Citizen Staff Writer
RealFAST LOCAL NEWS

MARK B. EVANS

mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

The uncertainty surrounding the Citizen’s future will continue a while longer.

The newspaper will continue day-to-day operation as negotiations for a potential sale continue, Kate Marymont, vice president/news at Gannett Co. Inc., told Citizen Interim Publisher Jennifer Boice on Friday.

Gannett announced in January it would close the Citizen on March 21 if no buyer came forward.

On March 17, the company announced that the paper would continue day-to-day because potential buyers had shown interest.

Two weeks ago, the company said the Citizen would remain open until at least May 9.

“Negotiations are continuing (with prospective buyers) and the full gamut of outcomes still is possible – from closure to sale,” Boice told the Citizen staff Friday.

$1.91 in Tucson

AAA says Arizona has nation’s lowest gas prices

Citizen Staff Report

The latest AAA fuel gauge report show gasoline prices in Arizona are the lowest in the nation.

AAA says the state’s drivers paid an average of $1.94 a gallon on Friday compared to a national average of $2.17.

Phoenix drivers had it best, paying $1.87 a gallon. Tucson and Pima County drivers were paying $1.91 Friday.

The highest gas prices in the nation, as usual, were in Alaska and Hawaii. Drivers in the Aloha State forked over $2.50 for a gallon of regular while those in Alaska paid $2.60.

Citizen Staff Writer
Tucsonans savor the moment

FERNANDA ECHÁVARRI, GARRY DUFFY and MARK B. EVANS

news@tucsoncitizen.com

Dozens of Tucsonans braved record crowds, traffic and housing nightmares and temperatures in the 20s to witness history Tuesday at the inauguration of President Obama.

Thousands more gathered at Tucson events to watch the inauguration, including the Tucson-Southern Arizona Black Chamber of Commerce at their Soul Food Brunch at the Northwest Neighborhood Center, 2160 S. Sixth Ave., and at the University of Arizona’s Centennial Hall.

Tucsonan Gloria Corral, 63, may end up with one of the best inaugural stories to tell.

Corral left Tucson on Sunday without tickets for any event, but with hopes of at least seeing Obama drive by during the parade.

Instead, she ended up with a ticket to the National Mall inaugural ceremony thanks to her act of kindness on the plane.

Corral said she sat next to a young woman during her flight from Tucson to D.C. who was suffering from allergies and didn’t have eyedrops. Corral asked fellow passengers if they had eyedrops she could use.

“So I got her some and made sure she felt better,” Corral said. “Little did I know she worked for U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Gifford’s office and after the flight she offered to give me a leftover ticket if someone didn’t claim it.”

The young woman was Amanda Sapir, a constituent service representative for Gifford’s Tucson office, the congresswoman’s office confirmed.

Sapir contacted Corral on Monday afternoon and told her one ticket was left unclaimed and she could have it.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Corral said. “Good thing I had my pretty dress ready.”

Although she had a ticket, she was too far away to see the Capitol steps and had to watch the ceremony on one of the Mall’s many big screens.

“I found myself not even looking at the screen sometimes, I was just looking around at all the people and their emotional reactions to what Obama was saying,” she said. “It was just incredible to be there and feel the happiness around me.”

A group of four students from Apollo Middle School also watched the event on TV, even though they were part of it.

They raised money for the trip through car washes and bake sales. Their teacher, Steve Olguin, in a text message said they found a spot near the old Smithsonian Institute on The National Mall, too far away to see Obama but right in front of a massive TV screen.

The students, Marrissa Molina, Gustavo Acre, Sabrina Madeiros and Roman Madeiros all said “adrenaline, excitement and the anticipation” kept them warm in the January chill.

After Obama’s speech, Marrissa said he had given “the best inauguration speech ever” and Gustavo Acre said he was “proud to be an American.”

Marisol Marquez, 22, a first year law school student at the University of Arizona College of Law, said she got in line about 7 a.m. Washington time and three hours later managed to find a spot right behind the seated area on the mall, well in view of the Capitol.

She said she thought Obama delivered a great speech that was “directed at my generation.

“I think the comments related to the Middle East were important . . . inspiring for all there,” she said.

Fellow UA student Christa Goldie didn’t have a ticket and said she tried to get to the mall but couldn’t. She and her best friend Brooke McLaughlin settled for a spot on the parade route.

Goldie and McLaughlin were able to watch the speech on a nearby big screen TV. She said, “It was exciting to hear it here and feel the excitement of everyone around.”

Tucsonans Carmen Prezelski and son Ted Prezelski were at the mall, but screened by walls of cameras and watched the ceremony on a giant screen nearby.

“I was talking to an African-American woman and we both just burst out crying and hugging each other,” said Prezelski, a delegate to the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston who was on the podium when Obama gave a memorable keynote speech that propelled him to national prominence.

“I feel like I’ve been with him from the beginning,” she said.

Ted Prezelski, a liberal blogger in Arizona, similarly was moved.

“It was spectacular. You were a part of this moment, sharing it with millions of people,” he said.

In Tucson, about 200 people at the brunch at the Northwest Neighborhood Center screamed and cheered, some jumping up and down, tears running down their faces as Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States.

Eva Turner, 58, showed up early with her family and friends and said she was full of “so many emotions” it was hard to put them into words.

“Even at my age, I did experience some difficult times during the civil rights movement, so to see the result of our struggles this morning fills me with pride,”she said.

“As I sit here, it’s really hard to believe it,” Turner said as her eyes filled with tears. “And to know that my 92-year-old mother is watching this at home right now, it’s just such a great moment I can’t explain it.”

Turner’s mother brought her family to Arizona from Texas in hopes for a better life in 1951, “and now I can see the beginning of a better life. It’s just beautiful to see we’re headed there,” she said.

Grant Bullock, 48, and his wife, Marilyn, 42, said that watching Obama’s acceptance speech filled them with hope.

“Hope for unity, hope that we all, as Americans, unite as one and stop looking at race,” Grant Bullock said. “He was voted by the people, by all of us, not just African-Americans.”

They were at the brunch with church and community friends.

Tucsonan Shirley Hockett, 65, said after Obama’s acceptance speech that she was elated to see Obama sworn in, but would need a moment to soak it all in.

“I’m glad to see that he is safe and he is now our president. I just can’t believe it has really happened,” she said.

“Now we can focus on the road ahead, on all the work that needs to be done. It’s not going to be easy, but I have hope.”

Tucson Democratic Councilwomen Karin Uhlich and Nina Trasoff were also at the breakfast.

Trasoff said she never thought she would be celebrating the inauguration of a black president, “but today it’s happening.”

“I just hope that people can share that sense of hope and allow (Obama) to take us in the right direction,” she said.

At the UA, the atmosphere inside Centennial Hall was celebratory. The estimated 1,400 attending frequently rose to stand and cheer during Obama’s address.

“It gave me a lot of hope,” Amy Brazier, 37, a UA employee, said.

“Especially what he said about restoring our place in the world.”

Many leaving Centennial Hall said they had come to see history and were not disappointed.

“It was an inspired speech,” said Anton Daughters, a 38-year-old graduate student.

“It almost made me cry,” added Cody Aune, 34, a UA graduate student.

The video of the event was shown on a giant screen under dimmed lighting.

“It made it feel like you were there at the mall,” said John Lapeyre, 44, another UA graduate student.

Tucsonans at inauguration relish historic event

‘I feel like I’ve been with him since the beginning.’

Carmen Prezelski

Citizen Staff Writer

MARK B. EVANS

mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

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.

Citizen Staff Writer
FROM OUR BLOGS

Citizen Assistant City Editor Mark B. Evans, on the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision not to review an appellate court ruling that upheld a lower court’s order to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department to pay attorney fees to the Phoenix New Times in a 2004 public records fight.

“This is the latest in a long string of records denials, lawsuits and subsequent losses in court by the Maricopa County sheriff costing that county’s taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past two years. The Tucson Citizen also is waiting to be paid thousands in attorney fees for a public records fight last year picked by Arpaio’s office.

“The Superior Court judge awarded the Citizen attorney fees but the sheriff appealed. Judging by the sheriff’s track record, Maricopa County taxpayers should be cutting the Citizen a check sometime later this year or early next, assuming Sheriff Joe doesn’t appeal to the Supreme Court.

“But then why wouldn’t he? It’s not his money.”

• For more blogs, go to www.tucsoncitizen.com/blog.

Citizen Staff Writer
Why a Free Press?

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.

Citizen Staff Writer

MARK B. EVANS

mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

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.

Citizen Staff Writer
Why a Free Press?

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.

Citizen Staff Writer
Why a Free Press?

Mark B. Evans

Pssst. Want to know a secret? The federal government classified about 2,600 documents as secret every hour, on average, in 2007.

It’s no secret the government keeps a lot of secrets, especially since 9/11.

But a new analysis by the nonpartisan advocacy group Openthegovernment.org shows the government is drowning in secrets.

Its July 12 report, “Government Secrecy: Decisions Without Democracy 2007,” details how secrecy has grown under the Bush administration.

“Citizens deprived of relevant information cannot participate in their government’s decisions or hold their leaders accountable,” says the forward, written by Republican Bob Barr and Democrat John Podesta.

“Without this check, government officials are more likely to make decisions contrary to the public interest, abuse their authority, and engage in corrupt activities.”

In a related development, Attorney General Michael Mukasey testified Wednesday at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on a federal shield law for reporters.

The proposed Free Flow of Information Act would protect journalists from having to reveal sources except in some extreme circumstances.

Mukasey and President Bush oppose the bill.

The irony of Bush’s opposition should not be lost. The Valerie Plame affair revealed that his operatives, including consigliere Karl Rove, leaked like rusty faucets to the press, all confidentially.

That New York Times reporter Judith Miller went to jail to protect the identity of an administration source, prompting more than 80 media companies to call for the shield law, only compounds the irony.

The national press has relied increasingly on confidential sources because of the government’s madness for secrecy.

The day after Mukasey explained his opposition to the shield law – it would protect lawbreaking leakers more than it would journalists, he said – a Washington Times

reporter was before a federal judge trying to protect his source and stay out of jail.

Bill Gertz

had written a story about the growing military threat from China.

He relied on secret grand jury documents leaked to him in order to report on a worker for a U.S. defense contractor convicted of conspiring to give U.S. defense technology information to China.

The contractor, Chi Mak,

wants to know who leaked the documents. The judge on Friday

ruled for Gerz but said the reporter may still be compelled to reveal his source to a new grand jury.

The shield bill has passed the House but has been hung up in the Senate over concerns about leaks of national security secrets.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said the bill would be “disastrous” to the fight against terrorism.

Among its supporters are both presumptive nominees for president, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain and Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama.

The chief opponent to the bill is Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who carries water for the administration on national security issues.

In May, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., told The New York Times about the administration’s efforts to defeat the law: “I’ve been around a while, and I’ve never seen such an avalanche of letters coordinated in such an unrealistic, emotional, unwarranted attack on a piece of legislation.”

Supporters are confident the bill will pass the Senate. Whether there is enough support to overcome Bush’s promised veto remains to be seen.

But if the president wins this battle, he may soon have another. Two bills progressing through the House would crack down on government use of classification to make documents secret, especially Homeland Security records.

The bills are among several efforts planned to force the government to let the sun shine in on the millions of records it makes secret every year.

Of course, Bush and Homeland Security oppose both bills.

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

Citizen Staff Writer
Why a Free 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 Republic 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.”

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

Citizen Staff Writer
Why a Free Press?

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.

Citizen Staff Writer
Why a Free Press?

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.

Mark B. Evans is a Tucson Citizen assistant city editor. You can reach him at 573-4614, or mevans@tucsoncitizen.com.

Citizen Staff Writer
Why a Free Press?

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.

Mark B. Evans is a Tucson Citizen assistant city editor. If you need help accessing records, call 573-4614 or e-mail mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

Citizen Staff Writer
Why a Free Press?

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 appear 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 and a dingbat.

Call Assistant City Editor Mark Evans at 573-4614 or e-mail him at mevans@tucsoncitizen.com. Read his blog, “Why A Free Press?” at www.tucsoncitizen.com.

Citizen Staff Writer
Why a Free Press?

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.

Mark B. Evans is a Tucson Citizen Assistant City Editor. E-mail: mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

Why a Free Press?

MARK EVANS

mevans@tucsoncitizen.com

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.

To read McCain’s remarks to the AP, see this story at tucsoncitizen.com/opinion.

Citizen Staff Writer
Why a Free Press?

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 extraordinary 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.

Call Assistant City Editor Mark Evans at 573-4614 or e-mail him at mevans@tucsoncitizen.com. Read his blog, “Why A Free Press?” at www.tucsoncitizen.com.