Tag Archives: Internet

local news, media news

The ‘O’ is vanishing

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We called it “The O,” or the “Big O” back in the day, but these days the “O” is a shadow of its former self and is vanishing into history’s dust bin.

The O is The Oregonian, the newspaper of record for my hometown of Portland. A friend sent me a story from Editor & Publisher with a distressing story about the Oregonian’s plans to quit daily distribution of a newspaper that once was considered a “cash cow” for Newhouse Corp., the company’s corporate owner. The Oregonian is about to end 142 years of daily newspaper distribution.

No more, man.

A paper that once distributed more than 250,000 copies daily and 400,000 copies on Sunday is suspending publication for four days weekly effective Jan. 1. The culprit? That damn Internet!

I don’t know how to react, other than with profound sadness at the state of the industry that gave me a wonderful career. I practiced my craft for nearly 37 years, and I actually got started with the Oregonian Publishing Co., which used to operate the afternoon Oregon Journal until it folded the paper into The Oregonian in 1982. I worked on the copy desk at the Journal until the spring of 1977 when I took a job as a temporary sportswriter for the Oregon City Enterprise-Courier.

The temp job became permanent, and I was on my way to a career that gave me more enjoyment and fulfillment than I probably deserved.

Now comes this terrible news out of my hometown. The Eugene Register-Guard and the Salem Statesman-Journal — both owned by Gannett/GateHouse — have effectively become a regional newspaper covering the Willamette Valley, according to E&P. The Medford Mail-Tribune shut down earlier this year. All three of those publications once were award winners of the first order..

The Oregonian’s circulation numbers are about a tenth of what they once were. The paper’s sales continue to plummet. What’s next is the unthinkable: shutting it down altogether.

Wow!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news

Great story on the fall of a media ‘giant’

The Texas Tribune has published a wonderful story about the pending demise of the Canadian Record, an award-winning weekly newspaper that has “suspended” its print editions … maybe only temporarily.

Nic Garcia wrote the piece.

Texas news desert expands after Canadian Record stops publishing | The Texas Tribune

The Record’s owner, Laurie Ezzell Brown, is trying to find a buyer. She admits to being weary of the grind and wants to spend time with her children and grandchildren.

Garcia alludes to the demise of many newspapers that serve rural communities. I would just add this mild critique, which is that he didn’t mention that the Texas Panhandle’s significant urban community — Amarillo — is suffering from the same lack of local news coverage as communities such as Canadian.

Same for Lubbock further down the highway from Amarillo. And other larger cities as well.

The era of printed newspapers is fading away … rapidly, it seems.

It saddens this old newspaper hand terribly.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Body language reveals much

I watched virtually every minute of Day Five of the House select committee’s televised hearing on the 1/6 insurrection, but one image from my day in front of the TV stands out.

U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., was questioning the Justice Department officials summoned to testify. The discussion turned to a Defense Department request made in early January 2021 to examine whether an Italian firm was able to change ballots cast for Donald Trump into votes for Joe Biden.

The look on Kinzinger’s face as he was grilling the witnesses was, to say the least, most edifying. It was as if he couldn’t believe (a) that he was asking such a question and (b) that the Defense Department was actually exerting any effort to uncover such nonsense.

The request reportedly came from Donald J. Trump. Yep, the POTUS himself wanted to know whether DOD could determine whether there were any Internet spooks monkeying around with the returns.

I mention this for an important reason.

It is that at no time during the frontal attack on the Capitol on 1/6 did Donald Trump bother to call the Defense Department to deploy troops to quell the violence that killed several police officers and injured dozens of others.

Oh, no! He was fixated on an election he lost to Joe Biden … which lends some authenticity to Rep. Kinzinger’s apparent disbelief in the testimony he received from the DOJ officials sitting before the committee.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news

Oh, this blog gives me fits

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

No matter how many times I tell myself how much I love my new role as a full-time blogger, I cannot get past some of the headaches associated with it.

All of them have one thing in common: technology.

I am a technological novice. I am not at all fluent in the language that Internet experts use when they converse with each other. They speak a jargon that is as self-contained as the language that doctors, lawyers and even journalists use when they speak to each other.

So, when technology throws me a curve ball, I am left to (a) my own devices or (b) call on one of my sons who happens to be quite fluent in the language known to those with more than a modicum of knowledge about this stuff.

Hell, I don’t even know a modicum of it.

I have been enduring some technical issues with this blog. I have had to rely on my son to walk me through it. We have had three-way conference calls that include him, me and the domain hosting service for which I pay a handsome annual fee.

I am in the middle of a technical issue right now. We will work our way through it. We’ll slog our way out of the mess.

Will this matter make me less in love with what I do these days? Not on your life. I will persist in seeking answers to these issues. I might even one day become semi-fluent in the language I ought to know when I get one of these geeks on the phone.

I could use some good thoughts and even a prayer or two.

local news

Oh, the Internet!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am receiving a real-time lesson on how dependent I have become to the Internet.

Our RV campsite is in the middle of the Davis Mountains of Far West Texas. Cell phone reception is gone, pfftt … nothing, man! That doesn’t bother me so much.

What drives me batty is my (lack of ) Internet connection. The Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, which runs the magnificent state park where we are holed up, has Wi-Fi service, but it’s lousy. I cannot sign onto the TP&W site. I can, however, sign onto Word Press, which is the platform that contains this entry. When I am finished I will post it to Word Press, but not onto the other social media platforms I use to distribute this blog.

Therefore, this entry will go to relatively few folks who normally would read these words.

I am expressing a frustration.

We’re able to go into town, where the cell service is a zillion times better. Thus, so is the Internet service.

I’ll just have to wait until our next foray into Fort Davis to reconnect with what we used to refer to in Vietnam as “The World.”

Bear with me. Please.

media news

Media deserve bouquets, not brickbats

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Donald John Trump is so very fond of bashing the media, those whose duty is to report to the public about how well — or poorly — government is functioning.

Yeah, he tosses the occasional compliment, then follows that with the usual rants about “fake news” and “low ratings” and other crap designed to denigrate the Fourth Estate.

I want to sing the media’s praises especially for the way they have been covering the coronavirus pandemic.

I’ve been trying to think back to any story that has dominated our airwaves and our printed pages the way coronavirus outbreak has done. The media, for their part, are covering this crisis about every way imaginable. They are doing so in ways I never would think of were I in a position to assign reporters to cover the story.

Trump’s anger at the media rests, in my mind, on the notion that the media aren’t swallowing the nonsense he spews — and the lies he tells — about the “fantastic” job he and his team are doing. They are seeking to fill in the spaces left open by the president and his team.

Trump says the disease is “under control.” The media go to expert sources who report that, nope, it’s untrue. The disease is far from being controlled, contained or confined.

The media’s reporting of seemingly separate stories are tied in varying ways to the coronavirus crisis.

That’s OK with me. The media are doing the job they are empowered to do. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects them from government interference. Over the generations since the founders wrote the amendment, it has been generally accepted that the Constitution also offers a shield against politicians’ bullying and coercion.

Donald Trump’s constant criticism is blatant form of bullying that cannot be tolerated. He won’t stop the attacks, given that they play well to the ignorant wing of his political base, the know-nothings who believe Trump’s ridiculous assertions that “fake news” is actually false, when in reality it merely is news that isn’t favorable to their hero.

The media are doing a great job covering a story that needs a free press now more than ever.

media news

In need of a respite from this madness

I am in desperate need of a respite, a break, a breather from the madness that has overtaken Planet Earth.

We’re caught up in this pandemic crisis. The coronavirus is killing thousands of human beings each day now. We hear glimmers of good news: the death rate is slowing in Italy, as are the new cases of infection; China is reporting no new cases; same with South Korea.

Here, though, in the U.S. of A., our infection rate is still accelerating. So is our death rate.

All in all, the media are doing a stellar job of reporting it to us. We’re being kept informed. I want to stay informed. I need to know whether my family is safe from this disease and I am relying on the media to tell me.

That all said, I need some relief from what is inundating us.

The Internet keeps me plugged in 24/7. I’m fine with that. I can turn it on — or off — as the spirits move me.

At this moment, the spirits are telling me to turn it off for a while.

Heaven knows the president of the United States, the fellow elected to lead us through crises such as this, isn’t doing his job. He’s blathering, spitting out lies and half-truths while expecting us to ignore their obvious fakery. Maybe that’s the source of my need for a break. I cannot listen to him.

So, I’m going to take a break. I don’t know how long it’ll last. Probably not long. I could return damn near any minute after I post this item. It’s a combination of what I call “pandemic fatigue” and profound disgust at the lies I keep hearing from Donald Trump.

For now … I’m out. See you on the other side.

local news

Man, this technology thing is mind-blowing

GREENVILLE, Texas — It’s official. My mind is totally blown apart.

I ventured to Greenville today for a story I am going to write for KETR-FM’s website, KETR.org. I won’t divulge what’s going into the story. I merely want to take a moment to tell you that I have been bowled over by high-tech genius.

My visit was with the Greenville Electric Utility System brass. I met with GEUS’s general manager, Alicia Price; with marketing manager Jimmy Dickey; with Internet manager Jason Minter and with Terry Walthall, whose business card describes him as a “Headend Specialist,” which a kind of code for system operations manager … the guy who knows which buttons to push and which wires to connect.

Our visit was informative in the extreme and I look forward to posting my story about Greenville’s cable TV-Internet system on KETR.org next month.

However, my mind was blown as I tried to process all the technological expertise that was being demonstrated.

My session with Price, Dickey and Minter ended with me recalling how it was when I was a youngster, how we were able to watch three whole TV channels. How we had to get up off the floor or out of a chair, walk to the TV set and turn the knob on the front of the set to change the channel. I asked Minter if he remembers TVs that took about a minute to “warm up” as the tubes inside got hot. He quipped about how the “vertical hold” would scroll the image up and down.

I mentioned the rabbit-ear antenna on top of the TV set and how we occasionally had to wrap aluminum foil around the end of the antenna to get a stronger picture.

Then I mentioned how Dad sold TVs and other appliances in the 1950s and how our family acquired one of the first televisions in Portland, Ore. And then I told them about the time color TV came into being and how my sister and I would host “TV watching parties” in our living room with neighbor kids who gathered with us to watch cartoons in color.

I am 70 years of age, but those memories remain fresh in my noggin. Today’s session with the high-tech powerhouses at GEUS only reaffirmed what I knew, which is that we’ve have circled the solar system hundreds of times in our quest — and our discovery — of technical know-how.

It has blown my mind.

media news

What took so long to build has collapsed in virtually no time at all

It took print journalism, chiefly newspapers, nearly two centuries to attain what used to be a virtually exalted status among their consumers.

And yet, the craft has all but collapsed in virtually no time.

What took years to erect has all but vanished in the blink of an eye.

That observation came from a dear friend of mine with whom I used to have a professional relationship when I worked in Amarillo as editorial page editor of the Globe-News. My friend was a freelance columnist; he had a regular day job, but wrote for us because he was good at it. Our professional relationship ended when I left the newspaper in August 2012. Happily, our personal friendship remains intact.

We were visiting the other evening when he made that stunning observation. His point is that newspapers climbed for a long time up a proverbial mountain to attain an important status in people’s homes. Readers of newspapers depended on them for news of their community, of their state, nation and the world around them. If you wanted to know what was happening in the world, you collected your newspaper off the porch, opened it up and spent a good deal of time reading what it reported to you.

We believed what we read. I mean, if it’s in the daily newspaper then it had to be true. As my friend noted, it took a long time for newspapers to achieve that status.

Then it all changed. Rapidly! Dramatically! Newspapers fell with a loud thud!

The Internet arrived. I can’t remember when it happened, but suffice to say it was the equivalent to the “day before yesterday.” Cable TV exploded. Social media burst forth, too.

All of that media took huge bites out of newspapers’ influence in people’s lives. Has print journalism become less reliable, less believable, less credible than before? I do not believe that is the case. Americans are still reading some first-class reporting from major newspapers that remain important purveyors of vital information.

And yet, we hear the president of the United States refer to the media as “the enemy of the people.” Right-wingers blast what they call the “mainstream media.” They accuse newspapers and other legitimate media organizations of peddling “fake news.” The attacks have exacted a terrible toll on newspapers.

The smaller papers, those that tell us about our communities? They are struggling. Many of them — if not most of them — are losing the struggle. The Amarillo Globe-News, my final stop in a career that I loved pursuing, has been decimated by competing media forces and — in my view — by incompetence at the top of its management chain of command.

My friend’s analysis, though, rings so true. It saddens me beyond measure to realize that it has taken so little time for it all come crashing down.

media news

Retirement journey takes me farther than I thought

I want to acknowledge something I realized during a recent foray across the western portion of North America.

It is that my retirement from a craft I pursued with great joy has taken me farther away from it than I could have imagined.

I worked in print journalism for nearly 37 years. My career ended in August 2012. I dabbled a bit here and there part time writing for other media outlets: public TV, commercial TV and editing a weekly newspaper. I kept my head in the game and my hand on the mechanics of the craft.

Then I entered full retirement mode.

In the old days, travels with my wife usually meant picking up newspapers in every community we would visit or pass through. I would bring home an armload of newspapers from which I might glean ideas about layout, or presentation.

This time, after spending more than a month on the road through the western United States and Canada? Nothin’. I didn’t bring home a single newspaper. Indeed, I read only one newspaper during our time on the road … and it was a freebie distributed to all the visitors of a Eugene, Ore., RV park. The newspaper was the Register-Guard of Eugene, which in the old days was considered one of the better newspapers in the Pacific Northwest. It was family owned and was considered a leader in graphic design and presentation of news and commentary.

The Baker family sold the R-G not long ago to GateHouse Media, the outfit that has purchased dozens of newspapers around the country, becoming a media titan in an age of dwindling newspaper influence and importance.

My wife and I spent several nights up the highway from Eugene in Portland, my hometown and where I first fell in love with newspapers. I never laid eyes on The Oregonian newspaper during our visit there.

Oh, the end of an era for me personally!

We visited many cities that used to boast solid newspaper tradition: Colorado Springs; Bend, Ore.; Wenatchee, Wash.; Calgary, Alberta; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Grand Forks, N.D.; Topeka, Kan.; Tulsa, Okla.

I didn’t read a single word printed in newspapers distributed in those communities.

What does this mean? Hmm. I’ll have to ponder it. I still cherish my memories of toiling at newspapers in Oregon and Texas. I continue to harbor many fond memories of those years. I recall them with glee. However, I no longer am wedded to newspapers as my primary information source … or so it has become obvious, given what I have just reported about our recent journey.

Gosh, am I now dependent on “The Internet” for all my information? To some extent, yes. Although I want to rely solely on “legitimate news sources” that are spread throughout cyberspace.

There remains a glimmer of hope that I haven’t gone totally to the dark side. I do subscribe to the Dallas Morning News. I restarted my subscription upon our return home. It arrived this Sunday morning. I will consume its contents with great gusto.