I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Twitter. So are a few other New Mexico reporters. But at least one reporter for the Albuquerque Journal doesn’t really see the point in the microblogging service.
Leslie Linthicum, in the…
An interesting exchange played itself out in the Albuquerque Journal in the week before Christmas, on the topic of “combined reporting.” And along the way, the Journal left out one important point in it’s editor’s note about one of the commenter’s discussing whether or not multi-state corporations should report the income they made in New Mexico, and pay taxes on it.
Readership is down as young people gravitate to the Internet (where they often read newspapers or opinion based on papers). Newspaper advertising revenue was eroding even before the financial crisis; now it’s plunging. Newspapers’ old business strategies are dying; new rationales are unborn or infantile.
President-elect Barack Obama is talking about a stimulus package that could reach $1 trillion. Meanwhile, the country is in two wars, the economy is tanking and millions of Americans are looking to the federal government for some serious help.
Seems…
Has the horror of Illinois Governor Rod Bla-GOY-uh-vitch’s apparent pay-to-play scheme got you wishing you were a registered Republican living in Illinois? Has the fact that this sleezeball is a former prosecutor who ran as a reformer threatening to make…
I inveighed here last week against the Albuquerque Journal’s right-wing Op-Ed pages, observing that their economic analysis, in particular, is limited to the gospel of laissez-faire. As if to confirm my observations, New Mexico’s heavyweight daily this week threw a powerful one, two, three combination of right hands at us.
“Wagner’s music,” said Mark Twain, ”is better than it sounds.” And the Albuquerque Journal is better than a perusal of its Op-Ed pages suggests. Unfairly, the Journal’s loud right-wing voice obscures the paper’s many virtues, of which I will write another time. Today, though, the focus is on those Op Ed pages. If they’re intended as a marketplace of ideas, the Journal has stocked them poorly — more like a neighborhood grocery than a supermarket.
Given recent cutbacks over the past year, there are fewer resources to focus on investigative and in-depth reporting that places the daily news in context. Put simply, fewer journalists watching the happenings at the Roundhouse means a greater potential for shenanigans to go unnoticed.
In another sign of the bad economic times for media, Albuquerque Journal employees won’t get year-end bonuses for the first time in more than a decade.
Publisher T.H. Lang notified folks earlier this week.
Polling in the presidential race in New Mexico wasn’t exactly dead on this year.
But in our U.S. Senate race — that pit Democrat Tom Udall against Republican Steve Pearce — the polling was a little better. Using the…
The Albuquerque Journal isn’t the only newspaper selling commemorative issues of the front page from Nov. 5 — the day after the history-making election of Barack Obama as president. As one person said, “You can’t keep a Web page…
I may be handing out the keys to the kingdom in even having this discussion. The Journal’s editorials do reflect the views of the editorial board in most cases, although the votes of some members carry more weight than others.
The Albuquerque Journal’s John McCain endorsement was the dictate of one man — publisher T.H. Lang — and it calls to mind the brute constitutional insight attributed to the late New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
Early voting is in its second week and still no presidential endorsement from the state’s largest newspaper. So why has the Albuquerque Journal waited so long to endorse?
Hinduism venerates the cow. In the American language, a sacred cow is someone immune from adverse criticism. In New Mexico, the classic example has been Republican Sen. Pete Domenici.
