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Nov

7

Question for Mark Naymik


Mark, you wrote for the Cleveland Free Times, which Anastasia Pantsios says has no restrictions on its reporters.

Now, you write for the Plain Dealer.

When you were at the Free Times, did it then, unlike now as Anastasia says, have the rules that Susan Goldberg has for the PD re: reporters can’t give contributions or at least can’t write about people or entities with which they have financial or emotional connections?

What can you tell us about how life as a journalist at the Free Times – with or without that rule or set of rules – compares with life at the PD under, possibly, a different set of rules? Do you think that the current Free Times folks aren’t real journalists if they don’t have that restriction about donations etc.?

For those who weren’t aware, Mark did investigative work for the Free Times (John Ettorre says Mark was a protege of Roldo) before joining the Plain Dealer.

And Anastasia wrote this about the current policy at the Free Times: “Free Times rules don’t prohibit it [donations to political campaigns] as they do at the Plain Dealer.”

Check out this “laurel” that the Columbia Journalism Review gave Mark in 1994 for his work at the Free Times:

* LAUREL to Free Times, an alternative weekly in Cleveland, and to Westword, an alternative weekly in Denver, for remembering what they are supposed to be an alternative to. In the September 14 edition, Free Times assistant editor Mark Naymik provided an unsettling look at how, with more than a little help from their friends in the news media, Cleveland’s business leaders rebuilt its image from national joke to the place to be. Tracing the flood of “slobber and gush” articles from the time that Tom Vail, then publisher of the Plain Dealer, began the New Cleveland Campaign, through the targeting of journalists in New York, Washington, and other media centers, and the encouragement of articles, opinion pieces, ads, and advertorials in outlets ranging from USA Today and Fortune to CBS This Morning and PrimeTime Live, Naymik concludes that “by counting news clips, new buildings, and tourists, Cleveland clearly emerges as a Comeback City. But by counting poverty rates, population, and job loss, and considering the state of city services, Cleveland is on a downward spiral. Just ask the city residents who live there.”

Similarly, while the planned new Denver International Airport sent most of the local media straight up to Cloud Nine, Westword has, month after month and year after year, kept its feet on the ground, reporting on the studies that correctly predicted the problems, prodding the major papers to face the facts, scolding this anchor and that for lending their images to DIA brochures and their voices to the DIA people-mover. “If [the media] had done their jobs,” ran one column by the relentless Patricia Calhoun, “someone might have figured out a little sooner that problems of disastrous proportions plagued the new airport.”

Mark. Seriously. You’ve been in a lot of different environments for reporting. Anastasia says the Free Times doesn’t have the same rules as the PD on this issue.

What were those rules when you were there? What do you think? You are in a unique position to help us understand.

Thanks.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 3:47 pm November 7th, 2007 in Blogging, Media, Ohio, Politics, Wide Open 

Comments

11 Responses to “Question for Mark Naymik”

  1. 1 John Ettorre on November 7th, 2007 4:11 pm

    Jill,
    It’s fair to say he was also something of a protege of Jim Neff, easily among the best investigative reporters to work in Cleveland in the second half of the 20th century. Jim’s a former head of IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors), author of a number of great books (at least a couple of which Mark helped do some legwork on), and now head of the investigations unit for the Seattle Times. But what most people don’t know about Mark is that he began his career in public relations, for Dix & Eaton. I think he picked up a few useful pointers about research there, as well.

  2. 2 Anastasia P on November 8th, 2007 12:37 pm

    I wonder if it really matters, Jill. I think work — and bias — speaks for itself. I’m saddened at the blatant bias in some of Mark’s recent reporting (one piece in particular comes to mind) because he always seemed to me to be diligent, fair and open to the facts. You don’t have to make donations to be biased; there are countless other ways. I think the ultimate difficulty in being super-vigilant about reporter neutrality is that no one is neutral really. We all have our biases and sometimes it’s just more honest to put them on the table than to pretend they aren’t there. I want to believe that maybe Mark was ignorant of what the word he used meant but I think he’s too smart for that, and I suspect he was sticking a little shiv in the back of one political party that he hoped no one would notice — or that no one at the PD would care about.

  3. 3 Keith on November 8th, 2007 3:31 pm

    Anastasia:

    I’ve been away from Cleveland for 10 years and noticed that Mark was gone. I’m sorry to hear of what has become of his efforts.

    It always amazed me that the best journalism at ground level was being done by the Free Times and other so-called alternative weeklies. The argument I used to get into with other mainstream journalists I worked with was the whole bias issue with the weeklies. Of course, the MSM writers decried what they say as ‘bias.’ For my part my defense of the alternative weeklies was they were doing the kind of journalism that WE should be doing but are afraid to do for reasons which, after the latest dustup with the PD should seem all too obvious. Muckraking, to use the term in a positive sense, never had to necessarily be about the right or the left but about finding out the truth of situations that were adverse to the public. Now that kind of journalism is assailed as being left-wing, which I would take as a compliment. Was Upton Sinclair a left winger? Well, Teddy Roosevelt supposedly hated him but got the Pure Food and Drug Act passed largely because of what came out in The Jungle. To be a progressive is to expose that which hurts the public in any form. Consequently, is the opposite type of journalism that which protects the ownership class or the status quo? If so, what do we call that type of journalism? Can we call it journalism at all?

    Ooooh, sorry, I seem to have launched into a roundtable type diatribe. But these questions fascinate me and we don’t talk about them enough.

  4. 4 Anastasia P on November 9th, 2007 5:08 pm

    Keith-

    I think you are exactly right that it is not so much about left and right as it is about protecting and supporting the powerful versus advocating on behalf of the powerless, in the sense of exposing the injustices that are frequently at the root of their powerlessness. Are altweeklies biased? Sure, absolutely — about exactly as much as papers like the Plain Dealer? They just tend to take a different side (leaving out the “modern” stance some have adopted of being cynical about everything. The PD protects institutions and businesses such as Forest City, the Cleveland Clinic and the Cleveland Catholic Diocese while acting like a pack of especially unpleasant martinets in lecturing the black community and our region’s poorer citizens for not maintaining and policing middle-class behavior on a frayed shoestring (sorry, no more bootstraps; they’ve long since been take away).

  5. 5 Jill Miller Zimon on November 15th, 2007 11:04 pm

    Do you think that these circumstances are endemic to the way the press functions now, that it is entrenched in this way of relating? Whether they like it or not?

    I ask this because when I meet and talk with traditional journalists, they may talk about loving their work, but I don’t know if they love their JOB. You know what I mean?

    What do you think?

  6. 6 Keith on November 16th, 2007 9:20 am

    Jill:

    I think that’s right. Journalists who got into the business because they wanted to make a difference in the world (and why is there anything wrong with that?) largely feel that way. I know I did. But the inter-newsroom politics eventually ejected me from a job I genuinely loved. I simply don’t think a true progressive can function as a reporter in a newsroom anymore because of the corporate culture permeating every facet of the operation. To sound like David Mamet – we all become whores in this situation. I knew those who had years in the business stretching back to the better days who are hanging on in a situation they hate just to make it to retirement. I think some of them are shortening their lives with the resultant stress. I think I would probably work best in an alternative newspaper situation but every one I ever applied to I was never called for an interview. I wonder if they have a bias against people who have been in the mainstream too long?

  7. 7 Jill Miller Zimon on November 16th, 2007 12:30 pm

    Well, I know for myself that when such a situation arises, I go looking for ways to change that situation, because no one, in this short life, should feel forced to remain in such conditions if it is their life passion.

    I apologize for sounding as though I think everyone has choices – of course I know better – it isn’t always possible, maybe even often it isn’t possible.

    But don’t we want to encourage people to TRY to improve their circumstances?

  8. 8 Keith on November 16th, 2007 12:43 pm

    Jill:

    Oh yes, I agree with that and heaven knows I did try and try and try and failed and failed and failed. :)

    Ok, I will accept that I may lack the tact necessary to change things from within but this is a system that does not (in many cases, I won’t make sweeping statements here) accept the validity of personal ethical codes. There are corporate ethical codes and the feeling that I always got was that you accept them or move on – they are not going to change simply because you might make what you consider a very principled and convincing argument to the contrary. And, of course, I was not the only one. But ask yourself Jill, in the recent Wide Open Blog dustup, if you had 15 minutes alone with Susan Goldberg and Brent Larkin and whoever else to make your best case, do you think the final decision would have been any different?

    At some point some of us stop beating our heads against the wall because it does truly feel better when we stop.

  9. 9 Jill Miller Zimon on November 16th, 2007 12:45 pm

    Well – since I have delusions of grandiosity, yes – I do think the outcome could have been different if they’d invited me or preferably all four of us in to figure this out.

    But even in my non-delusional state of being, I still believe we could have worked this out – if they really wanted to.

    Either they didn’t want to or they f**d up, or both. No matter how you slice it, the value of any ethics standard, for bloggers or journalists, is diminished the way they tried to use it with us.

    Again, it just did not have to be that way.

  10. 10 Keith on November 16th, 2007 12:55 pm

    Jill: were you watching me type? :)
    Wow, that was fast.

    I agree it absolutely did not have to be that way and if anyone could have made the case with tact and diplomacy it would have been you (my this apple is shiny!) :)

    So we are left to deduce why it did not. And I accept your version of events completely. And I see how deeply this troubles you and I commiserate completely. I felt the same way for weeks, nay months after I was fired from my talk radio job. Even a year later I would dream very vividly that I was back running the board and wake up angry and sad. It’s clear you greatly enjoyed WOB and saw it as a golden opportunity to merge the worlds of print and blog for the benefit of all the readers. And now we’re all left to look at the shattered pieces of what could have been and it plain stinks to high hell. And its got to hurt a lot.

    Like you I hope for a better world and am willing to work for it. But sometimes it just seems like were too tiny a boat against the tide.

  11. 11 Jill Miller Zimon on November 16th, 2007 7:19 pm

    Well, thanks Keith – I appreciate that.

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