Media Watch

SADIWSKYJ BOUNCED AT KGUN; KVOA TO SEND OUT REPORTERS
SOLO

Lena Sadiwskyj‘s three-plus-year run as KGUN Channel 9 news director came to an abrupt end last week. While she may not have
made the final hiring and firing decisions, Sadiwskyj certainly had a
lot to do with KGUN’s dramatic changeover in reporters during her
tenure—and she didn’t make a lot of friends in the process,
although much of the new blood had a better opinion of her.

Sadiwskyj may have been a somewhat ironic scapegoat for the
station’s problems, considering KGUN’s enhanced emphasis on its “Nine
on Your Side” moniker, designed as an effort to better connect on a
one-on-one basis with the viewer.

While parent company Journal Broadcast Group refuses to
comment on pretty much anything related to the station’s happenings,
insiders indicate that at a meeting earlier this month, upper
management from the company’s home base in Milwaukee pushed for a more
intense news approach, with the long-utilized “Nine on Your Side”
tagline as the lynchpin.

With Sadiwskyj as news director, KGUN had already taken a number of
steps to follow Journal’s requests. While some ratings books showed
improvement, upper management may have decided on a change based on
recent numbers and trends.

Sources say former KGUN news director Forrest Carr was given
a tour by local management last week. Carr served as KGUN news director
from 1997 to 2001. From there, he held similar positions with WFLA in
Tampa, Fla., WFTX in Fort Meyers, Fla., and KRQE in Albuquerque,
N.M.

What impact the next news director will have, considering the
desires of corporate management, remains to be seen.

In other local TV news: A more significant change in the way local
television news will be presented is in the works at KVOA Channel
4, which last week held a meeting announcing a movement toward what
some insiders call the “one-man band” approach, meaning reporters, as
they are, will be required to photograph and edit their own
stories.

In the grand local-news tradition of including a good story tease:
More on that developing situation in Media Watch in a couple of
weeks.

SCARPINATO JOINS ‘YELLOW SHEET’

Political reporter Daniel Scarpinato is concluding a
five-year stint with the Arizona Daily Star and will join
“political tip sheet” the Yellow Sheet Report starting
Sept. 1.

“Working at the Star has been a complete thrill. This sounds
corny, I know, but I took great pride in waking up everyday and
covering such an important beat for the community I was raised in,”
said Scarpinato via Facebook correspondence. “I truly am grateful to
everyone at the Star, particularly my editors, and I’m glad to
be leaving on great terms.

“I’m also really excited about this next step. The Yellow
Sheet is a legendary and influential institution in Arizona
politics. It has a very sophisticated and keen audience. From a
journalist’s perspective, it presents a host of great opportunities and
challenges.

“I think the next year will be one of the most interesting ever in
Arizona politics. I’m looking forward to the challenge of putting all
the pieces together for my new readers, an audience that relies on the
Yellow Sheet to get their own jobs done.

Scarpinato joined the Star in 2004, where he covered K-12
education before moving to politics in 2006.

TUCSONCITIZEN.COM RECEIVES J-LAB GRANT

TucsonCitizen.com is
one of five outlets nationally—and the only exclusively Web-based
entity—participating in a pilot project put forth by J-Lab at
American University’s School of Communication.

The pilot project—which also includes input from and funding
for The Seattle Times, The Miami Herald, The Charlotte
Observer in North Carolina, and the Asheville Citizen-Times in North Carolina—is an experiment to meld traditional
newspaper-style reporting with input from other community sources.

“In these days where anyone can publish local information, we hope
that a guided partnership between local newspapers and local bloggers
or citizen journalists can increase the amount of local information
available in a community and raise its quality,” said Gary
Kebbel of the Knight Foundation, the program funding the
project, in a press release. “We see this as a win/win for the
community.”

The Tucson Citizen ceased its print run in May.
Tucsoncitizen.com remains
operational with a skeleton crew and unpaid community bloggers. The
amount of the grant was not disclosed.

FACEBOOK A NO-NO AT CLEAR CHANNEL

In an effort to balance the business benefits of social networking
with the potential for abuses by employees, Clear Channel has
nixed work-time visits to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter over concerns
that the possibility of distraction is interfering with the bottom
line.

“During these tough economic times, the success of our business and
this market requires our full focus and attention,” said Tom
Zlaket, Clear Channel Tucson’s market manager, in an internal memo
acquired by the Weekly. “The increased use of social-networking
sites such as Facebook and/or MySpace can be contributors to
distractions within our building. In an effort to mitigate
distractions, the use of these social networking sites in our building
is now prohibited until further notice unless they are being
used, and only used, towards an increase in ratings.”

While Clear Channel isn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last,
business to nix social-network scanning on the company dime, it might
very well be a sign of more ominous concerns, and the Zlaket memo
suggests as much: When business is good, fool around all you want. When
times are tough, it’s Facebook’s fault.

How Clear Channel employees will attempt to balance the marketing
potential of social-networking sites while remaining in accordance with
the mandate remains to be seen.

This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2009.