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A tried and true gambit works again
Todd Blyleven was known as the 45-year-old son of a Hall of Fame baseball pitcher, retired Dutch-born Minnesota Twins Bert Blyleven, a guy whose record of 60 shutouts and 242 complete games is not even vaguely approached by any of today's $25-million-year hurlers. That is, until the Las Vegas mass shooting.
Now Todd will be identified as a guy who saved a lot of lives, while inadvertently reminding of how the smart localization of national stories is a tried and true gambit even in an age of local media business models crumbling.
Witness the tale of Blyleven, who lives in an affluent Dallas suburb and was visiting Las Vegas with his wife. He was with family and friends when shots started and scared concertgoers started running. He stopped and told his brother-in-law to take care of his wife as he returned toward the gun fire and helped put injured people in a wheelbarrow because "there were no paramedics, there weren't any gurneys." He did this for about the entire 15 minutes that shots continued.
You can find his saga not just in some national outlets like The Washington Post (which also covered the story) but on Minneapolis media such as KARE-TV, Dallas media like the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Myers, Florida, News-Press. The dad's a hero in Minnesota and has a home in Fort Myers, while the son lives outside Dallas. So everybody crafted their separate tales about a hero whose name might especially resonate with their audiences. (That's a photo of Todd that he posted on Facebook from Las Vegas.)
Nick Hytrek, a reporter for the Sioux City, Iowa Journal, informed that, in similar fashion, "Most hits on our website came from a story about a woman from our area still missing after the shooting in Vegas. Another story was on locals who were at or near the shooting scene."
But don't assume unceasing interest in the massacre. When I contacted Jeffry Couch, editor of the Belleville, Illinois, News-Democrat in early afternoon, the brunt of his audience was attached to three stories: police there using data from a cell phone to try to track down some people who robbed a local casino and shot a guard; Budweiser (based in nearby St. Louis) asking the public how it feels about its NFL sponsorship in light of all the protests; and an appeal to folks who may have lived near an abandoned factory there and might be eligible for a court settlement.
Then he got back to me later with an email titled, "I spoke too soon." They'd just posted a tale on the “bump stock” apparently used by the Vegas shooter that lets a semi-automatic rifle fire hundreds of bullets in seconds. Area gun dealers told reporter Elizabeth Donald that nobody asks, so they don't carry them, the thrust of a story that was then doing very well.
Meanwhile, Joel Christopher, executive editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, is experiencing a reminder of the season with college basketball in his area. At one point Tuesday, the best any Vegas-related story was doing was No. 15 among his readers. That was about a former Louisville softball pitcher who'd been at the concert.
A scandal involving the University of Louisville basketball team dominates. The best-read stories were about a new interim athletic director, the recruit at the scandal's center and the attempt by the suspended athletic director (who's paid more than $5 million a year) to keep his job. Rounding out the top five were pieces on a new mayoral candidate and on Rick Pitino, the legendary coach who is essentially being shown the door, selling his Louisville home.
In Miami, Herald managing editor Rick Hirsch cited his big stories as these: "Puerto Rico, changes in Cuba policy, Irma recovery (here and in the Florida Keys), nursing home deaths, Derek Jeter taking over the Miami Marlins."
The big story on the website of KATV in Little Rock, Arkansas, this morning? Internet stalking. "The Faulkner County Sheriff's Office has arrested an Australian man who they believe is responsible for messaging who he thought were 12- and 14-year-old girls in Mayflower."
For sure, even most once-proud major regional papers don't pretend to have national pretensions these days. So cable and broadcast news can be a reflexive place to turn on bigger stories. But what's playing out is also a reminder of the limited engagement consumers can have with the same fare that national media, notably TV, bombard us with, at times to the exclusion of most everything else.
Is Facebook's 2016 election role underrated?
BuzzFeed says that quite apart from the $100,000 worth of Russian-backed ads bought on Facebook, it discerns "another, less discussed aspect of Facebook’s political influence was far more consequential in terms of the election outcome." That would be the use of Facebook's advertising advice by political campaigns, including the Trump campaign, "a major part of the $1.1 billion of paid digital advertising during the cycle."
The story contends that Facebook, Google and Twitter's role in electoral politics is underestimated and they had helped Trump's digital staff. It's more intriguing than convincing. "Hillary Clinton built a large in-house staff to execute digital media on the campaign, but with a lean staff, the Trump team likely benefited more from the help provided by the tech companies. The expertise these firms provided to the campaign’s general election San Antonio office was particularly important, and days after the election, Trump's digital director said Facebook played a 'critical role' in its success."
Meanwhile, CNN reports that some of those ads were targeted at the election swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan. But reporter Manu Raju says it is not understood what impact, if any, they had.
The Boss on Broadway
It was the place to be for music critics and fans: Bruce Springsteen opened a run at a small (for him) venue, Broadway's Walter Kerr Theater.
The Daily News reports, "The two-hour evening began on a poignant note. Springsteen, dressed in black jeans and tee, dedicated the show to his friend Tom Petty and sent out prayers to the late singer's family and to the Heartbreakers."
He'll be there for his more intimate show through Feb. 3.
"The Lives We Have Lost"
The Washington Post editorial is almost a print counterpart of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington. As it makes the case for stiffer gun control laws, it runs names of those we know who died in Las Vegas, then all the other mass shootings of recent years. They go on and on, effective precisely due to their austerity, namely just names. Nothing to give a window into their actual lives. Just names, with the conclusion:
"Evil people and mentally ill people can be found in every nation, but other nations have different laws. And so they do not have rosters to mourn like this."
"When will we decide it’s enough?"
Europe, U.S. meld media, military, diplomacy, cyberspace to combat Russia
"In a sign of just how seriously countries are taking Moscow’s attempts to destabilize them, 11 European governments plus the United States have now joined forces to build a special think tank about new kinds of war," notes Public Radio International.
"Based in Finland’s capital Helsinki, the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats launched on Monday to research 'hybrid war' — the strategic use of diplomacy, politics, media, cyberspace and military to destabilize and undermine an opponent’s government."
Good news on St. Martin
Gordon Snow, who runs the family-owned Daily Herald on hurricane-ravaged St. Martin, couldn't possibly get the 10,000-circulation paper out for weeks, as recounted here. Now, he informs, things are getting much better, with electricity and water returning at a rapid rate (unlike Puerto Rico, the island long ago put their power lines underground due to a 1995 hurricane). And the paper is back printing.
"It's great to be back on the streets," he tells me. "To hold that first paper in your hands, for all of us, it was a great feeling."
He's printing about 80 percent of the usual run, given problems in even getting to neighboring islands that they service, such as Anguilla. The ferry there resumed Friday but there are at least two islands that are inaccessible due to no air travel. The primary airport remains a mess, with no commercial travel even now. But an island whose economy is tourism-based now looks forward to the first cruise ship since the hurricane. It's due Nov. 11.
A prime tax bill for Amazon
Bloomberg reports today, "Amazon.com Inc. was hit by a European Union order to pay 250 million euros ($294 million) plus interest in back taxes to Luxembourg as the world’s biggest online retailer became the latest U.S. giant to fall foul of the bloc’s state-aid rules."
A pro-lifer's bad choice
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette broke this tale. All you need to know are the first two paragraphs:
"A text message sent in January to U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy by a woman with whom he had an extra-marital relationship took him to task for an anti-abortion statement posted on Facebook from his office's public account.
"'And you have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options,' Shannon Edwards, a forensic psychologist in Pittsburgh with whom the congressman admitted last month to having a relationship, wrote to Mr. Murphy on Jan. 25, in the midst of an unfounded pregnancy scare."
A longshot overseas
Is crowdfunding a business model for sustainable, comprehensive news coverage? Writes NiemanLab:
"Most of Southeast Asia’s legacy media are family businesses or for-profit entities controlled by conglomerates. But New Naratif, a new regional startup, is now testing the market for a paid membership approach to journalism via crowdfunding. Borrowing heavily from the ethos of De Correspondent, the Dutch news site that raised $1.7 million from 20,000 subscribers back in 2013, New Naratif aims to build a community of readers across the region."
Guys, holler in a couple of years if you're still in business.
Amid the rampant cable speculation
Having decided to go all-in on the Las Vegas massacre, cable TV can be left with lots of time for perilous speculation, such as during the uninspired ensemble, "The Five." It was rife with the unjustifiable, led by the bombastic Jesse Waters, a former pet of the disgraced Bill O'Reilly, and included whether the shooter was sending money to terrorist groups in the Philippines.
So knock on wood for the show including level-headed reporting from the scene by Trace Gallagher. He underscored all one doesn't know, which won't stop the likes of blowhard Waters but is a thankful respite.
More troubles for Yahoo, and your friends at Equifax
"New revelations that a 2013 security breach at Yahoo affected all 3 billion of its users has triggered a sharp rebuke from the U.S. Senate, which now plans to drag company representatives back to Capitol Hill for a hearing in the coming weeks." (Recode)
"The powerful Senate Commerce Committee and its chairman, Sen. John Thune, announced on Tuesday that they aim to grill representatives from Yahoo, now owned by Verizon, along with executives from Equifax, a credit-reporting agency whose 2017 security incident affected the most sensitive information of more than 145 million Americans."
Strong line-up gets stronger
Masha Gessen, a well-known chronicler of Vladimir Putin and already a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, will now write two pieces a week as a web columnist, while Troy Patterson arrives as a web cultural critic, focusing on television. Patterson is Style editor at Bloomberg and has had tenures at Slate, Spin and Entertainment Weekly.
Sarah Sanders' non-response response
"Deflecting questions in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 59 people and injured over 500 more, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday that this is not the geologic era in which to debate gun control."
It's The Onion but it's actually not that far from her initial response to reporters, namely that this is not the time.
Corrections? Tips? Please email me: jwarren@poynter.org. Would you like to get this roundup emailed to you every morning? Sign up here.
