When the Iowa Independent launched version 2.0 more than a year ago, we were Iowa’s only major news site built on the open-source Wordpress blogging platform. Since then, other prominent news organizations have followed suit, including the (Cedar Rapids) Gazette and Radio Iowa.

Wordpress, which was created in 2003 and is maintained by a community of programmers, has become popular because of its user-friendly control panel and its virtually-infinite customizability. It is open-source and completely free, written in the popular Web programming language PHP.

The Gazette launched its new Wordpress site in the middle of the summer, using a modified template purchased from WooThemes.com. Radio Iowa’s relaunch happened this week, using a pre-designed template called Thesis. (The theme running on the Iowa Independent is a completely custom design.)

The Wordpress platform is by no means a silver bullet, and it takes a fair amount of work to keep it running in high-traffic environments. In the days after the Gazette’s switch to Wordpress, the site experienced downtime or debilitating errors for minutes (and even an hour) at a time. When traffic spikes for the first time for Radio Iowa’s new site, it could have similar problems. We certainly did when we were first getting things situated on our server. It’s unavoidable.

But the switch to Wordpress portends a promising trend among mid-sized news outlets. Rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on customized, proprietary software to run their sites, organizations like the Gazette and Radio Iowa are finding that excellent Web sites are virtually free. It still costs money to host a site and to design its template, but those costs are tiny compared to the cost of a large IT staff.

This means that even in a business climate where online advertising costs much less than offline advertising, news Web sites don’t have to cost more money than they bring in.

Open-source software like Wordpress is perhaps the only hope journalists have of developing a sustainable online model, with low overhead and easy-to-use controls that don’t take years for writers to master. It’s encouraging that more news outlets in Iowa are using it.

The company also plans to eliminate positions in offices in California and New York, and it will move 10 jobs from those states to Des Moines to cut costs.  According to the company, the cuts are necessary in light of declining advertising revenue.

“Newspaper ethics tend to do better about direct ripping off the competition,” Buttry writes. “Plagiarism is a career capital offense, so if we can’t advance a story or find the same sources to duplicate it, we reluctantly attribute.”

Buttry’s post is frank and honest, but he left one option off his list of common newspaper practices: skipping over a story entirely if there’s no way to write it without crediting another news organization.  That’s a pretty common one, too.

It may be true that in the world of traditional journalism, newspapers are better at citing original source material than broadcast media, but in my experience, most of them are bound by an arcane set of rules designed more to promote their commercial interests than to pursue the truth or inform their audience.

The news business is becoming less and less profitable all the time.  If there were any actual commercial benefit to avoiding citations of other news outlets, I would have a hard time faulting anyone for it.  But what good do they derive from it?

When the Des Moines Register cites the Cedar Rapids Gazette in print, do they lose subscribers?  Advertisers?  The two newspapers serve two distinct media markets, more than a hundred miles apart.

What if local TV newscasts cited the Register each time they cribbed a newspaper story?  They might sound funny having to cite the same source for nine out of the ten stories they feature, but it is unlikely that businesses are going to stop running television ads in favor of print ads, or that somebody will turn off the tube and curl up with a day-old copy of the newspaper to get their news.

I could ask the same hypothetical questions about whether there are legitimate reasons to avoid crediting nonprofit, online-only news outlets that regularly break news stories, but I’m done tilting at windmills for the day.

The Iowa Independent has been credited in print and on the airwaves by the Washington Post, the BBC, National Public Radio, and FoxNews (just to name a few), but to the best of my recollection, our name has never been uttered in the pages of the Register or in any local TV newscast.  If we ever do get local publicity (for which we are sincerely grateful), it is usually in the form of a novelty story about this new hobby called “blogging” — nothing that actually validates our work as journalists.

After a year and a half editing this site, I’ve made my peace with how the world works.  I can see the Iowa Independent’s footprint in the work of other local journalists even if casual readers, listeners, and viewers never will.

Marengo Publishing Corp. and Poweshiek Publishing, companies under Gannett’s large umbrella, have published three weekly advertisers, seven weekly newspapers and a monthly magazine for several years. The seven newspapers — Belle Plaine Union, Brooklyn Chronicle, Marengo Pioneer-Republican, Montezuma Republican, North English Record, South Benton Star-Press and Williamsburg Journal-Tribune — will be consolidated or shuttered.

“Everyone should be aware of our nation’s economic crisis and the recession we are experiencing,” wrote Dan DeBettingnies, MPC publisher. “Here in Iowa we are often insulated from much of the pain economic changes bring to the rest of the country. That’s a thing of the past. Today we are being affected directly.”

Today, Dec. 31, is the final publication date for both the Brooklyn Chronicle and the Montezuma Republican. The two papers will merge into a county-wide publication, the Poweshiek County CR (Chronicle-Republican). Offices in Brooklyn have already closed and offices in Montezuma are expected to close at the end of January. In addition to the two newspapers, a smaller news effort sent with the Pennysaver advertiser to Grinnell addresses ceased publication on Dec. 29.

The final issue of the The North English Record, which has published since 1891, will be on Jan. 1. After that date it will be repackaged with The Williamsburg Journal-Tribune. News from North English will have a page within the existing Williamsburg paper.

On Jan. 7, 2009 The Belle Plaine Union, a paper which began in 1866, and The South Benton Star-Press, a merger of three smaller newspapers in 1967, will merge into one publication, The Star Press Union, which will aim to serve the residents of southern Benton County. The company plans to keep offices in Belle Plaine.

Gannett announced a 10 percent staff reduction in late October. On Dec. 1 The Des Moines Register, which is owned by Gannett, announced a 6.9 percent reduction in its workforce.

“We will have to say goodbye to our friends and co-workers, who have worked hard and loyally, who helped us create the best product possible. Keep them in your prayers,” editors NIck Narigon, Dann Hayes and Jim Magdefrau wrote in a joint announcement.

The only problem is that, while the president is empowered to appoint the SEC chairperson (with advice and consent from the Senate), he is not empowered to fire him.  He could ask the chair to resign, but as ABC News reports, that doesn’t always work:

From time to time, presidents have attempted to remove commissioners who have proven “uncooperative.” However, the courts have general[ly] upheld the independence of commissioners. In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt fired a member of the Federal Trade Commission and the Supreme Court ruled the president acted unconstitutionally.

Beaumont’s story does not mention the Constitutional question.

Sportscaster Chris Hassel (Photo: whotv.com)

On Aug. 10 as she watched a WHO-TV Sunday evening broadcast on Channel 13, sports reporter Chris Hassel recapped the 2008 Summer Olympics being held in Beijing by referring to the Chinese men’s basketball team as the U.S.’s first “eggroll on their plate.”

“I just got angry,” Paul told about 50 people who gathered inside Drake University’s Harmon Arts Center for a “Public Forum on Race and Ethnicity in Public Discourse.”

Since the newscast, Paul, who is Vietnamese, said she has traded nearly 10 emails with WHO’s News Director Rod Peterson, sports reporters Chris Hassel and Andy Fales and Dale Woods, general manager.

Most disturbing, Paul told the audience and panel, was an email she received from Fales on Aug. 11. Paul said Fales wrote that she was “being too sensitive.” He also wrote that “Referencing eggrolls when speaking of China is akin to referencing hamburgers when discussing Americans.”

Cyndi Chen, division administrator of the Status of Iowans of Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage, said the goal of the forum held on Tuesday was to create an open dialogue and a “better place to live” by addressing inappropriate comments in the media.

“Reporting is not comedy,” Chen said. “Why are reporters using those words to refer to people? I don’t like it. I’m more than just food.”

No one from WHO-TV participated in the forum. In an interview on Wednesday with Iowa Independent, Peterson, the station’s News Director, said he was invited to sponsor and be a part of the forum, but was never provided details of the event, which Chen denied.

Peterson, who is Hassel and Fales’ boss, deflected Iowa Independent’s questions about whether the comments made on the newscast and in Fales’ email were offensive, professional and represented the station.

“It would be in Ms. Paul’s opinion,” that the comments were offensive, Peterson said.

The meeting and panel included Drake University professors Judy Allen, associate professor of psychology; Lenore Metrick-Chen, assistant professor of art and design; and Sandra Patton-Imani, associate professor of American Studies; and Leland Searles, professor of sociocultural anthropology at Des Moines Area Community College and Rudy Simms, executive director of the Des Moines Human Rights Commission.

Paul wrote Peterson on Aug. 11 that the sportscaster’s attempt at humor was “something a news reporter should be unbiased to and above” and played into racial stereotypes.

“This statement was small-minded and highly inappropriate for a news station,” Paul wrote.
Paul also wrote a letter to the editor in The Des Moines Register voicing her concerns.

Patton-Imani, associate professor of American Studies at Drake, said when people of color object to such comments, they are often told they’re being too sensitive, but there is no such thing as “innocent language.”

“So when racial comments are made, we need to think critically about how they support white supremacy. About how they foster discrimination,” she said. “About how they even unwittingly perpetuate a society where people are silently ranked by race, ethnicity, history and power.”

Paul provided a copy of Fales’ email to forum participants. Fales stated, “Censoring language is a very half-assed method of changing thought. It places blame on the wrong entity and does nothing to change the actual condition. What’s more, it reveals (an) inner lining of insecurity, fear and hostility that does far more to exacerbate the situation than language itself.”

Fales stated in the email that he understood the connotations of racial slurs like “chinaman and gook” and that it was a “good thing that we’ve taught ourselves to move away from them. But to go up in arms about the affable association of an appetizer, which is in no way linked to poverty, oppression or violence is pushing the envelope of political correctness too far.”

Searles, the DMACC professor of Sociocultural Anthropology, said equating a group of people with food isn’t an innocent act, which he found offensive.

“There’s almost an implied aggression. If you are an eggroll and I’m going to eat you metaphorically speaking, I’m going to do violence against you,” Searles said. “There’s a metaphorical death in calling a team a group of eggrolls or referring to them as eggrolls.”

Many people who spoke at the forum denounced the comments and shared similar stories of media insensitivity. Examples included Don Imus, a commentator who referred to the Rutgers University Women’s Basketball team as “nappy headed hos”; the term “Welfare Queen” and how the media used it in reference to black women; and the use of the terms “illegal immigrant and undocumented immigrant.”, among others. The panelist discussed the effects of such language on society.

One Drake professor in the audience who did not give his name said the media has failed to address fears about the U.S. “slipping” and China moving ahead.

Audience member Don Brown, who lives in West Des Moines and formerly worked at WHO-TV and the Des Moines Register, told the panel that he has experienced anger over comments made by WHO-TV sportscasters regarding Tiger Woods. Brown said he also contacted the reporters who “tried to minimize it.”

Allen, the Drake associate professor of psychology, said the comments objectified, devalued and dehumanized people. She said the use of humor is a way to rationalize the comments, but such comments harm the bystanders who hear it as well as those who make the utterances by destroying empathy.

Chen said Fales offered to meet one-on-one with Paul, but Paul felt uncomfortable with the idea. Paul said she is still awaiting answers and an apology.

“Was the response from Fales WHO’s official response?” Paul said. “And if not, what are they going to do?”

Peterson, who has been news director for two years, said he met with Chen on Aug. 19 and that the meeting was “very good.”

Chen said that Peterson was unaware at that point about Fales’ email to Paul. She said she questioned him on whether Fales’ email followed station protocol. They also discussed reporting in general, and she invited him to sponsor and participate in the forum.

Peterson said reporters at WHO-TV are instructed to copy him with any email correspondence they have with viewers, as that correspondence becomes a part of the station’s public file with the Federal Communications Commission. Peterson said Fales did not copy him on the email response he sent to Paul and was told that he should have.

Peterson said WHO-TV staff are concerned about the needs of “all of our viewers.”

The Minnesota author was in Iowa City on Monday to read from her new book, “The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir.”Background: A so-called “Secret War” was being waged by the CIA in Laos and Cambodia during the more public Vietnam War. In 1975, when the U.S. withdrew its military forces from Vietnam, the “Secret War” in Laos was also abandoned.

Why the secret? In 1962, a Geneva Accord was signed that forbade U.S. troop presence in Laos. To circumvent the agreement, the CIA was ordered to train and support an army of people known as the Hmong.

The secret Hmong army in Laos has since been largely forgotten by the U.S. government, but more than 100,000 Hmong people were killed. Their systematic persecution continues today in Laos.

Originally they lived in the mountainous jungles of Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. After the war, many fled to refugee camps and eventually made their way to the U.S., France and Australia.

Today about half of Hmong immigrants in the U.S. live in the Midwest.

Before Kao Kalia Yang was born, her family crossed the Mekong River to the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. At age 6, Yang and her immediate family immigrated to St. Paul, Minn.

By age 12, Yang was teaching English as a second language to adults. She continues to teach at colleges and universities. With her mother and sister, she runs a writing and translation business, Words Wanted, in St. Paul.

“The Latehomecomer” started as a series of love letters to her grandmother, who was the family leader and a shamanistic healer. Her spirit permeates much of Yang’s writing.

The book is filled with her family’s stories, scenes from the refugee camp where she was born, the move to America and growing up in Minnesota.

She said she began her life in English “on the page,” meaning that her first storytelling wasn’t spoken, but written.

In this video, Yang talks about her grandmother and writing her first book:

Yang was at Prairie Lights Bookstore for a reading on Monday night. Her book is available from Coffee House Press.

Nuclear proliferation and disarmament; United Nations strategy and planning; Middle East and Asian security; emergent powers; U.S. security; all of it. Ready for download and available from one policy research think-tank that is nonpartisan and stresses a multilateral approach to issues.

And what if this public policy resource with a worldwide reach was an independent foundation located not in the D.C. beltway but in the eastern Iowa river-town of Muscatine?The Stanley Foundation (TSF), Muscatine’s internationally focused think-tank, stresses a multilateral approach to its research. For over 50 years, the group has been envisioning a peaceful future through realistic parameters and wide-ranging voices. Even more importantly, they are committed to promoting education of both the public through media outreach as well as the policymakers through conferences, collaboration and advising.

The foundation has been located in Muscatine, Ia. since 1956, when it was founded by engineer C. Maxwell Stanley and his wife, Elizabeth. They don’t offer grants and subsist entirely on an endowment fund that provides an annual budget of about $5.5 million.

Stanley’s son, Richard, has run the foundation since his father’s death in 1984. The Stanley family runs several other foundations and was in the news recently when David Stanley, a former state legislator, was accused of raiding E & M Charities to the tune of $24 million to fund his New Hope Foundation. A lawsuit brought by other Stanley family members was settled out of court in January.

Describing their mission as active global citizenship and TSF has influenced foreign policy decision-making through media production and collaboration with a range of groups.

TSF director of policy analysis and dialog Dr. Michael R. Kraig was in Iowa City last week to moderate a panel on “Civil Society and Terrorism” at the University of Iowa Provost’s Forum on International Affairs. He sat down for a video interview with the Iowa Independent where he explained his views on three different types of terrorism: local, state-sponsored, and transnational.

Kraig believes there’s a gap between “what the public believes our foreign policy should look like in broad terms and the specifics of what our legislators are doing on Capitol Hill.”

He also talked about the some of the foundation’s programming and mission:

From 1980 to 2004, TSF produced “Common Ground,” a radio program that aired on over 200 NPR stations. They still produce radio documentaries, but have also started to do multimedia work.

A radio documentary called “Brazil Rising” will be released in June as part of their project “Rising Powers: The New Global Reality.”

According to Keith Porter, who is TSF’s director of communication and outreach, “Rising Powers” is designed to “spark discussion among Americans about the way the world order is changing and what it means for the United States.” TSF partners with KQED on radio projects. They will launch a “Rising Powers” Web site that will grow as more countries are profiled. India and Turkey are in line for coverage after Brazil.

Last year, TSF’s series of dialogues called “Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide” brought together emergent liberal and conservative thinkers. In one pairing, unpaid advisers for Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama co-wrote “The Next Intervention,” an editorial in the Washington Post. A longer version of their collaboration, “America and the Use of Force: Sources of Legitimacy,” was collected with nine other liberal/conservative conversations in a book. The series was described as “an alternative to the distortions and oversimplifications of today’s polarizing political environment” and largely succeeded in painting otherwise polemical arguments into workable solutions.

Porter said that the detailed policy work usually comes first and is followed by public outreach and a media campaign. Currently, the foundation is conducting a U.S. nuclear policy review to be ready for the next president’s administration. When the policy plan and report is complete, TSF will produce information to be disseminated through media channels, public speakers, citizen groups and other communications.

Another project will form a basis for a northeast Asian security group where none currently exists. Porter said, “There is no permanent security alliance like ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations).” So TSF will “take what happening in the Six-Party Talks and turn that into a regional association like ASEAN.” He said this project is typical of the TSF mission of “trying to get countries to talk to each other [through] multilateral solutions.”

Porter said he’d like to see:

“American leaders and American media take our global connections more seriously. People who work on foreign policy issues all the time can look at Main Street in Anytown, U.S.A. and find a dozen connections between that and the rest of the world …  that doesn’t get reflected very often in what our political leaders tell us. It doesn’t get reflected very often in what we see in the media and I think, regardless of that, it’s starting to make an impression on average Americans.

People are beginning to see how their fates are connected to the rest of the world … there is a direct one-to-one connection between U.S. national security and global security … we ought to be doing everything we can around the world to promote security, stability, better lives for people and, beyond being just the right thing to do, it will have good, positive influence and effects on us.

I do see recognition of that among people. I don’t see it necessarily among political leaders. I don’t necessarily see it among the media but it’s an idea that the public just grasps immediately. I find that encouraging.”

He summarized the Stanley Foundation mission: “We really believe that both the policy community and the public have to be engaged in these issues to bring about the change that we want in the world.”

TSF distributes a monthly e-mail newsletter, “think.” about their current program work. They also publish a quarterly magazine “Courier” that has TSF papers and policy analysis. Both are available at the Stanley Foundation Web site.

See the Mission Freak Web site for more bands and MCM events.

Essayist and fiction author Ben Marcus is MCM’s featured keynoter on Saturday afternoon at The Mill. Marcus is the author of “Notable American Women,” “The Father Costume” and “The Age of Wire and String” and will likely draw a local writerly crowd into the classic Iowa City venue.

Mission Creek Midwest is a local version of a west coast music expo that began (and still flourishes yearly) in San Francisco. MCM began when local founders Andre Peery and Tanner Illingworth came to Iowa City and started their east-central Iowa version with the Mission Creek brand name.

The fest has expanded its team of show producers. There are now five MCM producers plus a “street team.” Together, they organize shows, create posters, and deal with venues, booking and bands.

Some people have compared MCM to the legendary (and epic) SXSW fest in Austin, Tex. But SXSW is a music expo put on by the music industry for the music industry, so the comparison falls short.

Illingworth told the Iowa Independent that, “With Mission Creek, we are trying to put on a festival for Iowa City.  It’s a celebration of the arts and culture we have right here at home, not to mention all around the Midwest.  People come to Mission Creek to have fun for four days and experience some music that they aren’t going to see other places, not even SXSW.”

The Mission Freak Web site is the official space for festival news. Those interested can purchase festival passes on the site.

As part of the festival, Iowa City-band Illinois John Fever is playing at The Mill on Saturday night.

A year ago at Public Access Television’s studio in Iowa City, I.J.F. played “Biological Radio”:

But it was the death of a 7-year-old girl that became the “crystallization” of his conscientious objection to serving in Iraq.

Munford told a story about a friend, stationed in Iraq, who had been ordered to use a vehicle-mounted machine gun on an unresponsive civilian car in Baghdad traffic. The car was later revealed to contain a 7-year-old Iraqi girl, killed by the soldier’s bullets.

Not wanting to be put in the same position as his friend, to be ordered to fire on Baghdad motorists, Munford submitted a letter of intent to become a conscientious objector.

Munford gave a simple but frustrating description of the CO process:

1. It exists.
2. It is nearly impossible.

He said he was lucky to have been able to get out of serving in Iraq.

After researching CO status on the internet, he found that some internet sites were blocked at his base, so he used his own computer and connection to read about the CO process. He said the site Objector.org was one of the best, but none of the information he found was complete.

He described a harrowing, all-day “interview” with a Harvard Law School graduate who denied his objections. Munford said the Judge Advocate General officer had found every on-line post Munford had written, printed out his Myspace profile page, and had even found some letters written to newspapers and magazines.

He was given less than two weeks to rebut the JAG officer’s 23-page report.

His rebuttal was a success.

Munford said he is currently estranged from his father, a veteran. But his grandfather, a World War II  vet, supports his decision to become a CO.

Originally from Michigan, Munford said he moved to Iowa City because of his home state’s poor economy.

At the end of a discussion that included stories from four different Iraq veterans, Munford told the crowd he wanted to “push forward to a world where veterans are no longer needed.”

He also read a quote included his original CO letter of intent:

“War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

– John F. Kennedy