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      The Eugene Weekly Will Resume Printing After Embezzlement Discovery

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      The Eugene Weekly was forced to lay off all 10 of its staff members last month after it discovered tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills.A weekly newspaper in Oregon that laid off all of its workers in December after an employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars will resume its print edition on Feb. 8 after raising enough money through donations, its editor said on Sunday.The newspaper, The Eugene Weekly, abruptly stopped printing after it discovered financial problems, including money not being paid into employee retirement accounts and $70,000 in unpaid bills to the newspaper’s printer, leading it to lay off all 10 of its staff members just days before Christmas, its editor, Camilla Mortensen, said at the time.Over the past month, however, Ms. Mortensen has continued publishing articles online with the help of interns, freelancers and retired reporters and editors — many of whom were willing to work without pay to keep the paper afloat — she said on Sunday.As of this week, Ms. Mortensen and three other staff members will be brought back onto the payroll in preparation for the Feb. 8 edition, she said, noting that the return to print was made possible by readers and members of the public who raised at least $150,000 after the financial problems were reported.“With all this support from people, there’s just no way we can’t try — we have to try printing,” Ms. Mortensen said.The theft, leaders of the newspaper said in a Dec. 28 letter to readers, had been hidden for years and left its finances “in shambles.” The paper has hired a forensic accountant to investigate.Leaders of the paper said that while the situation was unprecedented, they believed in the newspaper’s mission, and were “determined to keep EW alive.”The Eugene Police Department could not be immediately reached on Sunday evening for comment about the embezzlement but said previously that it was investigating. The now-former employee accused of stealing, who was involved in the newspaper’s finances, has not been publicly identified.The free paper, founded in 1982, previously printed 30,000 copies each week. Copies could be found in bright red boxes in and around Eugene, Oregon’s third-largest city.Ms. Mortensen, who became editor in 2016 after nearly a decade at the paper, said Sunday that the closure had been painful.“Every time I walk by one of our little red boxes, there’s no paper in it, it stabs me in the heart,” she said, noting that the plan was to print 5,000 fewer copies so that the paper could remain sustainable.“Obviously, this outpouring has been amazing,” she said, “but we also want to go back to being this free weekly paper that pays for itself.” More

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      Los Angeles Times Owner Clashed With Top Editor Over Unpublished Article

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      The owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, had raised concerns with Kevin Merida, who stepped down this month, over reporting about a wealthy doctor and his dog.When Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, hired Kevin Merida to be the newspaper’s top editor nearly three years ago, he hailed the journalist as someone who would maintain the publication’s high standards and journalistic integrity.By this winter, the professional warmth between the two men had chilled. Their relationship was strained in part by an incident in December when Dr. Soon-Shiong tried to dissuade Mr. Merida from pursuing a story about a wealthy California doctor and his dog, three people with knowledge of the interactions said. The doctor was an acquaintance of Dr. Soon-Shiong, the people said.The previously unreported incident occurred as The Los Angeles Times, the largest news organization on the West Coast, struggled to reverse years of losses amid a difficult market for newspapers. Mr. Merida resigned this month. Shortly afterward, the company laid off roughly 115 journalists, or about 20 percent of its newsroom.It is not unheard-of for the owner of a publication to be consulted on sensitive reporting, particularly if it could jeopardize the newspaper legally or financially. But it is unusual for an owner or a publisher to pressure editors to stop reporting on a story well before publication, especially in cases that do not put government secrets or human lives at risk.In a statement on Friday, Dr. Soon-Shiong disputed the characterization of how he had acted, calling it “factually incorrect.” The Los Angeles Times said in a statement that Dr. Soon-Shiong, who bought the newspaper in 2018, had made a request for “truthful, factual reporting” on the story.In a note to staff this month, Mr. Merida said he had decided to step down after “considerable soul-searching about my career at this stage.” Dr. Soon-Shiong said at the time that it had been “mutually agreed” that Mr. Merida would leave.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Journalists at New York Daily News Walk Off Job for a Day

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      Newsroom workers at The Daily News Union, which formed in 2021, are in negotiations for their first contract.Journalists at The New York Daily News walked off the job on Thursday for the first time in more than three decades.Newsroom workers at The Daily News Union, which formed in 2021, are in negotiations for their first contract. The union called a one-day work stoppage to protest staffing cuts, as well as a new policy that requires workers to get advance approval for overtime.The Daily News, founded in 1919, was once a formidable city tabloid that raced for scoops against its rival, The New York Post, and was one of the largest newspapers in the country by circulation. But in recent years, the paper has been hollowed out by ownership changes and staffing cuts as it struggled against ever-declining circulation and dwindling revenue.In 2021, its parent company, Tribune Publishing, was purchased by Alden Global Capital, an investment firm that has bought up hundreds of newspapers across the country, acquiring a reputation along the way for making deep cuts to newsrooms.About a third of union members have left The Daily News since spring 2022, with membership now at 54 people, according to the union.“In reality, we’re being crushed for cash,” Michael Gartland, a Daily News reporter and union steward, said in a statement. “As a result, staff is diminished, which means our ability to cover the city is diminished.”A spokeswoman for Alden Global Capital did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The last work stoppage at The Daily News was a five-month strike in 1990 and 1991.On Thursday, Daily News journalists plan to picket outside a co-working space that now serves at their temporary office. The Daily News permanently closed its newsroom in Lower Manhattan in 2020. More

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      Haley Picks Up Endorsement of New Hampshire’s Largest Newspaper

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      The Union Leader, New Hampshire’s largest newspaper and one that reliably picked Republicans for a century before the rise of Donald Trump, endorsed Nikki Haley on Sunday in the Republican primary.“Of course, we can’t talk about Nikki Haley without addressing the elephant in the room and the rather old donkey hiding in the White House,” it wrote, alluding to Mr. Trump and President Biden — though making no mention of Mr. Trump by name.The newspaper did not endorse Mr. Trump in the previous two cycles, either.In the 2016 Republican contest, it backed then-Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — but later retracted its endorsement when Mr. Christie, who dropped out of the race after a poor showing in New Hampshire, endorsed Mr. Trump.Then in the 2016 general election, for the first time in more than 100 years, it did not endorse a Republican, instead choosing Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee.And in 2020, it endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. instead of Mr. Trump, who had previously called the newspaper’s publisher a “lowlife” in a television interview.“Nikki Haley is an opportunity to vote for a candidate rather than against those two,” the endorsement reads, again referring to Mr. Trump. It called Ms. Haley a “candidate who can run circles around the dinosaurs from the last two administrations, backwards and in heels.” More

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      Americans Might Tune Out the Trump Show Reboot

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      In crude material terms, Donald Trump’s presidency benefited the media, with subscriptions, ratings and clicks all soaring. It’s therefore not surprising that lots of people believe his return to the center of our politics will once again generate obsessive interest. “When Trump Wins, So Does the Media,” the center-left writer Matthew Yglesias wrote in October. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump recently predicted that because of Trump’s presidential campaign, “cable news channels may soon see a resurgence.” Even warnings about the manifold ways a second Trump presidency could damage a free press tend to assume that four more years of MAGA pandemonium would be lucrative. The business model behind our ailing industry, wrote George Packer in The Atlantic, “works better with Trump.”I’m not so sure this is true anymore. A few overarching questions animated Trump’s first term: Can he really get away with this? When will Republicans break with him? Will the law ever catch up? In a second Trump presidency, those questions would be answered. (Yes, never and no.) The constant hope that Trump could be exposed and even ousted would be gone. Thus among liberals, I suspect, the anxious hypervigilance sparked by Trump’s first election would be replaced, at least initially, by depression. In 2019, Viv Groskop wrote in The New York Review of Books about how some in Vladimir Putin’s Russia had resurrected the Soviet idea of internal exile or internal emigration, a disillusioned retreat from politics into private life and aesthetic satisfactions. If Trump is re-elected, I’d expect to see a lot of Americans adopting a similar stance as an emotional survival strategy. If that happens, the danger won’t be just to bottom lines in the news business. Though Trump thrives on attention, he’d be even more destructive without the pressure of sustained public outrage.The Atlantic writer Jennifer Senior recently described the twitchy psychic landscape of the Trump-era liberal news fanatic: “I’d spent nearly five years scanning the veld for threats, indulging in the most neurotic form of magical thinking, convinced that my monitoring of Twitter alone was what stood between Trump and national ruin.” Such compulsive news consumers were a huge factor in the Trump-era journalism boom. “The increase that news organizations saw in terms of audience engagement during the first Trump administration, a lot of that was driven by people who consume a lot of news. They were just consuming more and more and more of it,” said Benjamin Toff, a journalism professor and an author of the new book “Avoiding the News.” “But a lot of the rest of the public, I think, was pretty disengaged from it.”Since then, the ranks of the disengaged have grown. Trump keeps doing appalling things: In just the past couple of days, he nearly got thrown out of the second defamation trial brought against him by a woman he sexually abused, according to a jury, and then claimed on social media that presidents should enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution even when they “cross the line.” But his misdeeds have lost the capacity to shock, and they no longer drive conversations. That might change if he is once again president, but like a virus, he won’t generate as strong a reaction when he’s no longer novel.People who avoid the news, said Toff, tend to believe that nothing they do can change it. By contrast, the people who joined the Trump resistance had a great sense of personal efficacy. They poured into politics and organizing, sure that they had the power to mitigate the catastrophe of Trump’s election. But now, everywhere I look, I see a terrifying resignation. A potentially significant number of people on the left, particularly young ones, believe that because President Biden has disappointed them, it’s not worth voting for him to head off a Trump restoration. (Online, some have even adopted the sarcastic right-wing phrase “orange man bad,” meant to dismiss liberal revulsion against him.) Some centrist plutocrats have also made their peace with a Trump return. “U.S. Executives in Davos See a Trump Victory in 2024, and No Cause for Concern,” says a CNBC headline. As Jonathan Chait wrote recently, holding the anti-Trump coalition together “required maintaining a level of focus and willpower that has simply given out.” Who is going to want to be glued to the news of that failure?Obviously, as a journalist, I have a vested interest in people caring about the news, but what really scares me is less the decline of profits in my industry than growing numbness and despair in the face of possible political calamity. I keep thinking of the early 1970s, another period when broad-based, idealistic social movements had recently fragmented, with some turning toward a militant sectarianism while others withdrew from politics, seeking self-realization in lifestyle experimentation. “Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to ‘relate,’ overcoming the ‘fear of pleasure,’” wrote Christopher Lasch in his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism.” It wouldn’t be surprising if people react to another Trump presidency in a similar fashion. (Already both psychedelics and polyamory are back in a big way.) The reboot of the Trump show would be a lot darker than the original. People who value their equanimity might decide it’s not worth watching.Do you have a question for Michelle Goldberg about this column?Please submit it below. She will be responding to a selection of readers in a future piece. More

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      Kevin Phillips obituary

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      ‘The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” Kevin Phillips told the journalist Garry Wills during the 1968 US presidential campaign.Phillips, who has died aged 82, was the political analyst behind Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”, aimed at exploiting racial tensions to draw to the Republican side the more conservative voters in the south, where the Democrats had dominated since the American civil war primarily because Abraham Lincoln had been a Republican.Although both he and Nixon later played down his direct influence, Phillips’ keen perception of the changing antipathies of the American electorate, detailed in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, lay at the heart of Nixon’s victory.Phillips’s analysis was not limited to the south. He realised that traditional working-class Democrats were becoming alienated not just by the party’s embrace of civil rights, but were also sympathetic to conservative positions against the Vietnam war, protest, federal spending and the 1960s “cultural revolution”.Though he predicted their drift rightward to the Republicans, he could not foresee the long-term effect of this political tsunami, stoked by culture wars, and he eventually disavowed the division his work had sowed, becoming, by the George W Bush presidency, a leading voice of apostate Republicanism.Phillips’ analysis echoed a century of US political history. After John F Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) through Congress. Johnson was a master of political compromise, but when he signed the latter bill, he supposedly told an aide, “there goes the south”.The so-called “solid south” always voted Democrat, but these naturally conservative “Dixiecrats” were at odds with the rest of their party, which primarily represented working people in the north.Similarly, the Republicans were traditionally a party of big business, led by industrial magnates whose sense of noblesse oblige rendered them relatively liberal on social issues. But they also harboured a fierce right wing committed to undoing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and opposed to any hint of government regulation.These factional divisions facilitated legislative compromise, but Johnson’s prediction soon proved true, as Dixiecrats deserted to the Republicans. Starting with Nixon’s re-election in 1972, Republicans swept the south five times in nine presidential elections, stymied only by the southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.Phillips was born in New York City, where his father, William, was chairman of the New York State Liquor Authority, and his mother, Dorothy (nee Price), was a homemaker. He graduated from Bronx high school of science at 16, by which time he had already begun studying the political makeup of his city, discerning an antagonism towards the black and Hispanic community by the white working-class children of an older generation of immigrants.Already a loyal Republican, after graduation he headed the Bronx’s youth committee supporting the re-election of Dwight D Eisenhower. He earned his BA in political science from Colgate University in 1961, having spent a year at Edinburgh University studying economic history, and took a law degree from Harvard in 1964.His political career began as an aide to the Republican congressman Paul Fino, from the Bronx, where he realised that despite Fino’s relatively liberal domestic positions Republicans could not depend on minority voters.Phillips lent his prodigious research into the breakdown of the nation’s congressional districts to the Nixon campaign, and after the election he became a special assistant to the attorney general John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager, who would be jailed in the fallout from the Watergate scandal.He left Mitchell in 1970, becoming a commentator, with a syndicated newspaper column, his own newsletter and regular appearances as a broadcasting pundit. Phillips later traced Republican failures back to Watergate, although ironically it was his tip to the Nixon aide Jeb Magruder about the damaging information that might be in the Democratic party chairman Larry O’Brien’s Watergate office that precipitated the fatal burglary.Phillips coined the terms “sun belt” for the fast-growing areas of the southern and south-western states, and “new right” to distinguish the populist politics of Ronald Reagan from those of “elitists” such as Nelson Rockefeller. But as the white working-class shrank, along with its jobs, the politics of resentment grew more divisive. Dog-whistles to racists, from Reagan’s “welfare queens” to George HW Bush’s Willie Horton ads portraying a black murderer, culminated in the 1994 “Republican revolution” which captured Congress and proceeded to shut down the government.What Phillips had not foreseen was the impossibility of political compromise now that all the different reactionaries were in the same Republican boat. Watching the growing economic inequality which sprang from the Reagan years, he began to have second thoughts. His belief in his party as a stable, serious preserver of the status quo began to fall apart.Starting with Wealth and Democracy (2002), Phillips produced a series of books excoriating what he saw as George W Bush’s plutocratic revolution, recalling the robber barons of the 19th-century Gilded Age. He warned of an instinct toward authoritarianism under the guise of fighting so-called liberal permissiveness.Phillips castigated the Bushes further in American Dynasty (2004) for aiding already rich investors, especially in the sun belt’s energy and defence industries, at the whim of the Pentagon and CIA. American Theocracy (2006) recognised the growing influence of fundamentalist Christians in the Republican party, a dystopian vision of ideological extremism mixed with greed-driven fiscal irresponsibility.His 2008 book Bad Money focused on what he called “bad capitalism”, relying on financial services instead of industrial production. After the 2008 financial crash, he wrote a sequel, After The Fall (2009). By now he was a regular in such centrist outlets as National Public Radio or the Atlantic, where he found himself explaining how his analysis of the changing American electorate led, with some inevitability, to the polarised society that elected the authoritarian Donald Trump.Among his 15 books, Phillips also produced a biography of the US president William McKinley (2003) and 1775: A Good Year for Revolution (2012), about the circumstances which precipitated that war.He is survived by his wife, Martha (nee Henderson), whom he married in 1968, and their three children, Betsy, Andrew and Alec. More

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      Collision of Power review: Marty Baron on Bezos, the Post and Trump

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      Marty Baron led the Washington Post as executive editor for eight years, retiring in 2021. All told, newsrooms he led won 17 Pulitzer prizes, 10 of them at the Post. Liev Schreiber portrayed him in Spotlight, the 2015 Oscar-winning movie that depicted a Boston Globe investigation of sexual predation by priests.Baron has stories to tell. His first book has a tantalizing subtitle – Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post – and he dives right in.In August 2013, “five days after the announcement that Bezos would buy the Post, Trump heaped praise on both Bezos and the paper”, Baron recalls.“I think it’s a great move for him, I think it’s great for the Washington Post,” Trump remarked. Beyond that, Trump, then a mere reality TV star, called Bezos “amazing” and proclaimed that he was a “fan” of the paper.Trump soon fell out of love. In December 2015, as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, he accused Bezos and Amazon of scamming the American taxpayer. In March 2018, as president, he began hammering away at the supposed Amazon “post office scam”. But the deference Trump demanded never arrived.Baron’s book is timely. Last month, Trump barked that Comcast, owner of NBC and MSNBC, should be investigated for “treason”, and will be if he is re-elected next year.His Republican opponents offered no pushback. This was not a surprise. During his first presidential run, and then as president, Trump repeatedly called the media the “enemy of the people”, treating reporters as foils. To Baron, that echoed Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Goebbels. Threats of violence against the press wafted through campaign rallies. In late October 2016, in Miami, Trump whipped a crowd into a frenzy against Katy Tur of MSNBC. On Twitter, death threats circulated like “loose trash”, she recalled.Baron writes: “The middle finger he had given the press was about to become a fist. My own mood was one of stoic acceptance.” Throughout his book, his tone is measured and concerned, not simply alarmed. He calls for objectivity but he knows the press is under attack. Nationally, investigative journalism thrives. Locally, it dies.This being a Trump book, Baron also deals some dish. According to Baron, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, tried to oust him from the Post.“Trump and his team would go after the Post and everyone else in the media who didn’t bend to his wishes,” Baron writes. “In December 2019, Kushner would lean on [the Post publisher Fred] Ryan to withdraw support for me and our Russia investigation. ‘He aims to get me fired,’ I told Ryan.”Kushner “suggested the Post issue an apology and there be a ‘reckoning of some sort’”, Baron writes. No apology followed. Baron kept his job.The Post came with a storied history: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and more. It was no one’s toy or bauble. It was not the New York Observer, once owned by Kushner, whose own memoir reportedly received an assist from Ken Kurson, a former Observer editor pardoned by Trump on cyberstalking charges only to plead guilty to state charges of spying on his wife.In Collision of Power, Baron also describes a White House dinner in June 2017, months after the inauguration, at which Trump unleashed a torrent of grievance and self-adulation.“He had better relations with foreign leaders than Obama, who was lazy and never called them.” His predecessor had “left disasters around the world for him to solve”.In the same breath, Baron says, Trump took to task the chief executive of Macy’s for pulling Trump-branded products in reaction to his calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”. The store, Trump said, “would have been picketed by only 20 Mexicans. Who cares?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBaron also captures Trump throwing jabs at Benjamin Netanyahu, complaining of how little the US received in exchange for aid to Israel. Fresh off a trip there, and advised he couldn’t leverage aid to broker peace with the Palestinians, Trump was annoyed.“I was told ‘there’s no connection,’” Trump told Bezos, Baron, Ryan and Fred Hiatt, another Post editor. “He was incredulous. ‘No connection?’”Trump’s take, Baron says, foreshadowed reporting by Barak Ravid of Axios, that Trump “said he was surprised to find that the Palestinians want a peace deal more than the Israelis”. In his own book, Trump’s Peace, Ravid captures Trump saying of Netanyahu, “fuck him”, and reducing American Jews to antisemitic caricatures.A postscript: Trump’s dinner with Baron and Bezos was held on 15 June 2017, the night of the congressional baseball game. Trump chose to hang out with a bunch of reporters despite the shooting, at practice for that game, of Steve Scalise of Louisiana, a House Republican leader and Trump supporter, who was left fighting for his life.Of course, this is not surprising. In summer 2020, when protests for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd came close to the White House, Trump hid in the basement. More recently, John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, has confirmed that Trump refused to be seen with wounded veterans. In the Trump White House, bravura was common, compassion and bravery near-non-existent.A year after Trump was ejected from power, Baron retired and went to work on his book. As it comes out, Scalise is both battling cancer and plotting to become House speaker. Trump, 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination again.From the beginning, as Baron saw close up, Trump “had the makings of an autocrat”. In the next election, the tenor of coverage will be vital. Should Trump win, the plight of the press may be uncertain. Either way, Baron says, journalists will need “idealism, determination and courage”.
      Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post is published in the US by Macmillan More

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      This Conservative Thinks America’s Institutions ‘Earned’ the G.O.P.’s Distrust

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      You can’t understand the modern Republican Party without understanding the complete collapse of trust in mainstream institutions that has taken place among its voters over the last half-century.In 1964, 73 percent of Republicans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing always or most of the time. Today, that number is down to 9 percent. And it’s not just government. Pew found that only 35 percent of Republicans trust national news and 61 percent think public schools are having a negative effect on the country. Many of the issues animating the modern right — from fights over school curriculums and learning loss to media bias and Covid vaccines — are connected to this deep distrust.[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]Mary Katharine Ham is a journalist and conservative commentator who has appeared on CNN, Fox News and ABC News. In Katharine Ham’s view, America’s institutions have “earned” her party’s rampant distrust. Across her writings, she has leveled scathing critiques of numerous mainstream institutions, from the media to the C.D.C. and universities, arguing that these institutions have consistently failed to serve ordinary Americans. So this is a conversation that explores Katharine Ham’s critique in order to understand the distrust at the heart of the Republican Party. This episode was hosted by Jane Coaston, a staff writer at The New York Times Opinion. Previously, she hosted “The Argument,” a New York Times Opinion podcast. Before that she was the senior politics reporter at Vox, with a focus on conservatism and the G.O.P.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)Emily BabcockThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero. More