We lack the journalists we need now

Mayor thinks twice about merchandise sales

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We need experienced, inquiring local journalists now, and the Post-Star has just replaced its editor with a marketer.

The story announcing the change mentions its departing editor in a single, brisk sentence: “Former editor Steve Thurston is no longer with the company.”

Steve tried hard for a year and a half with three reporters and a part-timer to cover a large geographic area, multiple county, town and city boards, school districts and police departments.

It was a difficult job when we had six or seven times the number of employees in the newsroom. It’s an impossible one now.

My guess, from my own experience, is Steve’s misstep was not a failure in news coverage but a lack of enthusiasm for some useless corporate initiative paper-pushers at Lee Enterprises dreamed up.

Lee has hired as Thurston’s replacement Paul Kasko, who, according to the story, has a “passion for community-focused reporting.”

I hope so, although I have to wonder, since his passion for the past decade has been working for Narrative Content Group, a branding and marketing company based in Atlanta.

I have no problem with advertising, which paid my salary for 35 years in the newspaper business, but I shudder when our local paper hires an ad executive to run the newsroom.

Of all the principles of newspapering, maintaining a wall between advertising and news is, after telling the truth, the second-most sacrosanct.

Kasko lists his former job on his Linkedin page as “managing director, content marketing.”

Branding and marketing require collaborating with and satisfying advertisers, while good journalism requires independence from them and often upsets them.

I don’t want to be unfair to Mr. Kasko, but I wonder about the unspoken terms of his employment. Who does his boss, Michelle Rice, a longtime advertising director, think she is getting? Does she expect him to push back or to go along if she wants good coverage for a favored client or, worse, no coverage at all?

In 2019, when Post-Star reporter Kathleen Moore unearthed that Glens Falls Hospital lost $38 million in 2017 because of a bad billing system, the hospital’s CEO, Dianne Shugrue, wanted the paper to back off.

The paper’s publisher at the time, Brian Corcoran, pushed the newsroom to go easy on the hospital, which was Glens Falls’ largest employer and a Post-Star advertiser, but Ken Tingley, then the paper’s editor and since then the founder of this newsletter, successfully resisted that pressure.

Kathleen’s reporting gave the community critical information about the hospital’s mistakes and cuts in medical services that resulted.

Would that story make it into the paper now, and if it did, would the copy be as uncompromising as it was then?

The paper has lost so much of its vitality over the past 10 years or so. I haven’t seen a local editorial in many months. I hope it rallies and rediscovers a will to serve the community through reporting and opinion-writing. But this new hire, on its face, is not encouraging.

No alternative

The flailing and failing of the Post-Star could be an opportunity for the Chronicle, a free weekly, to approach what it has for years on its front page bragged it is: “Northern New York’s leading newspaper.” The Chronicle might at least become the leading newspaper in the city of Glens Falls, where its local coverage is strong.

Cathy DeDe, the hardworking managing editor, does a great job getting herself or other reporters out to events and covering them thoroughly.

But the paper rarely takes a strong position on a local issue, rarely endorses a political candidate — besides Elise Stefanik — and always hedges its positions, as if in fear of giving offense.

The Chronicle has represented, since I came to Glens Falls in 1993, what I hoped the Post-Star would never be and what I worry it will now become — a newspaper where business interests run the newsroom.

A recent byline in the Chronicle — Zander Frost/Chief Operating Officer — captured the lack of interest shown by the paper’s owner — Zander’s father, Mark — in the traditional separation between the business and news sides of a paper.

Although Mark has occasionally voiced his dislike of Trump, he rarely lets a criticism of Trump pass without lobbing a grenade at the Democrats or the “hard left.”

He’s an accomplished political straddler, probably because, as he told me when I called him last week, he “listens to his readers” and “learns from them.” What he learns, I suspect, is that many of his readers like it very much when Frost validates their support for the man Frost called, in an October 2019 column, “small, selfish and nasty.”

We have transgender citizens here in the Glens Falls area. We have immigrant families. We have migrant workers relied upon by local employers. And all of us rely more than we realize on the proper administration of federal institutions.

We need people with powerful platforms to stand up for order against the chaos Trump is promising, and we need them to defend the rights of the vulnerable and unprivileged against the power of a regime looking for scapegoats.

Will the Post-Star and the Chronicle do this most essential journalistic work? I’d love to think so, but I have no reason to.

The mayor’s merch

You probably haven’t noticed any merchandise from Mayor Bill Collins’ business, Celtic Attitudes, at the Adirondack Holiday Festival this weekend. That’s because Collins agreed not to join the other vendors in the heated tents along Maple Street after several people — including other members of the Common Council and members of the Glens Falls Collaborative, which is running the event — suggested it would be a conflict of interest.

The mayor’s participation as a business owner in any city festival might be considered a conflict, but in this one especially.

Collins hired the McKrells to perform twice during the festival, at a cost of several thousand dollars, for which he is using occupancy tax money he obtained for the city from Warren County.

The McKrells play a blend of Irish and American folk music and will reportedly be selling some of their own merchandise in the performance tent. Collins was going to join them with Irish-themed T-shirts and hoodies from Celtic Attitudes.

Celtic Attitudes features a “Feckin’ Wrecked” hoodie on its homepage with a drawing of three apparently inebriated Irish men, which, according to a blurb on the site, was designed by Kevin McKrell.

“He is a business partner with Sullivan and more importantly the Chief Executive Bard at Celtic Attitudes,” the blurb says of McKrell.

Sullivan is Collins’ first name.

So the hiring with public money of a “business partner” of the mayor’s, along with Collins’ intention to sell his merchandise at this city-supported event struck more than one person as a conflict of interest.

What strikes me is that Collins wasn’t concerned about the conflict, or perhaps didn’t recognize that there was one, until it was pointed out to him. But he did the right thing in deciding against selling his merch at the event.

Hawk

The local trails we frequent are mostly empty of other people these days, which may be why we spotted a red-tailed hawk at about 9 Wednesday morning as we walked around Hovey Pond. We saw the hawk from a distance, sitting on a branch, and tiptoed closer as I shot photos. Several shots I thought I had missed I actually didn’t, because of an iPhone feature called “Live Photo” I was made aware of by my daughter-in-law, Ciaira. Somehow, the phone shoots a second of video before and after the actual freeze-frame shot, and with a couple of clicks, you can rerun the video and freeze on a different frame. It’s another astonishment of the incredible power of our little phones.

Here is the hawk, managing to look fierce even as it perches without moving on a branch.

Here is the hawk (is there a way to tell if it’s male or female?) in a mid-flight shot I did manage to capture without resorting to the Live Photo video.

Since I’m writing about awesome birds, here is the newest mural at the Shirt Factory, a stunning owl I saw on Friday for the first time when Bella and I went to the complex to do some Christmas shopping.