In a strongly-worded Letter to the Editor in the December 2012 issue of Harper’s magazine, Thomas, Record-Eagle executive editor from 2002 to 2012, wrote that “democracy took a back seat to cronyism” during the Walker-based retailer’s attempts to overthrow civic leaders who fought a proposed store near Traverse City.

The letter follows a long-form piece on the story published in Harper’s October edition this fall, in which New Republic senior editor Alec MacGillis framed the long-running dispute as a nuanced corporate assault on community leaders in a one-intersection town divided over landscape-changing new development.

Thomas criticized statewide Michigan media outlets, suggesting that other newsrooms tiptoed around the story for fear of reprisal by Meijer, which pulled its Sunday ad circular from the Record-Eagle and gave it to a community feature-driven upstart paper “less interested in the messy business of journalism.” The move cost the Record-Eagle about $250,000 in annual advertising revenue.    MLive

Complete Letter

The transformation of the nation’s news landscape has already taken a heavy toll on print news sources, particularly print newspapers. But there are now signs that television news – which so far has held onto its audience through the rise of the internet – also is increasingly vulnerable, as it may be losing its hold on the next generation of news consumers.

Online and digital news consumption, meanwhile, continues to increase, with many more people now getting news on cell phones, tablets or other mobile platforms. And perhaps the most dramatic change in the news environment has been the rise of social networking sites. The percentage of Americans saying they saw news or news headlines on a social networking site yesterday has doubled – from 9% to 19% – since 2010. Among adults younger than age 30, as many saw news on a social networking site the previous day (33%) as saw any television news (34%), with just 13% having read a newspaper either in print or digital form.    Pew Research Center

With such fragmentation, claims of overall media bias tend to be spurious. How could all these sources have a consistent bias? For more on bias, see NYT.

I don’t usually blog about national politics, but this extreme misuse of statistics makes me furious.

Media Matters first spotted the inconsistency. Simply put, Fox & Friends juxtaposed unemployment in January 2009 — calculated to measure the number of unemployed people actively looking for work — with a different measure of unemployment in August 2012, calculated to include disaffected and marginally attached workers.    TPM

The valid comparison is explained in the article. In a nutshell:

The standard measure of unemployment (U-3) when Obama took office was 7.9 percent. Now it’s 8.1 percent.

The broader measure of unemployment (U-6) when Obama took office was 14.2 percent. Now it’s 14.7 percent.     TPM

Emmet County Circuit Judge Charles Johnson last week ruled on a Michigan Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Petoskey News-Review against the county, an effort to compel officials to release six emails between Jarema and a county commissioner they previously refused to reveal. Johnson ordered four of the six emails at issue to continue to be withheld as private, real estate advertisements not part of the public record, but ordered officials to release one e-mail and a redacted version of another.    News-Review

If you’re a teenager, you probably hadn’t heard of Joseph Kony last week. This week, you probably couldn’t avoid him.

“If I log onto Facebook or Twitter any time during the day, it’s my entire news feed, basically,” says Patrick Franks, an 18-year-old senior at Loyola Blakefield High School, outside Baltimore.

Franks is referring to a film produced by the nonprofit group Invisible Children. Its 30-minute video about the mass murderer in central Africa, “Kony 2012,” is approaching 60 million views on YouTube this week, with millions more watching on other video-sharing sites.     NPR

Also see The Atlantic

What happened to the Grand Vision? The public process to manage growth and development in the region around Traverse City was hailed as groundbreaking before it was pronounced dead by some local officials. People involved say it is on track and producing results. IPR

Elk Rapids Live salutes Jim Romenesko as a retiring blogger. Live itself has been going through a similar transition.

He was an aggregator before it became a dirty word. He was a blogger before there were blogs. But early next year, Jim Romenesko, the go-to source for news about the news, will retire from the blog that bears his name.     NYT

The changes cascading through the news media have made the old models of news delivery – like, say, an anchor reading the news at an appointed time – seem archaic. And it is about more than just TV – newspapers, magazines, radio, all the “legacy” media are feeling the earth move beneath them. Journalists look out and see thousands of empty campus TV lounges and newsprint-less recycling bins and millions of iPads and smart phones and they wonder what’s coming next.   CSM

Relevant local example
Plans are underway at The HERTH for a live radio broadcast in July. A must have?  High-speed broadband.

Welcome to the 21^st century.

Related story:  Die Walküre

Soon I’ll unveil the new look and features of Elk Rapids Live as well as a funding model that relies on advertising to pay expenses rather than the subscriptions I was considering. So there is some irony in my approach – funding an innovative online publication in the traditional ad-based way. For me, irony is the spice of life, often providing inspiration for many of my Live postings. So perhaps I’ll write about this new and ironic approach soon.

Most of the ads will come from outside sources, because it is easier for me to deal with externally generated ads as a one-person company. But I will be offering readers the opportunity to advertise on Live at very reasonable rates. This approach requires me to develop a fair rate structure as well as to create a policy that divides appropriate free content, such as public service announcements, from commercial materials, which must be paid ads. I’m working on those requirements now.

As part of today’s interview, I asked Blarney Castle’s Bill McCarthy about an ongoing concern of mine, that businesses along our U.S. 31 corridor tend to cater to transients and do not plug into the community like they should. He assured me that, at Blarney Castle, a family-owned business, it’s all about the community. In support, he promised to send me the schedule for community events that Blarney Castle holds at as many locations as possible. Here is that schedule.  (Click on the link at left or the graphic to download and view the entire schedule.)

Good to know. I hope Blarney Castle can do more than this for Elk Rapids.