Scientologists buy Governing magazine

Governing magazine, the ubiquitous periodical of the nation's city hall and state house offices, will be sold this week to a Sacramento-based company called e.Republic. The sale has drawn an unusual amount of attention because the prospective buyer is run by Scientologists and the magazine's current owner, Poynter Institute, owns the St. Petersberg Times, a newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the inner workings of the Church of Scientology.

Staffers at Governing - the new owners plan to whittle the staff down to 12 from 27 - have real concerns about working for a company that so closely ties management and religion. The New York Times reports:

Some of the anxiety among the staff stems from a 2001 article in the Sacramento News and Review, an independent weekly, about e.Republic. That article, which has been widely read by Governing’s reporters in the last few days, reported that e.Republic’s staff members are required to read a book on management called “Speaking From Experience,” written by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.

“There is concern,” Mr. Harkness said. “Unquestionably, there is concern.”

Officials at e.Republic say its all business, but the meltdown at the Unification Church-owned Washington Times, where attempts to raise journalism standards led to a bloodletting of top staff, has staffers understandably nervous.

Four in the morning

1. Another consequence of cutbacks at newspapers: Fewer papers are spending the time and money to fight for public access to court trials. The story mentions the Riverside Press-Enterprise, which helped set the standard for access to court trials in a pair of cases in the 1980s. NYT

2. One company - and I know there are others - thinks jargon and misdirection are the new news. From the NYT:

...the suburban newspaper is at the vanguard of the industry: reporters at The Journal News don’t work in a newsroom, they are part of an “Information Center”; they don’t cover beats, they cover “topics”; and in a new wrinkle to an old story, the staff was not being laid off, but becoming part of a “comprehensive restructuring plan."

Apparently, you no longer need to leave the newspaper to work in PR. NYT

3. Hard-hitting journalism is expensive: A jury awarded a doctor who was the subject of several articles in the St. Petersburg Times $10 million in a libel lawsuit. Even if the paper wins on appeal, the lawyers have to be paid. St. Petersburg Times

4. The Hartford Courant had some trouble managing both aggregation and attribution - it was taking stories from other papers posted to its website and then putting them in the newspaper under a Courant byline. Courant

Truth-o-meter

President-elect Barack Obama made a few promises as a candidate and the St. Petersburg Times is tracking whether he keeps, breaks, compromises or delays 500 of them using The Obameter. Experience expected disappointment and pleasant surprise all at the same time!