Fear and Loathing in a One Newspaper Community?
NevadaCo Wrestles with Media Monopoly
Seems like it was only yesterday that I was praising The Union editor Jeff Pelline for breaching the paper's walled garden, by enabling RSS feeds for their on-site weblogs. But another day, another revision of the story (or not; see Jeff P.'s response): the Mountain Messenger reports that elsewhere in the garden, the walls have grown massive, heavily fortified, and topped with broken glass.
"Intimidation and retaliation tactics have long been seen as one of the paper's, and Pelline's, main ways of dealing with dissent in the community. ... waging a vendetta against radio station KNCO ... '[Pelline] wanted an exclusive story and when we told him that we had given it to KNCO as well, he said "The meeting is over" and he left the room'..."
"...not a further drop of ink about the Foundry would appear in print if the paper was not allowed to participate..."
I emailed Jeff Pelline asking for his response, since it doesn't appear that he was contacted for the story. (his response is here)
I'm trying to get the Mountain Messenger to start a blog, so they can put their Nevada County stories online.
(Some other Messenger articles (ballot, tourists, business) have appeared on Yubanet, but not this one, as of this writing.)
Related:
the inflammatory Haute Trash and Stuckey editor-vs.-public email exchanges from pre-Pelline years;
March 2007 'arrogance and censorship' NCFocus post;
my suggestion from back near the start of the Messenger-vs-Union conflict: "It seems to me the Mountain Messenger ought to...(un)cover Nevada County. Then The Union could retaliate... and it could escalate from there, and the 2 counties would benefit enormously...newspaper sales would skyrocket."
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