Amid the backdrop of newspapers shedding jobs and narrowing news coverage, the Texas-New Mexico Newspapers Partnership is expanding its news operation to Santa Fe. The Daily News announced that Milan Simonich will report for the eight-paper partnership from the Roundhouse, beginning with the upcoming legislative session, the first for Governor-elect Susana Martinez.

The New Mexico papers in the Texas-New Mexico Newspapers Partnership include the Las Cruces Sun-News, the Alamogordo Daily News, the Ruidoso News and five other newspapers mostly in New Mexico.

“Re-establishing our Santa Fe news bureau demonstrates our commitment to our New Mexico communities,” said Sergio Salinas, CEO of Texas-New Mexico Newspapers Partnership, according to a story from the partnership. “Milan’s deep, rich experience will keep our readers informed on a wide variety of subjects, particularly state government and how it shapes our daily lives.”

The only New Mexico newspapers currently with Capitol bureaus are the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Albuquerque Journal.

Other papers may report from the Roundhouse on select days but do not have consistent presences in the Roundhouse.

Asked how the PRC could improve its public image, Jones told The Independent the media could start reporting on the PRC’s achievements. The public doesn’t know about the PRC’s successes and hard work because the media does not report on them, Jones said.

A PRC press release Tuesday aired similar complaints, taking exception with an Albuquerque Journal Business Outlook story’s “vague” accusations against the PRC, particularly the article’s description of the PRC’s decisions as “inconsistent.”

That adjective prompted Jones to call Journal reporter Winthrop Quigley to demand an explanation.

“What I find to be particularly troubling is the fact that when I called the reporter and asked him to identify or elaborate on the accusations he leveled in his story, he was unable to cite a specific example and said he would have to do some research,” Jones is quoted as saying in the press release.

The PRC press release did not refer to The Independent’s coverage of violations of the state’s Open Meetings Act. Nor did PRC officials respond to The Independent’s requests last week and earlier this week for comment on those violations.

“Day in and day out, the (PRC) strives to make sound decisions that provide the greatest benefit for consumer and corporate interests within the state,” the press release states, adding that the PRC makes hundreds of decisions a year. “The (PRC) makes its collective decisions with the added challenge of consistently being in the proverbial crosshairs.”

Jones, who really was in somebody’s crosshairs when he was shot at last Friday near Clines Corners, is running for state land commissioner.

PRC commissioners embroiled in ethical, legal troubles

His complaints are not entirely unfair. Many PRC decisions, resulting from months of work groups and bargaining, do not receive much press.

But that does not make the media responsible for the PRC’s bad public image.

Jones made headlines last year for hiring convicted embezzler Elizabeth Martin as his assistant at $72,000 a year.

The PRC has repeatedly violated the Open Meetings Act.

Commissioner Carol Sloan was found guilty of felony battery and burglary charges April 8 — though she will be allowed to keep her seat as she appeals her conviction, a PRC official told The Independent.

Commissioner Jerome Block Jr. and his father — a former PRC commissioner — both face charges for misusing taxpayer election funds.

A sexual harassment lawsuit against Commissioner David King cost taxpayers $840,000.

And while King’s part ownership of Estancia Basin Water Supply, which sells water to two PRC-regulated water utilities, did not rise to the level of a criminal violation, it nevertheless appears to be a conflict of interest. (District Attorney Angela Pacheco cleared King of violating a state law against accepting “anything of value from a regulated entity” in January.)

King does recuse himself from votes on rate increases for the companies to which his firm sells water, PRC Spokesman Gerald Garner told The Independent.

With the hiring of new interim chief of staff Johnny Montoya, the PRC could potentially improve its public image through improved transparency. One reason reporters don’t regularly cover the hard work of PRC staffers is that those staffers have not been allowed to speak to reporters. Montoya could change that policy with a memo.

National Tea Party Convention organizer Judson Phillips (Photo by David Weigel)

NASHVILLE — In the weeks leading up to the National Tea Party Convention, Judson Phillips didn’t do much talking to the media. The founder of Tea Party Nation, the chief organizer of the conference alongside his wife Shelley, was buffeted by attacks from Tea Party activists who accused him of staging a costly, “elite” convention, and dirtying the reputation of the movement by paying Sarah Palin $100,000 to speak there. On January 14, Tea Party Nation put out word that only five conservative media outlets would get full access to the convention. On January 30, they issued an email to their internal list pushing back against “baseless accusations and criticism” from angry Tea Party activists.

But on the floor of his convention, the paranoid, mysterious Judson Phillips was nowhere to be seen. The real Phillips, a jovial defense attorney, bounded in and out of sessions, across the stage of the Gaylord Opryland Hotel’s Tennessee Ballroom, and from interview to interview. Hardly 15 minutes could go by without Phillips, sporting a rumpled tan suit and day-old shave, shaking the hand of a grateful attendee or being miked for a new interview.

“I’m talking to them,” he said, pointing at a video crew from Time magazine, and asking if he could wait a few minutes to answer questions from The Washington Independent. “Then I’m talking to them.” He pointed to CNN’s set-up box in the corner of the small convention hall. “Then I have another interview in a half hour. But I will talk to you!”

As this three-day event wrapped up with an hourlong address by and Q&A with Sarah Palin — broadcast live on CNN, Fox, MSNBC and C-Span — it was clear that Phillips’s massive and controversial gamble had mostly paid off. More than 200 members of the media had descended on Nashville to write probing stories on the Tea Party Movement. In the end, said Phillips, the convention would turn a small profit — a step down from his initial hopes to make enough of a profit to launch a 527 that would back conservative candidates, but when compared to the rumors that led up to the convention, a smashing success.

“We’re going to break even, maybe a little bit into the black,” Phillips told The Independent. And just as he did from the main stage, Phillips went a little further and ribbed his critics with a joke. “I’m not planning to declare bankruptcy. I had to do that one time–it really sucks when you have to do that.”

To the delight of attendees, the National Tea Party Convention became a coming-out party for a movement that’s always had an oppositional relationship to the press. It was a small event — around half the size of the inaugural YearlyKos convention of liberal bloggers in 2006 — and The Gaylord Opryland location served to make it look even smaller. The entire weekend was contained in a ballroom and three breakout rooms adjacent to a short lobby with media check-in on one end and a raft of cameras on the other, with pundits like The Daily Beast’s John Avlon and RedState’s Erick Erickson doing quick live bits. Getting to the convention floor meant walking through one of two indoor shopping malls, one of them inside a massive dome decked out with greenery and artificial lakes. “I imagined one day I’d meet [Palin],” said conservative media pioneer Andrew Breitbart in his introduction of the former governor. “I just never knew that it would be in the middle of Tennessee, in a biosphere. Or is it an international space station? Or is it the set of Avatar?”

Inside the main hall, and inside the breakout sessions, there was one member of the media for every three Tea Partiers. During the troubled run-up to the convention, those sessions (and Palin’s speech) were scheduled to be closed to the media, and only a few cloaked-in-mystery “availabilities” would be opened up.

“I think they were the dog that caught the car,” said Erickson, who had been an early critic of the convention. “They got Palin. Who thought they were going to get Palin? They didn’t know what to do next.”

In the final stretch, as coverage of the “intra-Tea Party infighting” reached fever pitch, Phillips put Memphis TEA Party founder Mark Skoda in charge of media outreach. (”I just didn’t want to deal with it,” Phillips told The Independent.) It was Skoda, a bombastic radio host and consultant, who started keeping in touch and on top of media requests and letting the world in.

“I jumped in when all the negative press was coming,” Skoda said, “because I don’t have a lot of tolerance for people who want to be bullies. My focus was getting as much video press in here as possible, that show that we’re not a bunch of crazies, OK? So there was a necessity to look at international press. We wanted to give them access because this is truly American. Our president may not believe in American exceptionalism, but I do. And if you look at most of the U.S. press, there’s a national audience — there’s a lot of videography going on. My sense was: Nobody here is wearing crazy outfits, there’s no little pointy hats, no screaming mimis, no signs.”

Skoda’s calculation paid off. The few people in “crazy outfits” did draw cameras toward them as if they were magnetized. One was William Temple, a pastor who donned the revolutionary war garb and British accent he’d broken out at every Tea Party. During speeches, Temple would wave his hat and lead cheers of “Hip, hip, huzzah!” Outside of the main room, he was interviewed with every step he took. But Tea Partiers hardly had anything to fear from the quotable and polite man who co-starred in “Tea Party: The Documentary Film” and led the 9/12 march on Washington.

“Gone were the placards that protesters carried [at Tea Parties] last year with Mr. Obama’s face wearing a Hitler mustache or superimposed on the Joker,” wrote Kate Zernike in a New York Times piece representative of the convention coverage. Many questions to organizers were about the fiery speech by former congressman Tom Tancredo that opened the convention; many questions to attendees were about Palin, and whether they’d back her if she ran for president. The controversy surrounding the convention and its speakers led to media coverage of the convention as a mainstream political event, a stop along the road to the rebuilding of the GOP. One sign of how happy Tea Partiers were to see the media there came after Anthony Reese, who’d left the organizing committee of the convention in a huff, staged a press conference with three other angry activists critical of what happened–and then asked Fox’s Carl Cameron for a photo together. Cameron obliged.

“I think the media convinced the media to cover this by playing up the early stories,” said Glenn Reynolds, the libertarian Instapundit blogger who drove to the convention from his home in Knoxville. He was conducting interviews for PajamasTV, the conservative web network that ran some of the earliest coverage of the Tea Party movement, and was allowed to livestream most of this convention. “If I wanted to give Judson Phillips more credit than he deserves, I’d claim he was actually a genius who manipulated the media into giving this more coverage. I mean, this was the front-page, headline story in the Knoxville paper yesterday!”

High ticket prices aside, the Tea Partiers who made it to Nashville made up a representative — if slightly wealthier than average — cross-section of the movement. The overwhelming number of attendees were white, and when World Net Daily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah took a moment in his Friday night speech to ask how many of them were “born between 1946 and 1961,” the vast majority of hands shot up. On Friday night, Andrew Breitbart introduced “Generation Zero,” a splashy documentary that argues that the financial crisis was deliberately engineered by radical 1960s ideologues. Footage of dancing hippies and pictures of Saul Alinksy — the radical organizer who has become a household name among Tea Parties — were intercut with conservative writers like Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, historian Victor Davis Hanson, and Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald, explaining how left-wing theorists had long wanted to bring down capitalism and replace it with a socialist society. In a breakout session on immigration policy, Tancredo explained to Tea Partiers that Democrats wanted immigration reform in order to enfranchise millions of new voters to put them in perpetual power.

“Remember when Rahm Emanuel said ‘You never let a good crisis go to waste?’” said Lisa Mei Norton, a Tea Party activist and singer who opened the convention on Thursday night. “Now, what did he mean by that?”

Norton told The Independent that her beef with the media stemmed from how reporters covered things “they think are bad” out of proportion to everything else. She didn’t sing it at the conference, but she’s recorded a song about Barack Obama’s citizenship called“Where Were You Born?” Yes, she had questions about Obama’s citizenship. It was perfectly fine for reporters to write about it when Tea Partiers questioned Obama’s birth certificate. The problem, she said, came when reporters didn’t put that in context.

“Why is it?” she asked. “Is it the media leans left, and wants to only highlight things that put conservatives in a bad light, and downplay negative things that happen on the left?”

For John Ball, a political consultant working for “Ten Commandments judge” Roy Moore — now a candidate for governor of Alabama — understanding how the media covered conservatism was one of the major goals of the convention. After The Independent spoke to Moore, Ball asked for some analysis of exactly how and why the media turned conservative quotes into “extreme” gaffes.

“When we talk about the Constitution and getting back to the founders,” said Ball, “you guys are ready to say ‘Oh, the founders who owned slaves? Who wouldn’t let women vote? You want to get back to that?’ I think Tea Party people need to understand how that works.”

The threat of media bias, the way that the press could trip up inexperienced activists, was obvious enough to Amy Kremer. She had split with Tea Party Patriots — she’d been on the board — when she decided to join the Tea Party Express. Unlike Tea Party Patriots, which is run by grassroots activists, her new group is run by Republican consultants. It had been the focus of outsized media attention, more grist for the “Tea Party infighting” narrative. Kremer didn’t care. Neither, she said, did activists. “Nobody who comes to these rallies knows the difference between Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express.”

From her perspective, the coverage of the Tea Party Convention represented the media as it should work. The live network broadcast, she said, was “amazing.”

“You go the media when you have a message to get out,” said Kremer. “We’re our own media resource in this movement. But I think it’s good that they were here so the whole country could see what happened tonight.”

When the convention had ended and the cameras had packed up, The Independent caught Phillips again, rubbing his eyes, summoning the energy to go out with his top volunteers to celebrate. He’d had no idea that the networks had indulged him by running so much of the conference and of Palin’s speech.

“I just assumed that as soon as she sat down, they all would jump out,” said Phillips. “I knew C-Span would stay. That’s C-Span’s thing. But wow! That’s incredible!”

Scarantino says he is still learning to use the Web site, part of a national network of sites in other states, including West Virginia and Nebraksa.

Once Scarantino learns to use it, he says, “expect a lot of action.”

But an article two months ago from the Santa Fe Reporter says otherwise.

The Los Angeles Times writes:

New Mexico, home to high rates of alcohol abuse and miles and miles of open road, is now ranked 25th among the states in alcohol-related fatal crash rates and is expected to place lower when the latest rankings are compiled later this year. Between 2004 and 2008, the number of DWI [Driving While Intoxicated] fatalities here dropped 35%, from 219 to 143.

However, the Santa Fe Reporter pointed out that these numbers have a lot to do with high gas prices (less driving), safer cars (airbags) and better driving habits (seatbelt use) than any actual anti-DWI program.

Still, New Mexico is being hailed around the country for the use of ignition interlocks to help stop drunk driving.

However, the attitudes when it comes to drunk driving are the hardest things to change. Both articles mention the “culture” in New Mexico when it comes to drinking.

The LA Times:

Kenny Martinez, 43, agrees that alcohol is a part of New Mexican culture. Martinez was first convicted of drunk driving in 1992 and racked up four more convictions over 15 years.”When someone’s born, we drink. When someone dies, we drink,” he said. “We drink at baptismals, at birthdays. Oh, work’s off, let’s drink!”

The Santa Fe Reporter:

“I have mixed feelings,” DWI Czar O’Connor says. She thinks safe-ride programs, while probably effective in cities, are no substitute for keeping people sober: “You can’t serve somebody as much as you feel like [just because] they have a safe ride.”This attitude is revealing. Because when anti-drunk driving activists talk about “changing the culture,” they often mean promoting alcoholic abstinence.

America tried that before. “Prohibition didn’t work. We have to look at how we use alcohol,” Santa Fe Sobering Center Manager Richard Lucero says. In Europe, he notes, alcohol is “a family ritual at dinnertime, where teenagers are introduced to alcohol, and they use it responsibly.”

So are there any easy answers to solving the DWI problem in New Mexico? Probably not — or they would have been done already.

And in more governor blog news, the Las Cruces Connection discusses the current campaign moves made by GOP Governor hopeful Greg Zanetti. He started laying the groundwork in Las Cruces yesterday to begin his work toward gaining his party’s nomination for the 2010 gubernatorial race.

Always a topic of interest: What is the future of media? Tracy Dingmann of Clearly New Mexico highlights a few projects that give her hope for the future of journalism and gives the rest of us a pretty cool blog for the present.

In other blogger news, Peter St. Cyr covers Virgin Galactic’s successful rocket motor testing. Still in their first phase of testing, Virgin Galactic expects to begin launch flights from Spaceport America located in Southern New Mexico as early as 2010 for $200,000 a ticket — round trip, I’m hoping.

And if space travel isn’t science fiction-y enough for you, Julia Goldberg posts her thoughts on how and why “Terminator 4 Needs Salvation.” It’s a good lunch-break read, or whenever your boss isn’t looking over your shoulder.

Here are his remarks (slightly paraphrased):

During a recession of this severity, its important for the government to step in and fill the hole left by consumers and businesses …. But the long term debt and deficit is unsustainable.

We can’t keep borrowing from China or other countries. We have to pay interest on that and are mortgaging our children’s future. But also, they’ll eventually stop wanting to buy our debt…which will raise our interest rates…and dampen our economy. …The biggest thing we can do is tackle entitlements.

My administration has been going through the budget line by line to root out waste. We’ve eliminated 40 billion in procurement practices and no bid contracts in defense, and we’ve found $17 billion in programs that don’t work.

Let me pause to give a little commentary on the media.

When congress included in last years budget a whole bunch of earmarks, there was a weeks worth of stories about earmarks, but that’s less than one percent of entire budget that had been signed.

When we find 17 billion in cuts in programs, what do they say? “That’s not significant, not important.” But you can’t have it both ways. If those earmarks are important, then this is important too

But what is very true, is that we can eliminate waste, earmarks, and we still have a major problem because of social security, medicaid and medicare, and interest on the national debt.

I have said before and will say again, we are going to work with congress to enact serious entitlement reform that preserves a safety net but puts it on more stable footing

Its going to be hard, with some tough choices, and I’m going to need the support of the American public.

The Globe itself is in trouble, as its parent company (the New York Times Co.) “threatened earlier this month to shut down The Boston Globe unless its labor unions agree to $20 million in cost concessions, including pay and benefit cuts.”

Newspapers around the country are in trouble, with the Rocky Mountain News shutting down earlier this year and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer moving to an online-only format, along with drastic staff cuts.

“America’s newspapers are struggling to survive and while there will be serious consequences in terms of the lives and financial security of the employees involved, including hundreds at the Globe, there will also be serious consequences for our democracy where diversity of opinion and strong debate are paramount,” Kerry wrote in a letter sent to union leaders Friday, which the union released yesterday.

This news comes on the heels of a report that showed that newsroom cuts in 2008 were the worst in at least 30 years.

So while traditional newspapers are clearly in trouble around the nation, can the government do anything?

U.S. Sen. Benjamin Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, introduced legislation designed to allow certain newspapers to operate as nonprofit 501(c)(3) entities. The New Mexico Independent, part of the Center for Independent Media‘s network of news Web sites,  is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

“The loss of journalists is a loss for democracy,” said ASNE President Charlotte Hall in a statement. “The loss of people of color from our newsrooms is especially disturbing because our future depends on our ability to serve multicultural audiences. ASNE is committed to keeping newsroom diversity on the front burner even in tough times.”

 Of those who lost their jobs, according to the ASNE census, 854 were minorities.

The drop in 2008 followed a 2007 which showed a decline of 2,400 jobs in newsrooms. And New Mexico newsrooms haven’t been spared. Just take a look at NMI’s coverage of newspaper layoffs.

One area that has been growing, not surprisingly, is in the online arena. From the ASNE report:

2,300 journalists worked solely online of which nearly 19.6 percent were minority. ASNE started counting online-only journalists in 2007. Then there were 1,900 online journalists of whom 16 percent were minorities.

So how did they come up with these numbers?

The ASNE newsroom employment census is based on a yearly response rate of 65 percent. For the 2009 census, 931 of the 1,405 daily newspapers responded to the survey, representing 66.26 percent of all U.S. dailies. 

The changing media landscape is another hot topic. John Fleck’s take is here.

Peter St. Cyr, meanwhile, has the goods on some body parts found near Taos. That’s here.

Back to politics — because who doesn’t love politics? (Um, me!) — click here to read Mark Bralley’s take on Manny Aragon’s “arrogance.”

NMI intern Danielle Bauer wrote most of this posting. She is awesome.