin’s treatment by “the media.” That’s to be expected.

They’ve made a science out of dismissing anything negative published about a Republican as an attack by the “liberal media.”

Leave it to “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” a mock news show, to stick a pin in the outrage by juxtaposing clips of conservative commentators clamoring about Palin’s poor treatment by “the media” with clips of them criticizing Democratic presidential candidates, namely Hillary Clinton, in the same way earlier this year and last.

Palin’s public record is fair game for news and opinion.

I’m torn about her private life. The conventional wisdom in my profession these days is that a public person’s private life is open to scrutiny because it reflects on their character, which is an important factor in determining fitness for the job.

But this argument makes me think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He was confined to a wheelchair and so helpless that he needed strong men to lift him from his car, from the train, up stairs and into his bath and bed.

He also had two extramarital affairs, including one while he was president.

But few Americans in the 1930s and 1940s ever knew that.

The White House press corps chose not to report it because they didn’t think it relevant (among other reasons).

There are few photos of Roosevelt in his wheelchair or being carried by his porters. That’s not because the photos were suppressed, but because news photographers never took them.

My newshound senses and the issue of character tell me the press was wrong not to report on Roosevelt’s condition and his affairs with his secretaries. History tells us they were right.

What will it tell us about the coverage of Sarah Palin? That depends on what happens Nov. 4.

Mark B. Evans is a Tucson Citizen assistant city editor. He can be reached at mevans@tucsoncitizen.com or 573-4614.

Positions at TNI, Tucson Citizen; economy blamed

The Tucson Citizen and Tucson Newspapers Inc. will lay off about 15 employees before the end of the month, officials for both companies said Friday.

Tucson Newspapers handles the nonnews functions for the Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star, such as printing, advertising and delivery.

The layoffs are part of larger nationwide staff cuts by U.S. Community Publishing, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. The company Friday announced a work force reduction of about 1,000 employees. About 400 of those positions will be eliminated by having positions vacated by retirements and resignations go unfilled. The rest will come from layoffs, the company said.

The reduction represents about 3 percent of the company’s work force.

Mike Jameson, TNI president and chief executive officer, in a letter to company employees Friday, said USCP is requiring TNI and the Citizen to eliminate 30 positions. About half of those will be through attrition, with the rest through layoffs. The companies combined have about 750 employees.

Citizen Interim Editor Jennifer Boice told managers and some newsroom employees Thursday she expects the Citizen will have to eliminate about “2.5 to 3″ full-time equivalent positions. She said the newspaper has 73 FTEs.

Boice and Jameson said laid-off employees will be given at least two weeks’ severance pay with additional severance equal to one week for every year worked.

Boice, in a letter to employees Friday, said the number of positions to be eliminated for each of the more than 80 newspapers affected in USCP was determined by each publication’s “financial performance.”

Jameson and Boice in interviews Friday blamed the need for the layoffs on slow national and local economies. Boice also said the transition of advertisers and news to the Internet is playing a role in newspaper income both here and nationally.

Both were cautious about saying whether some of the positions might return if the economy improves.

“As the economy improves and business improves along with it, we will staff accordingly,” Jameson said.

Boice said this year has been the “toughest” she’s seen in the 25 years she’s been at the Citizen, which has had dwindling circulation for years although its Web site traffic is steadily increasing yearly. She was named senior editor for news in 2004 and became interim editor in June after the retirement of Editor and Publisher Michael Chihak.

She said she is optimistic about the newspaper’s future.

“I believe that what we create here with the newspaper and Web site will continue to be relevant and reliable sources of information,” she told employees in her letter. “Nearly two-thirds of all adults in Pima County read one of the two newspapers and/or look at the Web sites every week.

“While these steps we are taking are painful, I hope we can all emerge from this economic downturn stronger.”

Jameson said the announcement of which employees will be laid off will be made Aug. 27 or 28.

<strong>Mark Evans </strong>

Shakespeare said that sometimes you have to give the devil his due.

OK, here goes: I get most of my national and state political news by reading blogs.

I love newspapers. Despite the schadenfreude of bloggers at this tough time for print media, newspapers will survive the switch from print to Web news.

They will continue to employ thousands of trained journalists and make billions of dollars providing millions of Americans the news. It just won’t be as many thousands of journalists, billions of dollars or millions of Americans as in our heyday.

One of the reasons for newspapers’ reduced size and influence is that the Internet is giving rise to niche news providers who do some reporting better than newspapers. Especially political coverage.

Many bloggers still report little news. Instead they opine on the news they read in the newspapers they love to whine about.

But nationally, several blogs have been breaking political news that the so-called mainstream press ends up chasing.

One of the first and most successful is the Huffington Post, started by used-to-be-a-Republican Ariana Huffington.

A budding counterbalance to the Huffington Post’s liberalism is Pajamas Media, a collection of conservative blogs created by used-to-be-a-Democrat Roger L. Simon.

Competing with the national bloggers is Politico.com, a Web site made up of professional journalists and run by a news company.

It has far better writing, reporting and reasoning than the often-shrill navel gazing found in most political blogs.

On the state level, I’m ashamed to say that a handful of political bloggers are doing a better job of covering the state legislative races this year than any of the state newspapers.

Among them: Espresso Pundit; the Sonoran Alliance; Rum, Romanism and Rebellion; Blog for Arizona; and PolitickerAZ.

The anonymity of some of these bloggers drives me crazy. I’d like to know who’s providing me the news (especially when they throw stones at newspaper reporters who write stories they don’t like. Quit being hypocrites and put your names out there).

One who does sign his posts is Greg Patterson of the Espresso Pundit. He’s a former state legislator who lives in Phoenix, and he’s affecting political coverage in the press.

In recent weeks, he’s been writing about problems with signatures on some state ballot initiatives, especially Gov. Janet Napolitano’s fave, the TIME initiative. It would raise the state’s sales tax to pay for road construction.

Patterson blogged for two weeks that the initiative was in trouble because too many of the signatures were being rejected.

This week, both The Arizona Republic and The Associated Press wrote stories saying that.

A story that newspapers didn’t chase but I found fascinating was the Sonoran Alliance blog item about the state Republican Party convention in May.

Before the convention, Sonoran Alliance bloggers tried to get expunged any Arizona delegates to the national convention who had ever supported or given money to a Democrat.

The effort failed. After the convention, a couple of bloggers wrote about how party leaders “silenced” GOP troublemakers at the convention who were unhappy with the party’s pending nomination of Sen. John McCain.

State party officials (who were not named) reportedly didn’t want to embarrass the presumptive nominee by having a rebellion against him at his home state’s GOP convention.

There are two solutions to the blogger problem, as I see it from a business perspective.

One is to add more political reporters at state newspapers. Since more layoffs loom, that’s unlikely.

The other is to bring the bloggers into the fold. Newspapers will get political news they wouldn’t otherwise have and more readers, which leads to more advertising.

Bloggers will get more readers and paid for the rock throwing.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

Reach Tucson Citizen assistant city editor Mark B. Evans at 573-4614 or mevans@tucsoncitizen.com.

The two most liberal presidents of the 20th century - Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson - both disliked the press. And not just the opposition press.

Every generation likes to look through rose-colored glass at the preceding ones.

The same goes for the press. People in and out of the press like to pine for the “good ol’ days” when all reporting was fair and balanced, not just Fox’s.

Hogwash.

With apologies to David Byrne and the Talking Heads, the press is the same as it ever was.

The other day, I was cleaning out an overcrowded bookcase and came across a book I read years ago but had forgotten about.

It’s called “If No News, Send Rumors: Anecdotes of American Journalism” by Stephen Bates.

The title refers to a cable that Wilbur Storey, the editor of the Chicago Times, sent to a reporter during the Civil War. Demand for any information about the war was high and it had greatly boosted the paper’s circulation.

Bates writes that Storey told the reporter, “Telegraph fully all news you can get and when there is no news, send rumours.”

One of the greatest laments these days is that the press is hideously biased toward liberalism. Perhaps. But the press has always been biased.

The newspaper wars of the old days were not between leftist papers. They were between Republican and Democratic papers, or pro-business versus pro-labor, isolationist against interventionist.

If you had a point of view, there was a paper to read that supported it.

Conservatives have complained that it’s just the liberal papers that are left.

Maybe, but isn’t that just the free market at work? Or is it that it serves conservatives’ political interest to claim bias so any story critical of a conservative is disbelieved?

Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s running mate in 1968, was among the first to decry journalistic liberalism. He did it in the year that two-thirds of newspapers endorsed Nixon for president.

One of the common themes that comes out of Bates’ book is that every president, liberal or conservative, hated the press.

The two most liberal presidents of the 20th century – Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson – both disliked the press. And not just the opposition press.

In 1944, at the height of World War II when the U.S. and its allies were winning in all theaters, 796 out of 1,000 newspapers endorsed Republican Thomas E. Dewey for president.

In 1955, when Johnson was Senate Majority Leader, a rookie TV reporter tired of cooling his heels outside Johnson’s Texas ranch waiting for him to start a press conference, snuck into the senator’s house to call editors for guidance.

Johnson caught him and threatened to beat him up. The reporter fled down the street only to be picked up by Lady Bird Johnson, who apologized and gave him a ride back to the ranch.

The reporter? Dan Rather.

Rather became the CBS White House correspondent and the incident at the ranch was just the beginning of a long feud between the two.

The New York Times these days is frequently criticized for being un-American for printing information about U.S. war policies, strategies and spying.

However, even the beloved Abe Lincoln wasn’t opposed to leaking war policy when it suited him, according to Bates.

Gen. George McClellan in his campaign against Lincoln for president in 1864 complained that he didn’t like to discuss his military plans with Lincoln because they would be printed in “the New York Herald the next morning.”

Lincoln also wasn’t opposed to jailing reporters to stop leaks that didn’t suit him.

The conventional wisdom today is that President George W. Bush is the most secretive president since Nixon, who famously deployed his bumbling “Plumbers” to stop leaks from his administration. We also bemoan that government leaks are often attributed to anonymous sources.

Lincoln, though, was so furious in 1862 when the text of his first speech to Congress appeared in the New York Herald before it had been delivered to Congress, he demanded an investigation.

The House Judiciary Committee demanded the Herald reporter reveal who gave him the speech. He refused because he had promised to keep the leaker’s identity secret.

The committee threw the reporter in jail.

Sound familiar, Judith Miller?

The book isn’t all that scholarly. It’s just what it says it is, a collection of anecdotes. But taken together, it shows not all that much has changed in the past 100 years of modern journalism – not the quality or style of reporting, nor the amount or vehemence of the complaining about it.

It is what Washington Post publisher Philip Graham described before he died in 1963: “So let us drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never understand.”

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Read Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans’ blog, “Why a Free Press?”

If you need help accessing records, call 573-4614 or e-mail mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

Arizona has a sweeping public records law that says if a public body creates a record meant to be public or that serves as a memorial of the body's actions, it's public. Unless the Legislature says it isn't.

You’re not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth. OK, I won’t.

So thanks, Legislature, specifically Tucson Rep. Jonathan Paton, and Gov. Janet Napolitano. You have made public a class of records I always thought were public.

As part of Paton’s successful attempt to reform some practices of the state’s Child Protective Services, the Legislature and governor passed and signed HB 2159, which makes discipline records of state employees open to public inspection.

Hooray.

But when I read a few months ago that opening these records was part of CPS reforms, I thought, “Weren’t they?”

Arizona has a sweeping public records law that says if a public body creates a record meant to be public or that serves as a memorial of the body’s actions, it’s public. Unless the Legislature says it isn’t.

But of all the records created by state governments, there are only about 500 exemptions.

That means the overwhelming majority of the state’s records are public.

If the public body can prove a record’s release would cause a specific harm to the state or to a person, it can be withheld.

But the Legislature never exempted from release the records on state employee discipline. So they’re public, unless specific harm can be shown.

Enter the bureaucracy.

Title 2, Chapter 5, of the state’s Administrative Code covers personnel policies and records. Section 105 directs human resource directors to release only a handful of records from a personnel file.

Discipline records aren’t on the list.

So, though the Legislature never exempted them, the state’s bureaucracy effectively did because the only way HR directors would release them was by court order.

As often stated in this column, the state’s records law lacks teeth: There is no penalty for a public employee wrongly withholding a record. And the only way to get that withheld record is to sue.

That’s a cumbersome, expensive process. The public, including the media, have to decide whether the record requested is worth the bother and expense.

Too often it’s not.

Lawyers call that a “chilling effect.”

Paton, et al., just warmed things up a bit.

At first blush, it might seem a little invasive to see an employee’s discipline records.

But these are public employees. As such, they should be held accountable to the public for their actions.

Or lack of action, as was the case in the deaths of three Tucson children last year in which CPS workers failed to take action that might have helped keep these kids alive.

Opening the records holds accountable more than just rank-and-file employees. It spotlights their supervisors as well, showing how they lead their sections or departments.

Thus the open record protects the rank and file. If supervisors abuse their powers, it can be quickly exposed and dealt with.

Of the four CPS reform bills signed into law, this one is the most important because it applies to all government employees in the state, from water utilities up to the governor (court employees are excluded because of separation of powers).

The other significant reform dealt specifically with CPS records.

The child welfare agency has operated under a cloak of secrecy since its inception.

The secrecy was intended to protect abused children from risk and public ridicule, encourage reporting of abuse and protect children and families that may be dysfunctional but are not criminal in behavior.

A noble reason, but it made the agency only accountable to itself. HB 2455 requires CPS to release records associated with a fatality or near fatality.

Hooray again.

Other records, though, still remain under the cloak. Except if a CPS employee screws up and is disciplined for it.

That we now get to know.

Mark B. Evans is a Tucson Citizen assistant city editor.

Reach him at 573-4614 or mevans@tucsoncitizen.com.

———

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Read Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans’ blog, “Why a Free Press?”

If you need help accessing records, call 573-4614 or e-mail mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

Taking a break from the news was harder than I thought. Every hotel tried to defy me, putting newspapers in front of my door each morning.

I love the news. Stop the presses. There’s hardly a waking minute when I’m not consuming news, whether via television, Internet, magazine or newspaper.

Three weeks ago I started a two-week vacation determined to take a news vacation, too. I intended not to watch TV, surf the Web or read a newspaper during our trip to California.

I failed on day two.

I had gotten the idea from Dr. Andrew Weil, the University of Arizona alternative medicine guru and author who recommends taking news vacations.

It’s part of a regimen he suggests for de-stressing the body or readjusting your chi, or something like that, in order to reduce your anxiety or lower your blood pressure or whatever (I didn’t actually read the book).

I never paid much attention to alternative medicine; it’s too touchy-feely for me. But I viewed this advice with particular skepticism because it hit me where I live.

Weil seemed to be telling people the news was bad for them and they could become healthier by avoiding it. That sounds like bad advice to a guy who makes his living gathering and reporting the news.

Usually our family trips are planned out like the invasion of Europe: At 0900 hours we arrive at the aquarium, 0930 we watch seal feeding, 1130 hours we eat lunch . . .

My family politely told me this trip was to be different. No plan. We would take each day as it came.

That seemed disastrous, but I agreed to try. And to get into the spirit of this supposed no-stress vacay, I decided to give up the news.

It was harder than I thought. Every hotel tried to defy me, putting newspapers in front of my door each morning.

Of the 30 or so channels on hotel TVs, a third were trying to give me the news, five were 24-hour cable news – CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CNBC and CNN Headline News – and five or six were local channels and network affiliates that all had four or more hours each of morning, evening and night news shows.

Every restaurant seemed to have a TV on the wall tuned to either ESPN, CNN or Fox.

Even my phone kept trying to feed me news. I have it set to receive breaking news alerts from the Tucson Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star. I couldn’t figure out how to make it stop, so I had to ignore the incessant chimes and vibrations.

I was a miserable no-news failure.

Day two of my trip was the day the Phoenix Mars Lander was scheduled to land. The Citizen has put a lot of effort into reporting on the Lander’s trip, and I couldn’t wait another 10 days to find out if the thing had crashed.

So I tuned in to CNN and found out everything was copacetic.

I then resumed my fast. The next eight days were easier. I learned which TV stations to avoid, didn’t look at TVs in restaurants and started packing the days with more and more stuff to do.

We rolled into Las Vegas on June 2, the fourth city on our trip, exhausted. We were there to see “Spamalot” and to break up the long drive from San Francisco to Tucson.

I also wanted to do Vegas stuff – watch the volcano erupt, the ship sink, the fountains dance and whatnot – but we were so tired, all we could manage to do was sit in a casino ice cream shop for 2 1/2 hours waiting for the show to start.

While we waited, my phone went berserk. I broke down and took a peek. It said a Tucson cop had been killed.

My experiment was over. I read my phone every chance I got. I read the newspaper, watched the TV and couldn’t wait to get back to Tucson to read the news online, including 10 days of archived stories.

I was voracious.

Trying to reduce my stress by avoiding the news had raised my stress.

I guess what I learned is that I need to know. It’s what makes me happy.

If only everyone were like me.

Read Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans’ blog, “Why a Free Press?”

It's not often our state legislators make government more transparent. This one's a doozy, which I think they all realized, because it passed the Senate unanimously and only five representatives voted against it.

Margaret Click, a family member of the Jim Click auto dealership empire, gave $2,300 to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s campaign for president March 17.

Christine Olson, the soon-to-be former Mrs. Lute Olson, gave state Rep. Tim Bee’s campaign for Congress $2,300 March 31.

Joan Diamond, part of the Don Diamond land empire, gave $390 Oct. 19 to state Rep. Pete Hershberger’s District 26 state Senate campaign. He’s being term-limited out of the House.

How do I know about these donations? I looked them up. It took about five minutes of searching each on the Federal Election Commission’s and the Arizona Secretary of State’s Web sites.

Candidates for the U.S. House and president file their campaign reports electronically. But the Senate still files by paper.

Candidates for state office also file their campaign reports electronically.

That’s not true for local elections, but it’s about to change after the governor signed SB 1024 last week, requiring most counties and municipalities to post campaign finance reports online.

There are two election cycles in any campaign: the one in which ballots are cast and the one in which checks are cashed, the latter mostly preceding the former.

Sources of money candidates use to persuade voters often reveal more about these candidates than any impassioned stump speech, no matter how much candidates deny that donated money buys or influences their votes.

Watchdog groups have been taking these federal files and dumping them into searchable databases so voters can see, for example, that the finance and insurance industry is giving more money to Democrats this elections cycle than to Republi-cans, $50 million to $44 million. That’s a switch from just two years ago when the industry gave more to Republicans.

What changed? The Democrats run Congress now.

In Arizona, newspapers will download the financial files for state House and Senate races and tell voters who’s getting the developer and construction money or which union gathered gobs of $5 donations for a candidate to qualify for public campaign funds.

But what about financing of county supervisor races? Or city and town councils? Or school, fire and water boards?

For example, who has given money to District 4 Supervisor Ray Carroll’s re-election campaign and why?

I don’t know.

I could find out, certainly, but I’d have to drive down to the county Election Division’s office on East 22nd Street and get copies of the paper filings.

To be sure, Tucson Citizen reporters will retrieve Ray’s reports and those for all of the other local races. That’s our job.

But what if you didn’t want to wait for the newspaper to report it? Or didn’t believe what you read in the paper?

You’d have to go down to East 22nd Street, too. Few do.

Senate Bill 1024 changes that. The law goes into effect 90 days after the Legislature adjourns, which is expected to happen next month, certainly before June 30, the end of the fiscal year.

That means the campaign finance reports for the county September primaries likely won’t make it online. But they will for the general election in November.

Brad Nelson, the county’s elections director, said his office anticipated the bill’s passing and has been testing a beta version of a campaign finance Web page for the past couple of weeks. He may make it live before the law goes into effect, he said.

The new law does not require electronic filing, so most counties and municipalities will just scan in the documents and post the images on their sites.

Reporters and interested voters still will have to create their own databases or break out the calculator to find out how much Don Diamond and the like are donating to local candidates.

It’s not often our state legislators make government more transparent. This one’s a doozy, which I think they all realized, because it passed the Senate unanimously and only five representatives voted against it.

Well done.

———

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Read Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans’ blog, “Why a Free Press?”

If you need help accessing records, call 573-4614 or e-mail mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

Of the four of my journalism students who want to be nascent nattering nabobs of negativism, none appears to have a great command of the Internet.

They better learn some IT skills fast.

When I’m not lumbering around the newsroom doing whatever it is assistant city editors do, I moonlight as an adjunct instructor at the University of Arizona teaching journalism students how to report public agencies.

Of the 17 students in my class this semester, 16 are seniors and most will graduate next week. If that double octet of junior journalists expects to jump into jobs as reporters shortly after the last notes of “Pomp and Circumstance” fade, all I can say is, “good luck.”

As I’ve written in this space before, the news business is in flux. Old media – newspapers, magazines and TV – are competing with new media – the Internet. No one really knows how it’s all going to shake out.

This has been a pretty dreadful year for newspapers. Besides the contraction in readers and advertising that has been going on for 30 years, the cruddy economy is kicking papers while they’re down.

The trade press that I’m addicted to reading has been filled with announcements of layoffs at papers across the country, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Ore.

The ax has fallen here, too, with the Arizona Daily Star laying off 11 people in December and the Tucson Citizen leaving unfilled about a half-dozen positions vacated last year.

But even when the economy turns around, there’s little chance of job growth in the newspaper biz. Hiring freezes may be lifted and open positions filled, but the industry is not expected to create many new jobs.

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 67,000 people employed as news analysts, reporters or correspondents in 2006. The bureau expects in 2016 there will be 68,000 such jobs, the anemic growth attributed mostly to population growth and the news industry’s investment in new media.

Meaning, if you’re a journalism student about to graduate and you want a job, you better be a Web site whiz in addition to being a wizard with words.

Of my 17 students, four have said they’re certain they want to be journalists. The rest are destined for law school, graduate school, public relations, teaching, unemployment or a trip to Europe “to find herself.”

Of the four who want to be nascent nattering nabobs of negativism, none appears to have a great command of the Internet.

They better learn some IT skills fast.

I saw the writing on the wall 11 years ago when I became the 30-year-old editor of a weekly newspaper that had no Web site.

I attended a conference in which one of the seminars dealt with the Internet and the future of newspapers. The speaker predicted the demise of newspapers in 10 years, claiming all news would be published on the World Wide Web.

I realized that I had another 30 years or so to go in my career and that if the guy was right, I was in trouble.

He was wrong, but only about the timeline. Since then, I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about digital news presentation.

I’ve still got a lot to learn, but I’m ahead of the curve compared to some of my similarly- aged and -experienced colleagues.

Newspapers are not the dying dinosaurs their detractors portray them as. All of them are investing heavily into turning themselves into news Web sites, with varying rates of success.

The problem is that newspaper corporations can’t tell if print advertisers, all $42 billion worth of them last year, will become Web advertisers willing to still pay the same $42 billion.

Until that question gets answered, the flux will remain gut-churning.

Certainly, newspapers will look vastly different in 2018 than they do now, and who knows what they will look like 10 years after that. Shucks, 30 years ago, the news was written on typewriters and still often printed using hot lead.

So, if you’re 23 years old and about to embark on a 40-year career as a newsie, what do you need to know to get a job, besides the obvious?

I don’t know for sure, but it’s a good bet you better at least know the difference between a div and a dingbat.

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Read Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans’ blog, “Why a Free Press?”

If you need help accessing records, call 573-4614 or e-mail mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

'The responsibility of an informed citizenry is as much my responsibility as it is yours. . . . I want voters to know and understand my positions.'

JOHN McCAIN, speaking to journalists

Politicians and reporters have a necessary symbiotic relationship that both sides often unnecessarily make antibiotic.

Political reporters need politicians to say or do things that are newsworthy. Politicians need reporters to accurately convey their message to voters. If it only were that simple.

Reporters are not stenographers. They’re journalists. They make judgments about what a politician says and does, emphasizing some things, ignoring others. Sometimes reporters make mistakes.

Politicians often want reporters to emphasize what was ignored. Sometimes politicians make mistakes and want that to be what reporters ignore.

The result of this push-pull has been wariness and distrust. Politicians and their handlers so intensely want to manage what a reporter reports that they create circumstances in which a reporter is forced to report only what the politicians want.

Reporters so resent this hyper message management that they end up digging around a candidate’s life trying to find any source they can, too often through conditions of anonymity, to break through the wall.

None of this, though, applies to John McCain.

The Arizona senator and candidate for president is well known for his openness with the press, so much so that the press is often criticized for being “soft” on McCain because of the access he grants.

Monday, in a speech to open The Associated Press’ annual meeting, McCain explained why he talks reporters’ ears off at the back of the campaign bus.

His remarks should become a treatise on press relations for all politicians and political reporters.

McCain started off by admitting to the desire to control his message.

“Occasionally, the penalties a candidate suffers by granting widespread access can reinforce a campaign’s natural tendencies to avoid risk and closely control its message. There have been times when my enthusiasm in arguing a point and my glibness have had an effect that caused me to appreciate the qualities of tight message discipline and my staff to become distraught because I answered a question simply because I was asked,” he said, according to a transcript of his speech.

But he said he overcomes that desire for three reasons:

“First, I much prefer long back and forths, where reporters have multiple follow-ups and I have an opportunity to explain my views in greater detail – and, occasionally to correct any initial mistakes I might have made in communicating them – than is allowed in the short exchanges and bright lights of” an orchestrated press conference.

“Second, I think reporters are better able to meet their first responsibility of ensuring an informed citizenry if they are allowed to press a candidate for more than a gotcha quote or a comment on whatever the cable-driven news environment has decided is the process story of the day.

“Last, and most importantly, the responsibility of an informed citizenry is as much my responsibility as it is yours. . . . I want voters to know and understand my positions. I intend to stand by them, to defend them and even, at times, to engage in spirited debate with voters about them.

“But I want them to know what and why I believe the things I believe. And I think the press wants voters to know that as well, even though, at times, my views can suffer from your translation of them, sometimes more through my fault than yours. …

“But on the whole, you, I and, most importantly, the American people are better served by the openness and accountability that direct, lengthy and frequent exchanges with the press produces. And I will take my chances with you and trust in the American people to get it right in the end.”

That last sentence struck me hard. That’s a nominee for president saying he trusts the press. I guess McCain earns that “Maverick” label we like to pin on him.

If more politicians were to follow McCain’s tenets of good press relations, then perhaps the destructive animus between pol and reporter might evaporate and return trust to that necessary symbiotic relationship.

I’m not holding my breath, but I will keep my fingers crossed.

Read Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans’ blog, “Why a Free Press?”

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TO LEARN MORE
Transcript of McCain’s speech to the AP

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WHAT CLINTON AND OBAMA TOLD, OR DIDN’T TELL, THE EDITORS
Excerpts from Sen. Hillary Clinton’s speech to the annual meeting of The Associated Press:

It is essential that we have you to inform an active citizenry who are the owners and operators of this democracy. . . .

I was recently at an event held by Vital Voices honoring Mariane Pearl whose husband Daniel’s murder is a horrific and tragic reminder of the dangers that journalists increasingly face in the complex and dangerous globe.

So thank you. Thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you also for what you do here at home. There are many stories that have really made a difference. One in particular that I paid a lot of attention to was The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the disturbing conditions at Walter Reed. . . .

And once that story broke into public consciousness, the public and the public officials began to respond.

NOTE: Sen. Barack Obama did not discuss the role of the press in society during his speech to The Associated Press.

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Reporters at Long Island-based Newsday revealed, sometimes simply by using a tape measure, the numerous and dangerous safety problems with the Long Island Railroad. The stories led to a public outcry and long-overdue reforms.

Investigative Reporters and Editors last week announced its annual award winners for investigative reporting, underscoring once again the vital importance of a free press.

The organization was formed in 1975 to promote and recognize investigative reporting at a time when newspapers and TV stations were eliminating such positions to save a buck. The organization is still around because the trend continues.

Its awards have become as coveted among investigative reporters as the Pulitzer Prize. Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration because most Pulitzer winners get $10,000 and a certificate, and IRE winners get a medal and a handshake.

But there is only one Pulitzer for investigative reporting. IRE has several categories, including circulation and market size categories, that provide an opportunity for recognition of exceptional work by midsize and small papers and TV stations.

The Pulitzer committee has given the most attention to the work of reporters at five papers – The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal. Those are among the largest papers in the country, and they spend a bundle on investigative reporting.

IRE, in a March 25 press release, said it handed out more awards for outstanding work this year than it ever has. IRE Board President James Grimaldi, of The Washington Post, said the awards this year were a “testament to the amount of groundbreaking investigative journalism accomplished last year during extraordinarily difficult economic times for the media industry.”

Without the work of these members of a free press and the dedication of their news companies to produce the work, most of these stories would never have been made public. You’ll recognize many of them.

Among the IRE medal and certificate winners, as reported in the press release, were:

• Reporters at The Washington Post for their series on Walter Reed Hospital and the terrible treatment and neglect of wounded military members from Iraq and Afghanistan. The story led to Congressional hearings and reforms of the military and VA health system.

• Reporters at The New York Times for their stories about mysterious poisonings in Panama. They traced the poisonings back to shoddy and corrupt manufacturing in China. The stories led the FDA to halt imports of Chinese glycerin and a massive worldwide recall of Chinese-made toothpaste.

• A reporter at the Salt Lake Tribune who traveled to China to reveal the deadly manufacturing practices of the Chinese. Americans are enjoying the benefits of cheap Chinese goods made by workers forced to handle radioactive and toxic substances without any safety equipment while American importers and retailers accept falsified documents as proof the abuses aren’t taking place.

• Reporters at Long Island-based Newsday who revealed, sometimes simply by using a tape measure, the numerous and dangerous safety problems with the Long Island Railroad. The stories led to a public outcry and long-overdue reforms.

• Reporters at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle for their story about the Richmond County, Ga., criminal justice system. The paper reviewed hundreds of court cases to reveal that many people convicted of serious crimes were not able to appeal their cases to higher courts, a fundamental right of due process.

• Reporters at WFAA-TV in Dallas revealed a decrepit, dangerous and leaking gas pipeline that had caused several explosions killing six people. The series forced the government and the gas utility, which had been insisting the pipeline was fine, to spend millions replacing the system.

• Reporters at WMSV-TV in Nashville, Tenn., revealed that the state had been allowing the dumping of low-level radioactive waste in community landfills around the state. The story caused state government to halt the practice and begin a cleanup.

• Reporters at WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh, Penn., revealed abuses of taxpayer money by Pennsylvania’s state-run student loan agency. Government workers were using public funds to pay for tuxedo rentals, flowers, alcohol, NFL tickets and aromatherapy massages.

To read more about the winner and finalists for the awards, go to www.ire.org. The Pulitzer Prizes will be announced Monday.

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READ MORE
Read Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans’ blog, “Why a Free Press?”

If you need help accessing records, call 573-4614 or e-mail mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

In Arizona, the march for openness is a long, tough slog. It's a difficult issue to rouse the rabble on because government secrecy is more insidious than overtly outrageous.

Saturday the sun sets on Sunshine Week. Not that anyone will notice.

The annual weeklong observance began in 2002 and is led by the American Society of Newspaper Editors to promote open government and call attention to government secrecy.

In Arizona, the march for openness is a long, tough slog. It’s a difficult issue to rouse the rabble on because government secrecy is more insidious than overtly outrageous.

Arizona’s open records and open meetings laws are pretty broad, but they lack any substantive penalty for violating them. The only way to force a government into releasing a record wrongly withheld is to file a lawsuit and hope the government is later forced to pay your attorney’s fees.

There are few outrageous violations of the state’s openness laws; it’s mostly death by a thousand little denials.

Some recent local examples:

• Usually, when the Tucson Unified School District school board wants to hold a special meeting, an agenda is posted on the district Web site and the district’s PR machine alerts reporters about it via e-mail.

In February, on a Friday morning, a TUSD employee quietly posted a meeting agenda on a bulletin board outside the district office announcing a Saturday meeting to interview finalists for the superintendent’s job.

By the letter of the law, that’s all that was required. No agenda was posted on the Web site, no e-mails went out to reporters.

The district thought it was OK because it intended to conduct the interviews in “executive session,” which means secret, so it didn’t matter that no one was notified about it.

But reporters could have staked out the hallway and taken note of who went in and out of the interviews.

When Citizen reporters on Monday found out about the rare Saturday meeting, they demanded to know the names of those interviewed. The district refused, saying it would announce the finalists that coming Thursday.

There was nothing our reporters could do about it. We could have sued, but by the time the lawyers were alerted, the names would have been released. Were the four names announced that Thursday the same names of those interviewed that Saturday? We’ll never know.

• TUSD held special board meetings last week to let the public have a say about the proposal to close four elementary schools.

The board, citing advice from lawyers, claims the Open Meetings Law and parliamentary procedures prevented it from speaking about the issue at the meetings. I believe that was purposeful to avoid difficult public discussions with passionate people upset about the closures.

The board could have posted an agenda that listed the issue as a discussion-only item and suspended its debate rules so it could openly discuss the issue with the hundreds of people who attended the five meetings.

Instead they used its rules and the law against the public.

• In an effort to answer questions about Lute Olson’s leave of absence as coach of the University of Arizona men’s basketball team, the Citizen requested hundreds of public records from the university.

Among them were Olson’s travel records for the last three months or so of 2007. We got several records in which the cities Olson visited were blacked out.

That seemed silly, so I sent a letter to UA asking for a better explanation. Officials said revealing the cities could possibly violate the federal privacy rights of student-athletes Olson was recruiting because we might be able to figure out who they were. That’s so stupid I laughed out loud when I read it.

But where Olson went on recruiting trips was not the story we were after, so there was no point in suing the university to find out.

Those black marks are perfect examples of the little denials, the little secrets that keep the public from a full accounting of the activities of its government.

Those blacked out cities are festering sores for which there is no salve save sunshine. To me, the irony of Sunshine Week is that every week should be Sunshine Week.

It’s your government. Hold it accountable.

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READ MORE
Read Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans’ blog, “Why a Free Press?”

If you need help accessing records, call 573-4614 or e-mail mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

At issue here are the future of Olson and the UA basketball team, and whether UA properly handled Olson's leave.

The answer from Olson and UA has been a deafening silence.

Four months ago to the day, I wrote that University of Arizona basketball coach Lute Olson owed the public a better explanation for his sudden leave of absence announced Nov. 4.

I was pilloried in cyberspace for saying so; online commenters were outraged and vitriolic.

Olson was due his privacy. How dare I say otherwise? My wife half-jokingly suggested we leave town for a few days.

I should have waited a few months to write that column.

As ‘The Lute Story” grows curiouser and curiouser, about a third of readers and fans likely still would pelt me with virtual rocks and garbage for demanding anything of their sainted Lute. But another third would agree with me and the rest are sick of the whole affair and ignoring it.

I had predicted a persistent press would hound Olson, friends, family and UA until it got the reason fairly quickly. I also said Olson’s silence would only invite damaging rumors.

I was half right. The cone of silence around Olson and the media ambivalence have stunned me. Whether out of fear of Olson’s legendary wrath, or respect and loyalty, no one who may know the cause of his leave has been willing to say so.

The only medium that has stayed hard on this story has been the Tucson Citizen. Even the national media have mostly ignored it – until recently.

I didn’t expect the ugly rumors to resonate from my beloved free press, but some recent national reports have been loaded with innuendo, rumor and unnamed sources.

Citizen reporters have pursued all the rumors, but no one has been willing to speak on the record about them.

We report information with sources. It’s unfortunate that national media have jumped into this weird stew with unidentified sources.

At issue here are the future of Olson and the UA basketball team, and whether UA properly handled Olson’s leave.

The answer from Olson and UA has been a deafening silence.

The university, apparently through its interpretation of the federal Family Medical Leave Act, has kept Olson’s confidence, if in fact UA President Robert Shelton or Athletic Director Jim Livengood knows the answer.

Both are public officials who owe the public a better explanation, but both also are in an excruciatingly tight spot.

Proper handling of a beloved figure in the twilight of his career is a public relations nightmare.

They also must protect one of the nation’s best basketball programs. Recruits, its lifeblood, have to be reassured.

More than basketball is at stake, too. The difference between a winning and losing program is millions of dollars.

More than a dozen UA teams rely on the football and basketball teams to make millions to cover their own costs.

Shelton and Livengood are under tremendous pressure to keep money flowing and keep Olson, the players, recruits, boosters and fans happy.

Olson, though, won’t return calls or respond to reporters in person. Last week, he publicly congratulated players after the UCLA game, then retreated to his office with security guards in tow, who then barred the McKale Center hallway to his office. No reporters allowed.

Olson is being paid for his leave. His vacation time ran out months ago. So under state and federal rules, he must be using sick leave. UA won’t say.

Sick leave requires that he be caring for an immediate family member or be sick himself.

A news release in November from his estranged wife’s spokesman said his health wasn’t the reason for his leave.

That means he’s caring for a family member – unless rules are being broken or the news release lied.

A one-sentence news release from UA or Olson could settle this by simply stating what the hell is going on.

Instead, they leave one of the greatest college basketball programs twisting in the wind.

Olson is either unwilling or unable to break his silence.

Whichever is true, it’s news.

And terribly sad.

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READ MORE
Read Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans’ blog, “Why a Free Press?”

If you need help accessing records, call 573-4614 or e-mail mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

We fuss and whine here about "the media." But there is perhaps no greater testament to the power of the press and the importance of a free one than what's happened in Iraq since Saddam Hussein fell.

Journalism is generally not a dangerous profession. Mayors don’t slit the throats of pesky city hall reporters. College football coaches rarely plant bombs in columnists’ cars. Movie stars don’t hire hit men to rub out snarky bloggers.

At least, not in the United States. In other parts of the world, telling people the truth is exceedingly dangerous.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based group of foreign correspondents, nearly 700 journalists have been killed worldwide since 1992 for doing, or while doing, their jobs.

More than 1 in 7 have been killed in Iraq since 2003. Last year, 32 journalists were killed there.

Some were in the wrong place at the wrong time, killed by suicide bombers or roadside bombs whose targets were anyone in the blast radius.

Some were killed because they were Sunni. Some were killed because they were Shiite. Some were killed because their families didn’t pay a ransom quickly enough. Some were killed because they worked for Americans.

But most were killed because they were trying to tell their countrymen and the world what was happening there.

Some worked for or owned newspapers. Some worked for television news stations. Some worked for radio stations. Some were freelancers.

We fuss and whine here about “the media.” But there is perhaps no greater testament to the power of the press and the importance of a free one than what’s happened in Iraq since Saddam Hussein fell.

There has been an explosion of media, with newspapers and radio stations starting in every town, with nearly a dozen broadcast television stations and Arabic-language programs sent by satellite.

Why? Iraqis crave news.

But those trying to fill the power gap left by the demise of the Baath regime want to control what Iraqis get to know. Knowledge is power.

So journalists who try to wrest that power from the few and give it to the many are killed. Yet despite the death threats, bombings and killings, these nascent media outlets still find men and women willing to serve the cause of freedom by gathering and reporting news.

Brave men and women also risk their lives to report the news elsewhere, but war is not the common denominator for risk of death. Countries ruled by authoritarian regimes or ravaged by the drug trade are at the top of the list for journalists’ deaths.

The United States is one of the safest countries for journalists. Only three have been killed here since 2000, according to the CPJ. One occurred Sept. 11, 2001, and another is connected to the anthrax letters mailed shortly afterward.

The third was Chauncey Bailey, editor of the Oakland Post, a weekly covering that city’s black community.

He had been investigating the shady dealings of a bakery run by the Black Muslims when he was gunned down on his way to work Aug. 2.

His killer has pleaded guilty – good enough for prosecutors. An organization of Bay Area and national investigative reporters has been formed to continue Bailey’s work.

Questions about what went on at Your Black Muslim Bakery persist, as do questions about whether someone hired the killer to shoot Bailey.

The project is similar to the Arizona Project, in which dozens of investigative reporters from around the nation went to Phoenix in 1976 to continue the investigative work of reporter Don Bolles.

Bolles, an Arizona Republic reporter, died that year, several days after a bomb was detonated beneath his car. He had been investigating business and public corruption in all areas of Arizona government.

The goal behind the Bolles and Bailey projects is journalists serving notice that you can’t silence the news by killing one of us. More will come in our place and continue the work.

American journalists can afford such crusades. The killing of a reporter is rare here.

In Baghdad, there are no “projects” when a reporter is killed. There is only the daily work of reporting the news.

There, journalism is the crusade, for there can be no freedom without a free press.

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Countries with most journalists killed since 1992
1. Iraq 125

2. Algeria 60

3. Russia 47

4. Colombia 40

5. Philippines 32

6. India 22

7. Somalia 21

8. Bosnia, Turkey 19

10. Pakistan 17

11. Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, Afghanistan 16

15. Brazil 15

16. Sri Lanka 14

17. Mexico 13

18. Bangladesh 12

19. Angola, Yugoslavia 8

Source: Committee to Protect Journalists

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FOR MORE INFORMATION
Learn more about the Chauncey Bailey Project

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READ MORE
Read Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans’ blog, “Why a Free Press?”

If you need help accessing records, call 573-4614 or e-mail mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

Abuses by the press during turn-of-the-century newspaper wars in those days created a backlash that continues to this day.

Saying a picture is worth a thousand words is cliché. But clichés become clichés because they work, like this one.

It took Harper’s Weekly, the most prominent news publication of the Civil War era, about 6,000 words and a half dozen woodcut illustrations to tell the story of Antietam a month after the battle happened Sept. 17, 1862.

A few days after the battle, photographer Matthew Brady told a much more vivid and gruesome story when he put about a dozen photos of the battle up in his New York studio.

One showed dead soldiers, Union and Confederate, rotting in the sun along the “sunken road” where some of the fiercest fighting took place.

“The Dead of Antietam” were the first photographs of war, and dead bodies, offered for public view.

Harper’s described the dead; Brady showed them. That made him history’s first photojournalist.

News photography, still and moving, has been a powerful way to tell a story ever since. For the rest of the 19th century and into the early 20th century, journalists and news photographers went about their business mostly unfettered by government.

But abuses by the press during the newspaper wars in those days created a backlash that continues to this day.

Reporters and photographers used to traipse through crime scenes with cops, talking to whomever they wanted and taking pictures of whatever they wanted.

Today, the press is “bullpenned” far away, restricted in whom reporters can talk to and what photographers can shoot or videotape.

Courtrooms used to pop with the sound of flash powder and bulbs as newsmen snapped away during high-profile trials.

Then came the Lindbergh kidnapping, the greatest show trial of all time. We modern folks like to think O.J. Simpson had the trial of the century for public and press interest. But it wasn’t even close to the hysteria of the Bruno Hauptman trial in 1935 for the killing of Charles Lindbergh’s year-old boy.

While courtroom photography played a small role in the hysteria, it was a victim of the ensuing reform movement that led to curbs on press access to the courts.

After the trial, lawyers began arguing about a defendant’s rights to a fair trial and the government’s obligations to provide it under the Sixth Amendment. Much of the arguing claimed that the press interfered with that right.

The press argued for its First Amendment rights to be unfettered by government. For the most part, the Sixth Amendment won.

Photography was banned in federal courtrooms and some state courtrooms. In states without bans, it was highly regulated.

With the advent of cable news in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s and the subsequent rise of the 24-hour news cycle, many states have liberalized their rules on courtroom photography. The federal ban remains.

In 1993, the Arizona Supreme Court adopted Rule 122, allowing cameras in the courtroom at the “sole discretion of the judge.”

When the rule first was implemented, most judges allowed photography. Lately, though, state judges have been denying requests more frequently and often without explanation, says a Phoenix TV station’s request to amend the rule, filed last year.

The effort to increase public access, awareness and understanding of Arizona’s court system gained substantial momentum when Gov. Janet Napolitano named Ruth McGregor chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court in 2005.

McGregor is championing numerous reforms, including increased press access.

In November, the court agreed to consider amending Rule 122 and opened it to public comment. The requested amendment eliminates the “sole discretion” language and tells judges to require a showing of “substantial harm” to any party in a trial to prevent photography in courtrooms.

The amendment request, by KPNX and its law firm, Steptoe & Johnson, says the change “will improve public access to the courts, foster greater public understanding of the judicial system and enhance public confidence in the legitmacy and integrity of the judicial process.”

Can a photo really do all that?

In Tucson’s most recent high-profile trial, in 2006, Dr. Bradley Schwartz was convicted of the first-degree murder of rival Dr. Brian Stidham. Local reporters wrote thousands of words describing the killing, the trial and its aftermath.

A handful of photos published the day of the verdict by both daily newspapers told more about the human drama of this tragedy than any scribe could, no matter how skilled.

Our reporters described the devastation of murder. Our photos showed it.

A picture was worth a thousand words.

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COMMENTING ON AMENDING RULE 122
To read the petition requesting amendment to Rule 122 and to comment on it, go online to the Arizona Supreme Court Web site, click on “Court Rules Forum” and follow the instructions. The court will take comments until May 20. A court reform commission will then consider the amendment and the comments in September. It may choose to do nothing, make the changes or assign it to a committee for further study.

To read Rule 122, click here

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READ MORE
Read Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans’ blog, “Why a Free Press?”

If you need help accessing records, call 573-4614 or e-mail mevans@tucsoncitizen.com