Dan Haley, the Editorial Page Editor at The Denver Post, is leaving the newspaper in order to take a job in corporate communications for a regional bank.
UPDATE: Righthaven is now being counter-sued by a different defendant, which Righthaven says is...wait for it..."litigation overkill."
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As Westword reports, the blog-suing organization Righthaven (which the Denver Post is also working with) is looking at a PR disaster:
MediaNews Group's get-tough policy toward copyright protection has been led by Righthaven LLC, a Nevada firm whose Denver Post-related lawsuits have targeted the likes of Internet star Matt Drudge. Far less powerful is Brian D. Hill, a twenty-year-old hobby blogger on disability, who says he received no warning about unauthorized use of a Post photo and can't afford the $6,000 Righthaven told him he must pay to squash a suit against him...
...Hill immediately removed the photo, "and then me and my mom contacted Righthaven to try to reason with them. I told them I'm renting a house, so I don't own any property, and I'm on disability, so I really don't have any money for them to take."
According to Hill, a Righthaven representative responded by telling me "that if I paid them $6,000 in an out-of-court settlement, it wouldn't go to trial." [Pols emphasis]
Unfortunately for Hill, he has neither the $6,000 nor enough money to travel to Colorado for a hearing. He received a summons last week that gives him 21 days to respond -- "so me and my mom sent a letter to the judge to try to get him to dismiss the case." And if he doesn't? "Then the only way we can afford to go to Colorado is to countersue Righthaven and have them pay the filing fee."
MediaNews Group (which includes the Denver Post) says suits like this (and other legal threats) are all about "protecting their copyright." But at some point they have to start weighing this "protection" against the tremendous damage they are doing to their reputation and community goodwill. Righthaven and MediaNews Group can argue all day about copyrights and legal protections, but that doesn't change the fact that they're still suing a poor autistic kid who probably didn't know he was doing anything wrong in the first place (and who immediately complied with their requests to remove the offending content anyway).
By the time MediaNews Group finishes their "copyright protection" crusade, there might not be a whole lot of people left who are still willing to subscribe to their newspapers. At least then they won't have to worry about anyone "stealing" their content.
We debated about whether we should even bring this subject up again, but we think the questions that came to mind when we first saw this story yesterday in The Denver Post worth the discussion.
Strange story from Westword media reporter Michael Roberts today regarding more weirdness at The Denver Post:
Last Friday afternoon, we published an interview with award-winning Denver Post reporter Miles Moffeit, who confirmed that he was jumping to the investigative unit at the Dallas Morning News. Moffeit had given his two-week's notice the previous day.
This item was subsequently featured on Jim Romenesko's Poynter.org journalism-news page, and the following Monday, Post editor Greg Moore told Moffeit to clear his desk and leave the office within a few hours.
Moffeit declined to comment for this blog. For his part, Moore, responding via e-mail, writes, "That is true. We paid him through his resignation date and everything he was owed. I felt it was better we part company right away. I felt some of his comments to Westword and their implications were untrue and injurious to The Post and it was better he just begin the next chapter of his career. I am grateful to Miles for all the good work he did here and wish him well in Dallas."
Which of his comments were injurious to the Post? Sources speculate that Post senior management objected to Moffeit's focus on the relative health of the Morning News in comparison to the Post.
About the Morning News, he said, "They've gone through the worst of their layoffs, and they have no debt at all, so it's not a drag on them. They've made a profit the last two quarters." In contrast, the holding company of the Post's owner, MediaNews Group, had just emerged from bankruptcy -- a word the Post avoided using whenever possible in its coverage of the filing.
We read the initial Westword story when it came out last week and didn't think anything of it. There were certainly no comments or quotes that would have raised any of our collective eyebrows. And if it's true that the Post objected to Moffeit talking about the paper's emergence from bankruptcy...well, that's just odd. It's not like it's a big secret that the Post went through a bankruptcy. Hell, who hasn't?
We wrote yesterday about the virtually unprecedented move by The Denver Post to run a front page editorial bashing Gov. Bill Ritter for signing an executive order on Friday allowing for a partnership agreement with state employees. As we said then, forget the issue for a moment: Running a front page editorial in a major metropolitan newspaper is indefensibly wrong.
As former Denver Post columnist Jim Spencer writes, it seems as though there aren't a lot of happy folks in the Post newsroom over this:
"The language used and the placement demonstrate a certain hysteria that stems from Mr. Singleton's personal dislike of organized labor," Ritter's spokesman, Evan Dreyer, said Sunday.
"I think the degree of the personal attacks is a bit surprising for a newspaper of this caliber. To stoop to this level is unbecoming."
Dreyer said the governor "extended the courtesy" of telling Singleton and Post Editorial Page Editor Dan Haley about the executive order the day before it was issued last Friday.
"It was apparent two minutes into the conversation that Mr. Singleton was not happy," Dreyer said.
Singleton did not return an emailed request for comment Sunday. In an email, Post Editor Greg Moore said, "I don't have anything to do with editorials." Moore declined to discuss the decision to put the editorial on the front page, which is almost always reserved for news.
In an interview Sunday, Haley said he wrote the editorial. He called the decision to do so "a collaborative decision between the publisher and myself." Singleton serves as the Post's publisher and apparently ordered the editorial placed on the front page [Pols emphasis]...
...A source inside the Post newsroom said that most staff members were not aware of the tenor of Sunday's editorial and only learned of its placement late Friday afternoon.
"I didn't have any conversations with anyone about it," said one staffer who asked to remain anonymous. "I heard Greg tell some people it was going on the front page. All I knew was Dean was pissed off. So pissed off that he put an editorial on the front page. Who does he think he is - Hearst?"
The language in the editorial was so raw that the staffer predicted some distress among people in the newsroom.
"You can be opposed to what the governor does," he said. "But this name-calling stuff is embarrassing."[Pols emphasis]
Spencer also notes that Singleton's hatred of unions is well-known and reflected in his past history of newspaper ownership.
Singleton's visceral reaction did not surprise journalism scholar John McManus.
McManus, an author and professor, runs a San Francisco-area media watchdog group called GradetheNews.org. McManus says Singleton's hatred of unions revealed itself in his handling of a series of newspapers he bought recently in the Bay Area.
"He established something called the Alameda News Group for the small papers he owned," McManus said. "ANG papers were unionized."
When Singleton purchased the much larger Contra Costa Times, McManus said, Singleton merged the non-unionized Times staff with the ANG to form the East Bay Area News Group.
"Then," McManus explained, Singleton "said, 'We now have more non-union than union employees. So we will no longer negotiate with the union because it doesn't represent a majority of workers."
So far, that tactic seems to have worked, McManus said.
We're not going to get into the mechanics of Friday's executive order here, because the larger issue is the sad state of Colorado journalism when the largest newspaper in the state turns itself into a tabloid rag along the lines of The New York Post. Today the Post carries a FRONT PAGE EDITORIAL lambasting Ritter over his executive order - an editorial filled with ridiculous over-the-top, name-calling hyperbole such as this:
When Coloradans elected Bill Ritter as governor, they thought they were getting a modern-day version of Roy Romer, a pro-business Democrat. Instead, they got Jimmy Hoffa...
...The governor on Friday unveiled his plan to drive up the cost of doing business in Colorado by forcing collective bargaining on thousands of state employees.
We're concerned this may be the beginning of the end of Ritter as governor...
...Had Ritter thought employees were somehow getting a raw deal, he could have waved his magic wand and changed all that. He is the governor, after all. Instead, he's decided to prop up unions.
Now, he runs the risk of becoming Colorado's first one-term governor since Walter Johnson in 1950.
Coloradans bought the Colorado Promise, but may end up with a trail of broken promises.
A governor with such early promise has squandered his future in order to keep his backroom promises to a few union bosses. And Colorado is the loser.
Talk about your vendettas. Ritter lost his chance at re-election because of this? That's a bit much, don't you think?
And comparing Ritter to Jimmy Hoffa...come on, really? Forget the New York Post, this is National Enquirer territory.
Obviously somebody high up at the Post isn't happy with Ritter, and that's their prerogative. But editorials are not meant for the front page of a major metropolitan newspaper, and to promote an editorial in such fashion is, frankly, an embarrassment to the paper and all who work there (particularly when they include this silly disclaimer at the end of the editorial: "The Denver Post's editorial board operates independently of the paper's news coverage." Uh, yeah, right.)
Front page editorials are so universally decried as wrong that critics on both sides of the aisle have criticized their use (witness this commentary from the Independence Institute's Dave Kopel). It's fine if the Post wants to attack Ritter in its editorial pages, but it's unconscionable to do so on the front page of the paper and then to include the absurd disclaimer that the editorial board and the rest of the newspaper are separate. It's no mystery that newspapers are dying in this country when fundamental journalistic integrity is blithely ignored.
