Journal Pavilion: When Name Dropping Is a Good Thing

By Denise Tessier

When 2009 passes into history, we will be able to say goodbye, too, to the words “Journal Pavilion .”

A few journalists at the state’s leading newspaper might even be saying good riddance after this week’s announcement that the Journal is letting its naming rights at the venue expire at the end of the year.

The decision by the Journal’s owner nine years ago to put its brand on what had originally been Mesa del Sol Amphitheater was always a business decision, not a journalistic one. Civic pride might have figured into it – and maybe even the caché of having framed tickets bearing famous names hang outside the Ray Cary Auditorium on Albuquerque Publishing Company’s second floor.

But from a journalistic standpoint, it was never a good idea. Would Journal Pavilion receive the same impartial journalistic scrutiny it would have received as Mesa del Sol? Could it?

Despite the best efforts of news reporters and editorial writers who were put in the uncomfortable position of having to write about Journal Pavilion in non-entertainment terms, I think the answers were “no” on both counts.  Hard-hitting reportage and often even by-lines were absent when, early on, questions arose about how much rent Bernalillo County was collecting from the venue. And it was years before the interminable post-concert traffic jams were alleviated by the expansion of University Boulevard to the pavilion site.

The conflict of interest was not lost on Editor& Publisher, which in reporting in December 2000 on the pending naming rights bid, wryly led with this:

After years of criticizing Bernalillo County’s method of funding Albuquerque, N.M.’s, new 12,000-seat concert outdoor arena, the Albuquerque Journal is negotiating to buy the naming rights to the facility.

And right away, E&P noticed that the Journal’s own news coverage about the naming deal was showing signs of what it called “awkwardness,” noting:

A recent article in the Journal about the naming rights issue indicated SFX was negotiating with three casinos, a car dealership, and “a leading New Mexico newspaper,” referring to — but not naming — itself.

Not surprisingly, the story in this week’s Sunday Journal on A-3 announcing “Journal To Drop Pavilion Naming Rights” (no online version available) was a “Journal Staff Report.” Quoting President and Publisher T.H. Lang, it said the Journal won’t renew naming rights when they expire in December:

. . .based on a number of factors including the economy, scheduling of shows and the uncertainty of what promotions we will be allowed to do from show to show. . .”

We feel we can achieve stronger marketing results by reallocating the marketing dollars we now devote to the naming rights.

The story quotes Dave Aust, zone vice president of Live Nation, Inc., which operates the county-owned venue, as saying the company is talking to “several companies” about becoming the new naming partner.

While it was never disclosed how much the Journal had paid for the rights, a perusal of stories about naming rights online shows they can run into the millions, or close to a million spread over a number of years, depending on the market.

My colleague Tracy Dingmann was on the arts desk at the Journal when Mesa del Sol was renamed Journal Pavilion, and she remembers getting calls from people who thought – understandably – that the Journal owned the venue itself, not just its name. To further refresh our memories, she got in touch with former Journal writer Leanne Potts, who was entertainment writer at the time.

Another Opportunity Missed

By Denise Tessier

Well aware that it’s operating with a skeleton staff, I held out little hope the Albuquerque Journal would send a reporter to cover the “Mexico in a Nutshell” speech by Carlos Fuentes the day before Halloween. As expected, the state’s largest daily did not provide reportage from the lecture that drew nearly 300 people to the Student Union Building at the University of New Mexico.

Regular readers of this site are probably not surprised to hear that I think they should have.

Fuentes, perhaps best known for his novel El Gringo Viejo (The Old Gringo) because it was made into a movie, is so renowned in Mexico for his essays and historical short stories his works have been part of Mexican school curriculums since the 1960s. Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez called him “Mexico’s greatest living writer” in declaring Oct. 30 “Carlos Fuentes Day.”

Considering he is a historian and observer of Mexico now in his eighth decade of life, his talk offered a rare opportunity to gain insight into the country’s history and, more importantly, to hear first-hand an articulate expert’s perspective on what should be done to alleviate the turmoil that is racking our closest neighbor to the south.

But both the Journal and Chavez apparently felt touting the author in advance was enough; according to the news account of Fuentes’ talk in the UNM Daily Lobo , Chavez didn’t attend Fuentes’ lecture either.

Fuentes’ address was the last in a UNM series of three lectures on Mexican themes and immigration that launched Sept. 15 with a talk by another author, Sam Quinones, followed by that of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, the Journal’s inadequate coverage of which I’ve already lamented.

As the leading newspaper in a state sharing both a border and name with Mexico, the Journal is missing an opportunity to provide a strong voice and platform for dialogue on immigration and drug issues, both of which were touched on in the lectures by Fuentes and Fox.

Especially pertinent was Fuentes’ perspective on the Mexican drug wars, which was markedly different from Fox’s take. Interestingly, neither speaker included drug war comments as part of their lectures, but made them in response to questions from their audiences.

Fox couched his comment in bridge-building terms, saying current President Felipe Calderon has armed the Mexican military in a war against cartels and crime “ to cut the supply of drugs to this nation (the U.S.),” saying that Mexico is doing this for “your sons, your nation.”

Fuentes was more direct, saying Mexico’s drug war problems are “inseparable from the demand in the United States. Our two societies must come together (to come up with a solution).”

Many of those interested in Mexico are familiar with the names of the Mexican drug cartel leaders because of courageous media coverage in that country. In striking contrast, Fuentes demanded, “Who are the drug lords in this country?”

He concluded his brief answer with a simple statement:

I am in favor of decriminalizing and legalizing all drugs.

Opinion on Top of Opinion

By Denise Tessier

A former Albuquerque Journal colleague and I recently compared notes on something we’d noticed about the paper’s handling of the power struggle at the Socorro Electric Cooperative.  What we’ve noticed is that the introduction of the UpFront column – that hybridization of news and opinion that appears daily on the front page – has created a sea-change in terms of standard practice on the editorial page.

To be clear, my former colleague and I concur that the coverage about the co-op and its board members in columns by Thomas J. Cole (on March 28 , June 13 , and Oct. 21, subscription required) appear to capture well what is happening at the co-op in Socorro.

What’s interesting is that officially, there have been no news stories about it. Instead, there have been these three pieces by Cole, clearly marked at each column’s end with the disclaimer that “UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column”.

Twice the Journal has followed these columns with editorials weighing in further on the subject (March 31 and Oct. 24).

Technically, that’s piling opinion on top of opinion.

And that is the departure from editorial-page standard operating procedure that raises our eyebrows.

When a column warrants a warning label

By Denise Tessier

To piggyback on Tracy’s latest post just before this one:

This morning’s Mountain View Telegraph (sister paper to the Journal) carries yet another Marita Noon column, this one entitled “Climate Change Is Obama’s Iraq.”

The Telegraph is running her column with eyes wide open. In other words, it is well aware of the problems with her columns: On August 27, it ran a Noon column (“Energy Wrongfully Blamed[”) after that same column was pulled from Heath Hausseman’s nmpolitics.net and the Farmington Daily Times .

Reacting to criticism about running that already-discredited column, the Telegraph ran on Sept. 17 “Many Errors Found in Column,”  a response piece by New Mexico Wildlife Federation Director Jeremy Vesbach. At the end of his piece, Vesbach wrote, and – to its credit — the Telegraph printed:

I appreciate the opportunity provided by Telegraph Editor (Rory) McClannahan to present the facts on where NMWF stands on the San Juan River.

However, I also feel obligated to warn Telegraph readers that McClannahan said flatly that he is not interested in fact-checking opinion pieces and does not always print corrections or retractions for verifiably false information that appears on the Telegraph opinion page. This isn’t the way most news organizations work, and I believe this lackadaisical approach is a disservice to readers. But until something changes, Telegraph readers should realize that it is apparently up to us to fact-check opinion pieces we read in the Telegraph.

Having once been in the situation of finding columns and sorting through letters to fill the space on the editorial pages of the Mountain View Telegraph and the zoned editions of the Journal (the Rio Rancho and West Side), I have to say I understand McClannahan’s point that there is little time to fact-check the items that come in. And, believe it or not, it’s often difficult to get columns to put on those pages. When I had time, I would call presidents of neighborhood associations and other involved citizens asking them to write about what was going on in their part of the community so I wouldn’t be caught short on deadline day. And sometimes that was like pulling teeth and I’d still be scrambling to fill the space.

That said, I would be hard-pressed to use a column by someone who has been problematic.

On deadline, lacking anything else to run, one might consider running such a columnist only in conjunction with some clear disclaimers about the writer’s background.

Which brings me to my point: If the Telegraph is going to continue running Noon’s columns (as it obviously has decided to do), it should write its own end-note describing the columnist’s background.

The end-graph as it now routinely is run (or not) describes the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE), of which Noon is executive director, as an advocate for “citizens rights to energy freedom.” What the heck is a citizen’s right to energy freedom?

At the least, those words should be put in quotes. Better still, instead of this squishy description crafted for general audiences, the Telegraph should lift from CARE’s Web site the words it uses when addressing its member audience, which are that:

. . . Marita has moved CARE toward specifically advocating for oil, gas, nuclear and coal. . .

Caveat emptor.

Separating Turkey Talk From Truth

By Denise Tessier

Earlier this month, an UpFront column in the Albuquerque Journal got me so teed off  I ended up spreading the gist of it in conversations with friends and family. I wanted to make sure they were aware, too, of what I perceived as an injustice and new level of ludicrousness on the part of the federal government.

What got me going was the Oct. 4 piece (subscription required) about Embudo Valley Organics not selling local organic turkeys this year. If you read the story all the way through – and it’s a crisp, but blood-boiling read – you’re left thinking they were shut down by the feds for not having enough razor wire to prevent Osama bin Laden and anthrax-wielding terrorists from poisoning our food supply.

If you read it again more carefully (which I did, because it all sounded so unjust) the story did clarify about half-way through that the feds “overlooked the lack of anti-bin Laden wire” stressed so strongly in the first part of the article. However, it said, “they dinged the place” on three other problems, all of which seemed equally ludicrous and onerous for a small family farm.

I believed the farm was forced into suspending its turkey operation — and had no reason to think otherwise — because the story appeared well researched, and because I respect the writer, Leslie Linthicum.

Then I got my weekly newsletter from Los Poblanos Organics farmer Monte Skaarsgard, whom I truly hold in high regard.

And he wrote that the UpFront column “is simply not true.”

“We have been friends with the Embudo dudes for seven years now,” Skaarsgard wrote. “We get our feed for our turkeys and chickens from them.”

Skaarsgard went on to say that Embudo is “an amazing business” whose owner, David Rigsby, experienced the “tragic loss” of his wife in the off season.

From the newsletter:

And their assistant farm manager quit right when the season was about to get going.

Feeling overwhelmed, they took the year off to regroup and rebuild their strength. But the federal government did not run them out.

I confirmed what Skaarsgard had written when I talked by phone to a manager at Embudo Valley Organics, who did not want to be quoted because he said he was feeling a little unhappy with the media at the moment (citing the UpFront column). He did say closure of the turkey operation was an “internal decision completely” and that the feds did not shut it down. In fact, I was told the farm plans to sell turkeys next year.

Certainly, Linthicum didn’t make this stuff up.

There were rumors of a federal shutdown months before the column ran, and the farm apparently has had a lot of phone calls as a result. Four months before the column, in fact, a New Mexico chicken farmer not affiliated with Embudo Valley Organics testified at a hearing that Embudo’s turkey operation was already a casualty of federal regulation and had been shut down. The comments were made at a “Listening Session” sponsored by U.S. Department of Agriculture officials in Albuquerque on June 16. (This pdf can be downloaded by doing a search listing “embudo, listening session, turkey”; then read pages 68 and 69.)

Many stories and columns result from hearsay and rumors; the writer’s job is  to check them out. The resulting UpFront column packs in a lot of information and research. It quotes Embudo’s owner, David Rigsby, about what the feds allegedly wanted, and the farm’s manager, John McMullin, is quoted as saying said the feds “put a lot of hurdles up that could put a small farm out of business.” (My emphasis added.) The story gives a history of how inspections used to be done by the New Mexico Livestock Board, but were handed over in 2007 to the feds, who are new at the job.

And deep into the story, almost at the end, Linthicum wrote:

The farm is trying to work with the FSIS (Food Safety and Inspection Service), meet the federal standards and get back into the gobbler business next year.

Nowhere does she say the feds shut the farm down. She says the “farm opted out of raising turkeys this year while it sorts this all out.” Yet, it’s a natural conclusion to think federal regulation is why there will be no turkeys this year  –  and there’s no mention of anything else going on at the farm that might have contributed to the decision to suspend operations.

Looks like the headline writer got that impression, too; the jump headline was: “Turkey Farm Runs Afoul of Feds.” (The front-page headline was “Talking Turkey With Feds May Cause Migraine.”)

Skaarsgard, who like the Embudo farmers, has to work with federal inspectors in order to stay in business, called the column “op ed compost”. He added that it, “surprisingly, . . . ended up on the front page:”

The one page of the paper that you would hope and expect would deliver news and not someone’s poorly researched opinion. . .

Skaarsgard’s comment about being surprised to see opinion on the front page illustrates a point ABQJournalWatch has made about how readers perceive UpFront, a self-described “daily front-page opinion column.”

Skaarsgaard’s comments conclude with this:

Here is the thing that fries me the most: I hate scare tactics. I do not like when the government uses them. I hate it when businesses use them. And I hate it when the press uses them.

Look, we need regulation in the food industry. Period. We have had people die from tainted spinach, so the federal government is trying to ensure our safety. Will they make it all perfect right off the bat? Of course not.

But I have seen way too much fear-mongering this year in regards to food. . . .

Journalists sometimes describe their craft as “threading the needle” – meaning they are being careful about the wording of every sentence in a multi-faceted story like this one and skillfully string those sentences together. Each sentence can be accurate. And when they are, the result is a column or story that achieves a kind of truth.  Oftentimes, that is the best one can do with a given subject. And yet, sometimes the result falls short of the whole truth.

Calling it opinion doesn’t change that.

---

The Journal Strikes Again: Noon Whistle

By Denise Tessier

The Journal’s done it again.

The Albuquerque Journal ran on today’s Op-Ed page a column by discredited columnist Marita K. Noon. This one’s entitled, “Target Redundant Costs First To Trim State Budget (subscription required).”

If you’re not familiar with Noon, you won’t get much help from the Journal in learning more about her. All that accompanied this column was the identifier under her byline, which said: “Executive Director, CARE.”

Which might make you think it was written by someone from the international humanitarian group, CARE.

No, it’s not that one.

This “CARE” is a New Mexico pro-energy group, Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy, the Web site of which says this about Noon:

Since wind and solar are the darlings of the energy world, Marita has moved CARE toward specifically advocating for oil, gas, nuclear and coal and has pushed CARE onto a national platform.

Why is this important? Because Noon’s column in today’s Journal advocates elimination of the Oil Conservation Division – the state group created by the State Legislature to manage and regulate oil and gas development in New Mexico.

Her point is that the state could start tackling the yeoman’s task of cutting the state budget by eliminating redundancy. It’s hard for anyone to argue with that, but she’s saying the OCD is redundant because a few counties have tried to impose even more rigorous rules on the oil and gas industry.

The way Noon puts it, these counties are “usurping the authority given to the division” and therefore there’s no reason to have an OCD. Yet, truth be told, counties are hiring consultants and creating their own regulations because they don’t think the OCD is doing enough to protect their interests, not because they would rather being doing the job themselves.

But Noon cheerfully suggests that by taking over the OCD’s duties, counties will have to hire more people, which she says is a “win-win” because that will create county jobs. “Certainly ‘job creation’ has become a buzzword,” she helpfully adds.

The Journal has done its readers a grave disservice by failing to run an explanatory bio on Noon at the end of this column.

The editors probably didn’t have the space, but interestingly, all they would have had to do to make enough room would have been to edit out some of the redundancy in her column.

But frankly, considering her track record as a columnist and the flawed logic of this anti-regulatory piece, it shouldn’t have been run at all.

May the News Stalwarts Survive

By Denise Tessier

This week, according to the New Mexico Press Association , is National Newspaper Week.

Dana L. Bowley, the executive director of NMPA, has written a commemorative column which ran today on the editorial page of the Albuquerque Journal’s sister publication, the Mountain View Telegraph. Part of Bowley’s message is, “Newspapers are not dying. Reports to the contrary are incorrect.”

Of course, a few newspapers have died – the Albuquerque Tribune and Rocky Mountain News come to mind first. And others have gone strictly online, like the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

But Bowley’s column is pretty much on target in describing the struggle newspapers have gone through since the massive loss of classified advertising to the Internet, cutbacks by advertisers due to the flattened economy and the challenge of trying to cover news and events with skeleton staffs.

Bowley correctly points out that most people consider news available on the Internet as “free” but that “there’s no such thing as ‘free’ news.” And Bowley takes to task non-media Web sites and news aggregators:

What you see on nonmedia Web sites or from aggregators is news that’s been taken without compensation – stolen – from Web sites of newspapers and wire services that paid to gather and deliver it to their subscribers.

Back in May, according to the Associated Press, nearly a third of the newspaper executives contacted in a survey said they were considering charging for online content, a practice the Albuquerque Journal and Wall Street Journal already adopted (which is why many of this site’s links to Journal stories work only with a paid subscription – either to the print edition of the Journal, which includes online access, or by paying a reduced fee to view the Journal solely online). It seems to have worked for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and the Post Register in Idaho, according to the AP.

Many papers have balked at the practice, saying readers won’t pay for news. Interestingly, that was the consensus of three veteran newsmen – the editor of the San Antonio Express-News, an associate editor and senior columnist at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and an interim dean of the North Texas University School of Journalism – who appeared on a panel at a National Federation of Press Women conference I attended in San Antonio last month. That was their consensus, that is, until a young woman stood up and, to their visible astonishment, told them she would pay for news – just as she already pays to download music and get cable TV.

According to Bowley’s column, that time is coming:

. . .as happened with music, the “free news” ride is coming to an end. Newspapers are beginning to charge for Web content and setting up “pay walls” that will largely prevent content theft or track stolen content back to the thief for prosecution or compensation. The Associated Press is rolling out such a system right now, and newspapers that have gone this route are seeing circulation increases because readers want their product.

I might add here that in small communities especially, readers want a newspaper product. The Internet is not, at present, covering those small towns or providing a viable outlet for local business advertising.

And Bowley continues with this:

Most importantly, there is a new business model emerging in the industry that combines newspapers and the Web to bring print, audio and video together in a complete news and information service, allowing the news organization and the advertiser to provide subscribers with access to what they want, where they want, when they want, and how they want.

Only newspapers have the infrastructure and the means to do this.

That part about the infrastructure might well be true, but as that business model bringing “print, audio and video together” evolves, it becomes even more imperative that newspapers and their reporters hew to the journalistic imperative to keep opinions out of news reportage.

It’s tough to compete with clever postings on the blogosphere and the sometimes outrageous rhetoric that passes for “news”, but for readers drowning in opinions, straight news stories are like a breath of fresh air. Involved citizens, it is hoped, will seek out unbiased coverage. And if newspapers are going to be “Carrying the Torch of Freedom,” as the theme for National Newspaper Week suggests, that is what the newspapers that survive must provide.

Willing To Let ACORN Die

By Denise Tessier

I’m coming into this topic a little late, but before too much more time passes I want to express disappointment about something the Albuquerque Journal has failed to cover.

Last month, the scandal broke involving ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). I was out of state and didn’t see how the Journal handled it, but was glad to see Peter St. Cyr reporting on the scandal’s local repercussions as one of his first stories for Heath Haussamen’s acclaimed NMPolitics.net Web site . Surely, I thought, the Journal won’t be able to ignore this, and will do a similar story on how the scandal is affecting New Mexico’s ACORN affiliates and the local people they serve.

It’s October, and it hasn’t happened yet.

Catching up on back issues, I see the state’s leading newspaper covered the national angle of the unfolding saga almost daily, using the Associated Press. Coverage commenced Sept. 11 with the firing of two Baltimore ACORN employees after one was caught on videotape cooperating with an undercover team posing as pimp and prostitute and trying to get tax and housing assistance.

(At this point, I think I need to interject that the Baltimore employees’ actions as portrayed were indeed indefensible, and merited the firing, internal investigation and staff training that followed.)

That first story was followed by AP accounts of the fallout: on Sept. 12 (“Census Cuts Ties With ACORN” in order “to tamp down GOP concerns . . .”), and Sept. 16 (when the GOP called for an investigation of ACORN by the Justice Department, along with the Senate’s vote – at GOP request — to block HUD from giving ACORN grants).

On Sept. 17, the Journal ran a story that included ACORN’s official statement that the Baltimore incident was “indefensible,” with ACORN Chief Executive Bertha Lewis saying no new clients would receive ACORN’s services, pending an internal investigation and staff training. That story included, too, a Florida Republican congressman’s jump on the bandwagon, asking FEMA to repeal money set aside for ACORN to put smoke detectors in the homes of low- and moderate-income families in New Orleans.

Also on Sept. 17: The Journal weighed in with an editorial, “ACORN Scandal Calls For House Cleaning.”

Yet the Journal still had not done any kind of local story assessing whether similar things were going on at local ACORN offices and, at the least, how all this national controversy was affecting the local affiliate and low-income New Mexicans it serves.

In running the AP stories, the Journal failed to include so much as an inserted line indicating ACORN has offices in New Mexico.

The Journal editorial, which called ACORN “one of the nation’s premier liberal activist groups,” listed the benchmarks in the ACORN scandal story, helpfully adding that President Obama has “past ties to the group.” It concluded that ACORN “must clean house and return to what is supposed to be its mission –advocating for the poor, legally. Otherwise, this little piggy’s place at the public trough should dry up.”

After the editorial, the Journal continued to run national ACORN stories almost daily: the House voting to deny ACORN any more federal money in a GOP-led action three days after the Senate did the same (Sept. 18), a history of the group’s problems on the national level (which ran Sept. 20, and which, while carried by the AP,  originated in the Washington Post), Obama’s call for an investigation of the video scandal (Sept. 21) , the Inspector General’s announcement that he is reviewing the group (Sept. 22), ACORN’s hiring of a former Massachusetts attorney general to do its internal investigation (Sept. 23), and Bank of  America suspending its affiliation with ACORN on housing projects (Sept. 29).

It also ran a West Side Journal freelance column lauding the work of the undercover videographers and two scathing columns about ACORN by columnist Kathleen Parker, on Sept. 24 and Sept. 29 . (Note: These last two online links carry different dates and headlines than the print-edition versions, but the text is the same. Notably, the print edition headline on the first of Parker’s columns was “Nothing Good Can Sprout From This Toxic ACORN.”)

The first of these Parker columns is an informative interview with a former ACORN board member who was “booted in the summer 20008 when she tried to examine the organization’s books.” In that column, Parker deftly summarizes the allegations against the national group – “charges of voter registration fraud, embezzlement, tax arrears, corruption and, now, accusations of aiding and abetting illegal immigration, prostitution, tax evasion and child abuse.”

These are serious crimes, and I do not condone any of them. But I can’t help thinking back to the years when I was the Journal’s environment reporter and Albuquerque ACORN workers were there, trying to bring awareness to sides of issues that largely went uncovered, advocating for those too busy struggling to put food on the table to call up a newspaper and ask for help in fighting the water pollution causing “blue baby” syndrome or to complain about the smell and possible health effects of a nearby pollution source.

The GOP is waging a national campaign to eliminate ACORN — not just to get at the root of ACORN’s problems, and not just to ensure a house-cleaning through firings and, where appropriate, filing of charges. When cases of charity embezzlement turned up in several states in 2002, was there a national outcry or political party demand for abolition of the Red Cross?

The difference here is that ACORN assists low-income citizens and people of color with voter registration, efforts that the GOP believes will aid the Democratic Party.

But if the GOP succeeds in eliminating the national ACORN, it stands to reason New Mexico will lose its affiliate offices, even though no charges of embezzlement or aiding and abetting illegal immigration and prostitution have been alleged here. And if New Mexico loses ACORN, will another group take its place and fill the gap?

In his report, St. Cyr quoted ACORN Southwest Regional Director Matthew Henderson as saying ACORN’s Las Cruces and Albuquerque offices normally provide New Mexicans help with avoiding foreclosure and applying for citizenship, and helps them prepare taxes and qualify for low-income heat and energy programs in the winter.  All good things, right?

And in a Sept. 17 statement released to reporters, St. Cyr wrote, Henderson said:

If FOX News had wanted to focus on New Mexico ACORN’s tax preparation work, we only wish that they had brought a hidden camera at the end of tax season, when our offices were open late every night, filing free tax returns for low and moderate-income families. The truth is that ACORN helped over 700 hard-working families in New Mexico collect nearly $700,000 in tax refunds over the past two years and $90 million nationally.

Since the Baltimore scandal broke, however, offices in Albuquerque and Las Cruces are providing limited services to existing clients and the organization has “temporarily” suspended accepting new clients, St. Cyr wrote.

“All that we ask is that the rest of the world judge New Mexico ACORN based on the work we do on behalf of working people here in New Mexico,” Henderson told St. Cyr.

But readers can’t judge the actions of the New Mexico ACORN group if the Journal won’t cover them. It is apparent the Journal is unwilling to investigate what is happening to the New Mexico affiliate and how many low-income New Mexicans might be affected. Instead, it is ignoring its existence, willing to let New Mexico’s ACORN simply die on the vine.

Protest trumps content

By Denise Tessier

New Mexicans this week had the rare opportunity to hear first-hand thoughts from the immediate past president of Mexico – our next-door neighbor nation plagued by drug war violence and the greatest source of our illegal immigration problems. Former president Vicente Fox’s talk at the University of New Mexico’s Popejoy Hall Monday morning was free to all comers.

If one couldn’t attend in person, surely it could be assumed a full account would appear the next day in the Albuquerque Journal.

Unfortunately, the six-sentence wire service account by the Associated Press immediately after Fox’s first lecture Monday morning contained more substance than what print-edition readers of the Journal found on page C-1 the following day. The Journal story focused less on what Fox said than on how much UNM had paid Fox to come – an angle the student paper, the New Mexico Daily Lobo, had already addressed thoroughly in its Monday edition, written before Fox had even stepped on the stage.

Covering campus dissatisfaction with Fox’s $25,000 speaker’s fee is a legitimate angle for the campus newspaper, and the Lobo covered it fairly, giving weight to both the student and faculty objections and to the university’s response that the fee was a “remarkably good deal”, considering fiction authors and columnists are paid at least that (and often more). Plus, Fox was scheduled to give not one, but three guest lectures on campus that day. (Furthermore, the Popejoy event and talk Monday evening at the Centennial Engineering auditorium provided students with access to an expert resource. Seated next to me in Popejoy, for example, was a UNM student writing a paper on immigration for her English class. Fox also was scheduled to talk to health care professionals at the Health Sciences Center.)

Protests about Fox’s speaking fee certainly could merit mention, but they should not have been the focus of coverage by the largest daily in a state that shares a border with Mexico.

Yet, that is what dominated both the headline (“$25,000 for Fox Prompts Protests”) and content of the story’s first seven paragraphs – almost half the 15-graph total. Devoting so much space to the speaker’s fee and student complaints about Fox’s shortcomings as past president – both real and perceived – meant leaving out real content: that is, the thoughts of a Harvard-educated businessman and history-making leader on the subjects of labor, immigration policy and economics.

For those who are interested, here are some of those thoughts (from the Popejoy speech):

Drastic problems on our doorstep deserve more coverage (Updated)

By Denise Tessier

Nearly two weeks after it was reported elsewhere, the Albuquerque Journal on Aug. 31 finally noted that New Mexico’s nearest neighbor to the south has decriminalized most drug use in that country. This was reported not in a news story, but via “Mexico takes drastic steps on drugs” by non-staffer Jerry Pacheco, whose column appears Mondays in Business Outlook.

The Journal didn’t run a wire service story 10 days before, when Mexico’s Congressional action decriminalizing marijuana, cocaine and heroin took effect (nor did it give any mention that Argentina was following suit).

The Journal also has yet to run anything about another Mexican drug war development that directly involves the state: that in response to prison problems– including a riot that left 19 dead and 20 injured — Mexico has been sending guards to New Mexico and Colorado for training.

Although the Journal over the years has run in-depth stories about Mexico, the absence of these recent stories is illustrative of the general disinterest its editors have displayed toward breaking news from that country (and a seeming aversion to the topic of decriminalization). Editors seem content to allow a four-paragraph “brief” (about once a week, in the “Around the World” section, A-3) and Pacheco’s “Business Across the Border” column to suffice as the paper’s regular Mexico-related news.

This is not a criticism of Pacheco’s column – far from it. But a column’s role is to supplement news by offering insight and commentary, not to shoulder the burden of breaking that news as well.

Sufficient numbers of stories about Mexico come across Journal wires that the editors likely could create a daily Mexico “page” if they wanted. Considering the number of New Mexico readers with direct ties to Mexico – as tourists, or through friends or family members residing or originating from there — a Mexico news section would constitute better use of scarce space than the “Celebrities” slot wasted every day on “stories” most readers have previously seen or read elsewhere.