Change is inevitable for the post office…..and newspapers

The Neptune Nudniks got one right today. 

In their editorial, Change inevitable for post office, The Asbury Park Press editorial board accurately spells out how the Internet and digital technology has changed the economics of information delivery, making the United States Postal Service obsolete and insolvent.  

The post office is undergoing a major downsizing. Appropriately so because people are just not using it they way we used to.  Electronic exchange of documents and information is just far more efficient than physically moving paper across town or across the country.

The Press concludes that, “we cannot subsidize what should be a self-sustaining entity any more than we could subsidize the buggy whip industry at the turn of the last century.”

That unassailable reasoning should also be applied to the subsidies the newspaper industry receives in the form of state mandated legal and public notices advertising.

Classified advertisings in newspapers has gone the way of the buggy whip industry. It has been replaced by craigslist, ebay, autotrader.com, realtor.com, realtytrac.com, and countless other websites.  The once thick classified sections of newspapers are now four or five pages daily, half of which is government compelled legal and public notices.

Bi-partisan legislation, The Electronic Publication Of Legal Notices Act, passed the State Senate in July of 2010 and the Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee in February of this year.  Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver has blocked the bill from being voted on by the full Assembly.

With millions of dollars in government mandated subsidies at stake, the newspaper industry came out in force to lobby against the bill arguing that legal notices on government websites instead of in newspapers really wouldn’t save the government money, that poor people without computers would not have access to the vital information( do poor people attend foreclosure auctions and zoning board hearings?) and that elected officials could use the power to withhold legal notice advertisements to punish newspapers for unfavorable news coverage.  The newspaper publishers said that their role as unbiased watchdogs would be compromised.

The assertion that newspapers fill the role of unbiased watchdogs is laughable.   Yesterday’s Star Ledger editorial laying out a strategy for Democrats to counter Governor Christie’s effective Town Hall meetings, along with the paper’s slanted “news” coverage of Christie’s meetings eariler in the week is just one recent example of how “newspapers” are just as biased as this or any other blog.

But the publishers’ argument that allowing newspaper advertising and/or Internet advertising on governement websites of Legal Notices gives government officials the power to punish newspapers whose coverage they don’t approve of (or to reward newspapers for coverage they do approve of) has merit.

That potential for abuse could be fixed by amending the Electronic Publication Of Legal Notices Act to require that legal notices be published only on government websites.  Reasonable fees for ads that are now paid to newspapers by planning and zoning applicants, foreclosing lenders and other private interests that are compelled to advertise could be collected by the municipalities to offset the cost of maintaining their websites and as a new source of much needed revenue.

The rest of New Jersey’s traditional media should embrace The Asbury Park Press’s outstanding reasoning, as it applies to the post office, and apply it to themselves in the interests of the public good. They should let Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver off the hook and suggest she post The Electronic Publication Of Legal Notices Act for a vote before the full Assembly where their friends in the chamber should amend the bill to prohibit governments from spending taxpayers dollars on legal notice advertising and eliminate the requirement that private interests pay to advertise anywhere other than on a government website.

Of course, the 1st amendment would allow the newspapers to continue publishing the notices, as a public service, or as a private sector revenue driven profit center.

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Real Jersey Bloggers On The Radio

This week’s Real Jersey Guys On The Radio Show will be different.

My partner former Senator Dick LaRossa has called in sick.

My young friend, Save Jersey founder Matt Rooney, has stepped up from being a guest to being the co-host.

After taking a year off from politics to work in the judicial branch of New Jersey government, Matt is back in the private sector practicing law and political punditry.  I’m glad he’s back.

Blue Jersey blogger Jay Lassiter will be calling in at about 5:15.  This will be a first for the show, being  joined  by a liberal Democrat, but it will be Real Jersey Radio.

You will want to hear it.  You will want to call in. We’ll be taking your calls at 609-447-0236.

The show is broadcast from 5PM-6PM on WIFI AM 1460 and here on the Internet.

The show is sponsored by Repatriot Radio.

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Diversify The Media

UPDATE:

Star Ledger reporter Ginger Gibson, a member of the Statehouse press corps tell me she is Mexican:

 I saw your piece about the diversity of the press corps. I just wanted to let you know, I’m Mexican. So it’s not all white guys in the press corps, there are some minorities. Just wanted to make sure you knew that.

I never would have guessed that, given Gibson’s fair skin and last name.  Another lesson about assumptions.

Yet the point of my piece still stands.  The press corps is far from 40% minority, and the Ledger editorial board is still FOS.

On Saturday The Star Ledger published an editorial calling on Governor Chris Christie to appoint minorities to the State Supreme Court.

The Ledger is lamenting the fact that since Christie took office both minorities who were on the court, Justice John Wallace and Justice Roberto Rivera-Sota,  have left the bench.  For the first time in twenty years there are no minorities on the court. “And yet more than 40 percent of the state’s population is black, Hispanic, or Asian.”

The Ledger took the diversity theme a bit further this morning with an article that sites a Star Ledger analysis which concludes Governor Christie is favoring white middle class senior citizens in selecting communities to host his Town Hall meetings.

This got me thinking about the diversity of the New Jersey Media.  Is the New Jersey press corp comprised of 40% of African Americans, Hispanics and Asians?   Not even close.

From my experience, without doing an extensive MMM analysis like the Ledger did of Christie’s Town Halls, journalism may be the least diverse industry in New Jersey.

The State House press corp?  Overwhelmingly white. 

NJ.com, The Star Ledger’s website?  Only one African American columnist who writes almost exclusively about Newark. 

Giving credit where it is due, Gannett’s papers have a diverse group of reporters, on the local levels.  They have an African American Executive Editor, Hollis Towns, at The Asbury ParkPress.  Their Statehouse Buerau?  Five white guys.  They would be wise to make Jane Roh part of that team.

News12 has a diverse staff. 

So what is with the progressives at The Star Ledger?  Should they be telling the Governor to take the speck out of his eye while they have a log in their own?

Are the folks at The Ledger hypocrites or has Gannett scooped up all the good minority writers?

I don’t know for sure, but I tend to think they’re full of poop.  They’re attempting to set the agenda for Christie’s Supreme Court appointments by using the race card.  As part of the vast progressive conspiracy, the Ledger likes an activist court that requires billions of dollars to be flushed into urban schools that produce morally unacceptable results in educating minority children.   If they can convince the public that race should be a criteria for selecting a Supreme Court Justice, rather than scholarship, judicial temperment and a philosphical committement to interpreting law, rather than writing it from the bench, The Ledger figures they can thrwart Governor Christie from “turning Trenton upside down” anymore than he already has.

The Legislature is very likely to remain in Democratic control after the coming election, which limits severely the reforms Governor Christie can make over the rest of his term.  Given the legislative map, a second Christie term will most likely also have a Democratic legislature.    That he will have the responsiblity to appoint the majority of the court in his first term, to reshape the court as he promised, will result in the real legacy of the Christie administration.

The Star Ledger’s lip service for diversity is nothing more then getting ready for that coming political battle.

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If Christie’s the new darling of the far right, where does that leave Steve Lonegan?

Should we care?

That’s the question that Bergen Record Columnist Charles Stile asks this morning at NorthJersey.com.

Stile is wondering how Lonegan is reacting to American For Prosperity benefactor David Koch’s declaration that Governor Christie is “my kind of guy” at the super secret corporate donors meeting in Colorado last June.  That was the meeting where Christie told the tale of how he saved Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver’s position by lining up Assembly Republicans to vote for her had the Democrats staged a coup to prevent the pension and benefits reform bill from being posted.

Strangely, Lonegan who is never shy with the press, rebuffed Stile’s inquiry four times in two weeks. 

Stile probably hasn’t noticed that Lonegan’s rare pontifications about Christie have been positive since April of this year.  That is when Christie prevailed upon Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips to get Lonegan to tone his rhetoric down, as reported at the time by the now defunct TheStateNJ.com.

Lonegan’s focus has been on co-opting and controlling New Jersey’s Tea Party movement and attempting to destroy Tea Parties he can’t control, if The Bulldog Pundit, Gene Hoyas’ body of work over this summer is accurate.

Hoyas has been white knighting for the Bay Shore Tea Party Group which has suffered ad hominem attacks from conservative websites that Hoyas says are Lonegan mouthpieces.  Hoyas’ smoking gun that Lonegan, and Senator Mike Doherty, are behind the attacks is that they haven’t publically called for the conservatives sites to stop picking on the BTPG.

All of this nonsense, from Stile’s piece this morning, to Hoyas and other purists fighting all summer, to Lonegan trying to control Tea Parties, if he is, are gifts to the Democrats who are on track to keep control of the legislature in Trenton.

Stile could have written about the current and ongoing rifts within the Democratic party, rather than suggesting to his readers that Christie is more “far right” than Lonegan.  Instead he attempted to tweak Lonegan into reigniting a battle that he surrendered months ago.  We should expect that from Stiles as a center-left opinion leader.

But Hoyas and other conservatives fighting with each other, as well as the ongoing ideological Inquisition of RINO hunters is nothing more than a circular firing squad.  

Now that they have wasted the summer, it is time for all the ideological purists to stop fighting over which angel does a better dance on the head of a pin and get to work electing candidates who are right and center-right.

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Kudos to News12

News 12 televised the moving dedication of the Empty Sky Memorial of New Jersey residents who perished on September 11, 2001 this morning and early afternoon.

NJTV broadcast an episode of Sesame Street and a repeat of Caucus New Jersey.

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Christie and Oliver at odds over leaked tape of secret speech

All the New Jersey media is abuzz over the leaked audio and transcript of a talk that Governor Chris Christie delivered to a secret meeting of GOP mega-donors organized by the Koch brothers in Colorado on June 26.  The meeting was so secret that Christie did not disclose to the press, as is customary, that he was leaving the state and transferring power to the Lt. Governor.

What has everyone in a tizzy is a story that Christie told the group about how he saved Sheila Oliver’s speakership during the landmark pension and benefit bill negotiations:

And Thursday night it came time for the Assembly. And they started to caucus at 11:00 in the morning. They were supposed to start voting at 1:00. It got to be 5:30 and they were still in the caucus room. And the reports I was getting out of there were not positive about what was going on to my friend the Speaker. She was takin’ a beating at the hands of her own party. At 5:30 she called me and she said to me, “Governor, I don’t know how this is going to play out, but I’m going to, I want to post the bill but I think when I go on the floor, my own party’s going to take a run at me to remove me as Speaker. So I can’t post the bill.” She said, “I think the only way I survive is if the 33 Republicans in the chamber will agree to vote for me for Speaker. Can you work it out?” [scattered laughter] So I said, “Give me five minutes.” [laughter]

So I went down to the Republican Assembly caucus room. I stood at the front of the room and I said, “Ladies and gentleman, it’s a historic day today. You’re going to get an opportunity to cast two historic votes.” [laughter] “The first one, of course, is about pension and benefit reform and I know that everybody in this room supports it. The second one is a little more unusual.” [laughter] I said, “Probably for the only time in my governorship I’m going to actually ask you to vote for a Democrat. I said Sheila Oliver is under siege. And she wants to do the right thing. And we cannot be slaves to party or partisanship. She is right on this issue and she is with us on this issue. So if they take a run at her on the floor, I need all of you to vote for her for Speaker.” I had these men and women look back at me like, “What?” [scattered laughter] And I said to ’em, “We were sent here to lead. Not to preen and posture, posture and pose. To lead. A public office to lead. We need to do this. So raise your hands. Are you with me or aren’t you?” All 33 of them raised their hands and said they were with me.

And so I went back to my office, I got on the phone and I called the Speaker, and I said, “You just got 33 new votes.” And she said, “Well, you just got yourself a bill.” And she went on the floor, she led the debate, another two and a half hours of debate. They never took a run at her. It was the Minority Leader who suddenly went over to the Majority Leader of the Assembly, it was the guy who was gonna take a run at her, and said, “By the way, we’ve got her back, so don’t try it.” [very scattered chuckles] They didn’t. They opened up the board, they cast the votes, by then 46 to 32, with 33 Republicans and 13 Democrats, we passed health and pension reform that will save the taxpayers of New Jersey over the next 30 years at least 132 billion dollars. [audience: “wows”, whistles, applause]

When I get back to New Jersey tomorrow morning, we will sign the bill on Tuesday and make it law and it will become effective July 1st. And that’s what we were sent to do to govern.

At a press conference in Atlantic City today, Christie confirmed he delivered the speech and he issued a correction.  He said there were 32 in Assembly members in the Republican caucus room, not 33 as he said in Colorado.  The Star Ledger quotes Christie today saying he was “proud” that he helped protect Oliver’s speakership.  He said that the story shows that “Republicans put policy over politics,” according to the Ledger.

Oliver said Christie “is deranged” :

“The assertions that Gov. Christie has made, they are outright lies. Outright lies. I am beginning to wonder if Gov. Christie is mentally deranged,” Oliver said. “At no time did I ever, ever pick up the telephone, call Gov. Christie and ask him to quote ‘save my leadership.’ ” The governor was engaged in a chest-thumping vaudeville entertainment session in front of the Republican donors, she said. “I don’t expect to call him at all,” she said. “I think it’s disgraceful.”

Now the Democratic leaders of both houses of the New Jersey legislature have called Christie a liar. In January Senate President Stephen Sweeney refuted Christie’s claim that he was in direct contact with Sweeney during the December blizzard while Sweeney was Acting Governor.

Sweeney famously called Christie a “rotten prick” in July after Christie used the line item veto to balance the budget.  Today Oliver called Christie “mentally deranged.”    Christie calls these people his friends.

Multiple people who were in the Republican caucus room spoke to MMM on the condition of anonymity.  They confirmed Christie’s version of the story, sort of.  Let’s just say that while 32 hands went up, not all of them had five fingers raised.

The caucus knew that Oliver was under siege.  They expected Majority Leader Joe Cryan to try to replace her in order to prevent the pension and benefits reform bill from being posted.

No one could confirm Christie’s account of Minority Leader Alex DeCroce going over to Cryan and telling him, “By the way, we’ve got her back, so don’t try it.”   If it happened, it may have been a bluff.

Several of the more conservative members of the caucus were very concerned about casting a vote for Oliver as speaker.  “Such a vote will follow me for the rest of my career, if I have a career,” one Assembly member said, according to a source who was in the room.

“There are two factions if the Republican caucus,” said the source, “those who are concerned about primary challenges from Tea Partiers and those from the more moderate districts who are concerned about winning the general election.  The conservatives were worried about having to vote for Oliver.”

There is some truth to Oliver’s carefully worded response to the leaked tapes.  Christie’s speech was entertainment.  As Assemlbyman Patrick Diegnan (D-Middlesex) told the Ledger, this was “a red meat speech.”

As those who have followed Christie on the stump know, the Governor is a great story teller, in the tradition of great Irish story tellers.  

Great stories and tales get better every time they are told by a master. While the underlying truth remains, the details get embellished and the story gets “better.”  It makes a point better, is more moving or entertaining.  Anyone who has attended three or more of Christie’s town hall meetings knows Christie is a great story teller.

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The Difference Between Democrats And Republicans

That’s the difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats latch onto any way to gain power and force their agenda through, like Obamacare. Republicans waste their time over purity of thought and have circular firing squads.

The only reason Republicans get power is because the Democrats screw things up so badly that the voters force a change. Then the Republicans turn on each other and the Democrats are back again like a herpes outbreak.

~Joe, a commenter on Paul Mulshine’s circular firing squad.

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Television Coverage

News12 is doing an outstanding  job covering the hurricane for New Jersey.  The major network affiliates in New York and presumably Philadelphia are doing the what they usually do….cover New Jersey as an after thought to their home cities.

News12 is only available to cable subscribers.  FIOs and satellite TV users are without comprehensive New Jersey news, which in the case of a hurricane or other disaster can be life threatening.

NJTV, the successor to NJN, is broadcasting an episode of Sid The Science Kid.

Hopefully NJN veteran Michael Aron, who has recently taken over the news operation of NJTV, will have the resources to build a bureau that provides New Jersey the news coverage it needs or will develop cooperative agreements with other outlets so that all New Jersey residents can get the news they need when they need it.

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Rutgers-Eagleton Releases Stale Polling Data

The Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University released a poll this morning indicating that most New Jersey voters do not think President Obama deserves a second term.

The data Eagleton relied on in the press release is 10 days to 2 weeks old. The polling was conducted between August 9 and August 15.

The poll is meaningless now.    Of course Obama’s numbers were low August 9-15.  S&P had just downgraded our debt on  August 5 and the stock market was in a free fall.

I’d much rather know how New Jersey voters feel about the President now, after the “Death Star” bus tour, the Martha’s Vineyard vacation, Joe Biden’s remarks about China’s population control policies and the demise of the Gaddafi regime in Libya.

The age of the poll will not stop the NJ mainstream media from reporting it as “news.”

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Dustin Racioppi Leaving RedBankGreen

Prolific Reporter Is Joining The Asbury Park Press

Dustin Racioppi is taking his considerable talent to The Asbury Park Press.  Hopefully the creative and entrepreneurial scribe will not be stifled by the suits at Gannett.

“Hopefully I won’t become a “Nudnik'”, said Dustin when confirming his move.

In his two years at RedBankGreen Dustin demonstrated an enviable ability to report local events from car accidents to council meetings with a compelling flair that kept readers coming back for more.  He contributed mightly to the impressive growth of RBG and to the emergence of the “hyber-local” news business that the corporate media giants are now unwittingly attempting to homogenize.

Focus is a key to Dustin’s success. He lived and breathed his beat of Red Bank, Fair Haven, Rumson and Middletown.  Last year while preparing to cover Congressman Frank Pallone’s office hours in Long Branch, I reached out to Dustin to see if he was going to cover it.  “Long Branch is Jupiter to us,” was his response.

I was surprised when I first heard that Dustin was leaving RBG.  While preparing to move MMM to this domain from the old blogspot site I sent a feeler out to Dustin about joining me.  “I love working for John Ward,” was his immediate response.  That was obvious from the quality of his work.

And Ward, owner/publisher of RBG, obviously loved having Dustin work for him.  In an “Help Wanted” ad for reporters on RBG, Ward says:

We’re interested in teaming up with people who can quickly gather information and shape it into brief stories that are factually solid and fair, yet more than mere stenography. A distinctive and confident writer’s voice, or a desire to develop one, is a must. So is a broad range of interests, from the arts to public policy to business. The ability to take a decent photograph is a big plus. Wannabes, whiners and prima donnas: please don’t waste our time. We’re interested in working only with those who demonstrate entrepreneurial energy and focus on what needs to be done. Yeah, they sound boring, but they’re the most fun to be around. And we do have fun here.

In other words, John is looking to clone Dustin.   Not an easy person to find, as I have learned over the last year. If you’re out there and love politics more than sprinkling fire hydrants or fireworks shows, call me first, or last.

Dustin’s move comes at a difficult time for RBG as it faces competition for advertising dollars from the patch.com sites and perhaps The Two River Times.  Two weeks ago, Dan Jacobson reported in the triCityNews that TRT’s new publisher Ellen McCarthy was planning to convert the weekly paper’s website to an active news site with daily updates.  If McCarthy has started doing so, I haven’t noticed.  It’s probably still in the planning stages.  Diane Gooch is still listed as publisher on the TRT site, an indication that they haven’t gotten to working on the website yet.

MMM wishes the best for Dustin at APP, and for Ward and RBG.  While we’re at it, we wish the best for McCarthy and TRT and we pray the Neptune Nudniks learn from Dustin rather than trying to train him into a dead tree scribe.  The more quality sources of local information available the better for all of us in this Internet age.  I’m pretty sure Ward knows that.  Maybe the Nudni’s are beginning to figure that out, but probably not.  Jacobson doesn’t care.  Only Dan knows how to make dead trees sing.

We don’t wish Patch well so much.  We’d love them if they put out a consistently quality product, but that’s difficult if not impossible to do with part-time writers working for an extra $50-$100 per week.  In the mean time they’re only mucking up the revenue side of the business.  Patch’s only hope long term is for AOL/Ariann Huffington to pay Ward, Jacobson or me hundreds of millions of dollars and then leave us alone to do what we want to do. 

Not likely to happen.

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