The Union’s sister paper, the Summit Daily News, is drawing scrutiny from The New York Times and other major media for firing a longtime journalist in the wake of a flap with a major advertiser. The Times’ blog report is here.
The incident involving the Swift-owned newspaper — now a national story — calls into question whether the Summit Daily News in Colorado fired a veteran reporter because a major advertiser, Vail Resorts, complained and pulled advertising.
“I sometimes wonder whether the ski industry wouldn’t benefit more from being completely transparent about weather and snowfall with its customers,” wrote veteran mountain reporter Bob Berwyn in a Nov. 19 column in the Summit Daily News. “But when snow = money, perhaps that’s expecting too much.”
Berwyn’s comments came after Vail Resorts chief executive Rob Katz was accused of hyping snowfall to drum up business.
It started when a “top resort executive” (who turned out to be Katz) tweeted a picture of snow on his deck in Boulder — a long way from the resorts. The tweet elicited a response from a Breckenridge resident who pointed out, correctly, that is was warm and sunny in the mountains.
According to Berwyn’s comments to the media, Katz phoned to complain about his commentary and went on to cancel ads for Keystone and Breckenridge in the Swift-owned newspaper. Berwyn says publisher Jim Morgan told him he had “a lot of groveling to do.”
“He told me that we were X amount of dollars off budget and that Vail’s decision was going to make it even harder to reach our numbers,” Berwyn told the New York Times.
Within two weeks, Morgan fired Berwyn.
“It’s unfortunate but, especially in this economy, some advertisers feel they can flex their muscles when there’s commentary they don’t like,” Ed Otte of the Colorado Press Association told The Denver Post, which also reported the incident. “Newspapers need to withstand these kinds of threats.”
“There has been a long tradition in ski towns, and here in Summit county, of cozy relationships between the ski industry and the press,” Berwyn also told the Times.
In his own column, Morgan said Katz’s firing was not the result of pressure from Vail. He said he could not elaborate much because it was a personnel issue. Morgan’s column is here.
For his part, Katz said he felt “off-the-record” chats with the reporter were made public, and he felt a trust had been violated. “We did not pull our advertising because of a bad story,” Katz contended.
The Times concluded: “His firing suggests that vulnerable publishers, under pressure as the noose on advertising-supported print seems to tighten, are willing to groom away the moguls if that’s what they think the advertiser wants.”
Swift’s “Mission 2010″ campaign includes a “nifty new tool for measuring our fourth quarter (Q4) financial success by property,” according to the newspaper chain’s website.
“Every two weeks our president and fearless leader Bob Brown will send out an email full of numbers, indicating how each property is faring in respect to their monthly goals,” it reads.
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How is cutting the size of a reporting staff in half, like the Union has, any different than this story out of Colorado? Neutering a watchdog for financial reasons is just as bad, and Ackerman has shown his priorities by his riding an anemic three or four underpaid or green reporters. Not that his paper is a watchdog, and you’d have to wonder how he’d treat a “rogue” reporter who properly covered his favorite Canadian gold mining company to never open a gold mine.
If the story’s true, it’s an old one–anybody who has worked in the news biz can tell stories of how the business side caved in to advertisers.
When I was a boy reporter at the old Redwood City Tribune, I was forbidden to write a story about the drunk driving arrest of one of the paper’s largest advertisers, even though he knocked down a power poll and cut-off electricity to several hundred homes. There was a lot of explaining to do when the San Jose Mercury ran the story a day after we could have.