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Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
The Gazette cutting back on covering Linn County? Nope.
May. 12, 2010 5:35 pm
Updated Friday, May 14, 2010: My Sunday, May 16, column in The Gazette newspaper expands on this blog item.
Linn County Supervisor Brent Oleson asserts on his blog today that The Gazette is cutting its coverage of Linn County. Here's a link to his post and my response below:
Brent,
Your blog provides an opportunity to correct a couple of misconceptions you've distributed about how county government reporting is done for The Gazette. The misconceptions may not necessarily be your fault because the company that owns our newspaper and television station has been going through revolutionary changes this past year and a half when it comes to collecting and presenting news. We've explained them but they are hard to grasp because they stray from what has been "business as usual" for many decades.
One misconception deals with your assertion that The Gazette no longer covers the Board of Supervisors because a "KCRG" reporter pops in. The reporters you refer to in your post as being "Gazette" and "KCRG" reporters are, in fact, reporters in the same newsroom and covering news for multiple outlets: The Gazette, KCRG-TV9, GazetteOnline.com and kcrg.com/
We are trying to break the barriers and stereotypes that go with the terms "newspaper" and "TV" reporter in this new digital age, when people increasingly are turning to the Internet for free information. Our goal in doing this is to focus on the journalism, not a single media outlet, and then distribute that journalism through several media outlets. We are trying to do this in a responsible way financially, using one reporter to cover some selected news stories instead of two from the same newsroom, which would be a wasteful duplication of effort.
All the reporters you've come to know as Gazette and KCRG-TV9 reporters in the past work for Becky Lutgen Gardner, our company's senior director of content information. Contributions to KCRG-TV9 by reporters whom you may think of as being Gazette reporters are not as evident on television because they do not appear in stand-up reports or voice-overs. Those you would think of as being KCRG-TV9 reporters because of their strong affiliation with the station -- by virtue of history or simply being on the air -- are more evident in The Gazette because we give them bylines.
The other misconception deals with the standards you unfairly suspect from reporters now gathering information for The Gazette. Becky expects each reporter, photographer and content team manager on her team to have high journalistic standards and I expect nothing less from her team when it comes to stories for The Gazette.
Our company president, Chuck Peters, and others have written this past year about changes we've made to be more financially responsible while still meeting our obligations as news and information providers. Chuck's blog can take you deeply into that shift at http://chuckpeters.iowa.com/
Talk about transparent: you can read a live blog of our last internal employee meeting in addition to Chuck's vision, evolutions in that vision, stumbles we've made and successes we feel have advanced our efforts.
Much has been written about our efforts nationally, by the way. Here's one site:
The Gazette Editorial Board operates independently of any newsgathering operation here. Its members research topics and issues and conduct interviews with policy makers, as we've done with you, when weighing in on a public issue with an editorial. We also invite members of the community to add their voices to the Opinion Page.
We are going to agree on a few things. One is that cutbacks in all news organizations in this country, including ours, have hampered meaningful watchdog journalism. And we need strong watchdog journalism in our democracy. We aren't perfect but our 126-year-old local, family-owned news and information company is working hard to find solutions that continue to support its journalism.
... Lyle Muller, Gazette Editor
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