Anybody know what really happened to PD video?

If further proof of the media's loss of credibility  with disjointed editorial endorsements during this  election season was needed, the Plain Dealer's shameful stunt in removing a video from its online page will serve nicely. Since the video of Gov. Kasich's abysmal  true-to-life performance with two challengers seated before the NEOMG/Plain Dealer editors was inexplicably pulled,  the story has traveled widely.  Columbia Journalism Review associate editor  Greg Marx filled the blank darkly by describing it as "weird".

Still worse has a been the stonewalling of the decision as inquiries, including mine , were flagged to others on editors' row, where it's possible that the janitors were told to close  all of the blinds.   Calls and  emails  from a number of news outlets were  ignored, or  shoved up the ladder to Chris Quinn, vice president of content.  Nick Castele of WCPN reported that Quinn "politely declined" to explain the story behind the story.

My hunch is that the decision was made to protect Kasich, who made such a mess of himself  with his casual campaign slouch, ignoring Ed FitzGerald and Anita Ruiz and shunting  editors' questions. It was Quinn, after all, who threatened a lawsuit against Plunderbund, which posted some clips before the video vanished.  (Next day, the PD endorsed Kasich.)

But here again was Kasich's M.O. throughout the campaign, and with considerable help from FitzGerald's missteps,  friendly newspapers and millions in campaign money, we will have to live with him for a while longer.

 When he arrived in office four years ago he dismissed the press - said he never read newspapers and seemed to be the perfect model for former iconic  film critic, Pauline Kael,   who once twitted  the  New Yorker's debonair critics for being "so superior to the subject that they never dealt with it".

Hardly debonair,  Kasich,  rough edges and all, still seems to fit that description quite well.

The Plain Dealer's new survival plan; Good luck on that

 Just received a spritely booklet from the University of Illinois College of Media in which  I learned that the old School of Journalism is now called the Department of Journalism.  If I remember correctly  I got a journalism degree from the school a long time ago.  So if I had a nostalgic twitch upon reading the pages (with a donor envelope tucked in!) I hope you'll understand.

Journalism is seldom mentioned as a profession these days in the tectonic shift from newspaper print to electronic conveyances of what you could unfold and read at the breakfast table.  Some schools are now boasting of studies in "electronic arts".  Besieged by drops in circulation and advertising, more and more papers (those that haven't already  expired) have  eliminated several home delivery days, many absent from wash-day Mondays.

But let's stick to that paper on the lake - the Plain Dealer - that Titanic-like has drastically rearranged itself with big cutbacks in staff,  shrinking its home deliveries and creating an   office maze that is as  challenging a weave as the maddening pattern of Venetian streets.

Columbia Journalism Review has  the gory details:

"As a major reorganization  of the Cleveland Plain Dealer takes shape, veteran reporters are adjusting to ' backpack journalism,'  the division of staff into two companies, a looming move to a new office, and demands to post stories more quickly."

The concept appears so bizarre to some reporters that one told CJR "this used to be a.... newsroom", adding,  "newsroom culture is gone".

While  scattering the staff to divided venues, CJR writer Anna Clark reports, the new PD will equip reporters and editors with  iPhones and laptops, "along with actual packpacks so they can work from home or cafes."

In the new setup, some staffers will work out of from the current Superior Ave. offices, some flung out to the paper's distribution center in the suburbs and another cadre in the Tower City Center  above the Cleveland Hard Rock Cafe.

One reporter told CJR:  "They are very much encouraging us to be mobile, to not claim particular place and not keep a lot stuff there," which sounds a lot like what the Browns must tell their prospective  head coaches.

Andrea Hogben, president of the Northeast Ohio Media Group, explained to  CJR that the rationale for the upheaval  is to  "showcase our digital capabilities and promote a culture of innovation  and creativity".

But never at my doorstep on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. It will be darkly interesting over the next year or so to see how the survival plan by Advance Publications, the owners who are exercising the same concept at some of its other papers, works out. As I struggle from the murky deep to understand all of this, I must first decompress.

Whatever turns a killer on...

Columbia Journalism Review, one of  the few remaining guardians of lucid journalism, offers this headline from the The Messenger, of Athens, Oh:

Police:  Dismembered woman lived with killer

Media parachutes: When life is worth living

IT'S OFTEN SAID that it's lonely at the top. But for the one percenters, topness does make life worth living.

There's a piece in the current Columbia Journalism Review that clearly tells you why golden parachutes are the best way to survive a frail economy. Posting figures from Bloomberg News, CJR focused on just two media ex-CIO's who will never miss a meal: Janet Robinson of the New York Times Co. and Craig Dubow of Gannett.

Although the Times' stock crashed more than 80 pct. during Robinson's seven years of watching over the shop, she managed to leave with a $21 million parachute. She also got a $10.9 million pension at the same time that employee pensions were frozen. The article reports what the $21 million could have otherwise paid for: 230 starting reporters salaries: 14 years of Baghdad bureau funding; 21 million reporter's notebooks; 17,514 iMacs, and 4,200 digital cameras, among other things.

Gannett's Dubow got a $37.1 million parachute that could have bought 3,550,239 shares of the company's stock; 1,474 starting salaries at the company's Indianapolis Star; 37,100,000 reporter's notebooks and 2,555,096 copies of Job Hunting for Dummies, which, mercifully, neither Robinson nor Dubow will ever have to read.

CJT noted that after awarding Dubow his retirement package, "the company announced it would force employes to take their fifth unpaid furlough in three years".

But as Mitt Romney has so often reminded us, the one percenters should not be criticized for their hard-earned and well-deserved success. In this instance, however, I'm never a good listener.

Fr. Coughlin vs. Beck: A duet?

THE CURRENT ISSUE of Columbia Journalism Review (May its tribe increase!) turns the page back on the current Glenn Beck phenomenon to an earlier media star - a priest, no less. In his essay "A Distant Echo," CJR contributing editor Douglas McCollam reminds us of the remarkable grip that Charles E. Coughlin - Father Coughlin - had on millions of Americans with his Sunday radio broadcasts during the Great Depression, challenging not only FDR but all others who did not fit comfortably into his matrix of political activism.

Even by today's numbers, the so-called Radio Priest might well have been called the High Priest of Political Distemper who rose quickly from an obscure parish in Royal Oak, Mich., to the voice of of an avalanche of dissent in America. McCollam gives us some numbers to reflect Coughlin's awesome influence:

"Working from his home parish at the Shrine of the Little Flower in suburban Detroit, the 'Radio Priest' built an audience estimated as high as 40 million listeners for his Sunday broadcasts - at a time when America's population was less than half of what it is today. At the apex of his popularity, he received around 10,000 letters a day and employed a staff of more than a hundred clerks and four private secretaries just to answer his mail. His church eventually had to establish its own post office branch to cope with the deluge, along with its own motel and gas station to service thousands of tourists who visited his shrine every Sunday."

At his peak, Coughlin also spoke at public rallies that drew 20,000 to 30,000 in Chicago and New York. Just as today's preening celebrities offer up their special prescriptions for a nation on its knees , Coughlin authored a book that sold nearly a million copies, McClollam notes.

Dissecting Coughlin's charms. McCollam concedes it's not an easy task.

"Reading Coughlin's sermons at a remove of 80 years, it's difficult to see what all the fuss was about. His prose is stilted, repetitious, a bit leaden. But from the beginning Coughlin connected with his listeners in an electric way. Part of his appeal, of course, was pure novelty. He was among the first to offer regular religious services over the air....

"Coughlin was also the master of identifying with the concerns and anxieties of his audience. He was emotional, dramatic and evocative..." [Sound familiar?]

The priest's attack on Communism drew the fearful attention of his audiences. Possessed by success, Coughlin formed a group called the National Union for Social Justice in 1934 and two years later the Union's endorsed candidates won several primaries. He was now on his way to endorsing a congressman from North Dakota who was supported by several splinter groups. He attacked FDR as the "great betrayer" and a liar, adding: "When an upstart dictator in the United States succeeds in making this a one-party form of government, when the ballot is useless, I shall have the courage to stand up and advocate the use of bullets." In response, FDR, who enjoyed his own reservoir of political magic, condemned Coughlin's stupidity and demagoguery.

Not the least of Coughlin's sins was his anti-semitism (Coughlin denied it although there was plenty of evidence to the contrary in the newspaper he published.)

The onset of WWII intruded on the Coughlin phenomenon and he faded into becoming a simple parish priest again. But in exploiting new electronic media (radio, no less), Coughlin was the radical master of making it work for him. McCollam introduces a profound thought from the philosopher John Dewey that is clearly appropriate today for today's media in general and Fox News/Beck in particular.

"Writing in the 1920s at the dawn of electronic mass communication, Dewey foresaw that the new technology carried with it the power to divide and "atomize" society, with individual constituencies increasingly replacing the shared sense of community.

Dewey nailed it - then and now.

As for today, McCollam neatly suggests that Coughlin's greatest lesson for today "may actually be its limitations."

"His fiery broadcasts could generate huge ratings, fill cavernous stadiums and flood Washington with protestors and irate telegrams. At times, he was able to stop major pieces of New Deal legislation in their tracks. But when it came to swaying elections, his influence was practically nil. Perhaps that fact is the Fighting Priest's most enduring legacy."

We can hope.