Daily Archives: April 26, 2010

Peoria Public Schools

No wonder D150 is trying to bury public comments

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Tonight was the last District 150 Board of Education meeting that will be televised live on Comcast’s education public access channel 17. From now on the meeting will be broadcast a week delayed — and with the public comment period excised. It’s increasingly easy to see why the district would not want this portion of the meeting on television. They want to be able to control the image of the district, the board, and the administration. But during the public comment time, a more unflattering image is often presented. And sometimes it exposes things the administration wants to keep hush-hush.

Like tonight.

Rumors of unapproved clerical raises were substantiated at tonight’s school board meeting, the Journal Star reports:

The union representing clerical workers at Peoria School District 150 is filing a grievance after learning 10 of its members in the central administration building were arbitrarily given raises in November now totaling more than an estimated $80,000, officials said Monday.

The raises were rescinded Monday, effective immediately.

Debbie Chavez, former president of Local 6099 Peoria Federation of Support Staff, which represents some 650 clerical, cafeteria and paraprofessional workers, told School Board members during public comments [emphasis added] on Monday that both the union and the School Board had been left in the dark about the raises approved by the administration, which she said boosted the pay of some by more than 50 percent.

Interim Superintendent Norm Durflinger defended the raises and said they didn’t violate the collective bargaining agreement … even though they were kept a secret from the union and the school board … even though he rescinded them effective immediately. He’s going to sit down and talk to the union about the raises … now that they know about them. Whoops.

I have to admit, I was skeptical about this scandal when the rumors first started flying on my blog. It sounded too ridiculous to be true. Imagine giving just a few clerical workers humongous raises — an $8/hour raise in one case — at the same time the district is pleading poverty, laying off teachers, closing schools, and cutting out live broadcast of the school board meetings. Nobody would be that stupid.

And yet….

If the school district were trying to destroy every last ounce of trust the public might have for them, I don’t know what more they could do than what they’re doing now.

My suggestion: Now that they’ve rescinded the raises, they should have enough money to broadcast the meetings live and in their entirety. After all, finances were the reason cited for going to a one-week-delayed, censored broadcast. Now that they can save $80,000 in five months, they should have plenty of money to restore the live feed and let the public see their representatives in action on Monday nights, right?

Amtrak, City of Peoria, Illinois Dept. of Transportation

Still on my radar: Peoria Amtrak feasibility study

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Since 2007, Amtrak and the Illinois Department of Transportation have been studying the feasibility of establishing a Peoria-Chicago train route. The report has been constantly delayed, pushed off one or two seasons at a time. Last time I checked, it was supposed to be released last fall. I recently e-mailed Mayor Ardis to ask the status of the report. The latest estimate from his Amtrak contact is that the report will be finished and released this summer — and, Ardis added, the Amtrak representative “thought it would be favorable for us.”

Investment in new rail lines is moving ahead despite the state’s deficit problems. Before Peoria’s study was initiated, IDOT and Amtrak did a study on re-establishing service between Chicago and the Quad Cities. That report was favorable, and in January Gov. Quinn announced “$45 million in state capital funds to establish passenger rail service from Chicago to the Quad Cities. The new service will result in up to 825 new jobs, including 440 construction jobs.” Hopefully Peoria will get similar results when the Chicago-Peoria study is finally finished.

Amtrak’s ridership continues to increase in Illinois (up 10% on the Chicago-St. Louis route and up 4.1% on the Chicago-Quincy route), and yet still no train travels through greater Peoria — the third-largest metropolitan statistical area in the state.

General News

Trends in online newspaper access

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Starting in June, The Times of London is going to start charging a subscription fee for online access to their newspaper content. Subscribers to the print edition of the paper will get complimentary online access, but web-only subscribers will have to pay £2 ($4 USD) per week. That’s roughly one-third the price of a print edition subscription.

“Paid content is the only way that we are going to see a sustainable economic model for quality journalism,” explained Times Editor James Harding.

Mr Harding added: “Saying that our journalism is worthless and dumping it free online is not a viable economic model.” Even were The Times to double its online readership over the next five years the revenue created through non-subscription means would be too low to sustain a quality newspaper, Mr Harding said.

Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, added elsewhere in the article, “We are proud of our journalism and unashamed to say that we believe it has value.”

They aren’t the only ones setting up pay walls. The New York Times announced earlier this year, “Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access.” The Financial Times has a similar setup. Those who register can get 10 articles for free every 30 days, but must pay a subscription fee of $3.59 per week for unlimited online access. The Wall Street Journal charges $1.99 per week for online access only, $2.29 per week for a print-only subscription, and $2.69 per week for both.

A recent article in the Online Journalism Review says this is the way all newspapers will eventually go because it’s the only viable business model. “You don’t get free gas from a gas station. You don’t get free meals from a restaurant,” observes the article’s author, Gerry Storch. “So why is the newspaper industry the only one in America that is expected to give its product … in its electronic version … away for free?”

“Giving away information for free on the Internet while still charging 50 cents to $1 for the print version of the paper was one of the most fundamentally flawed business decisions of the past 25 years,” says Prof. Paul J. MacArthur, who teaches public relations and journalism at Utica College. “Newspapers told their paying customers that the information truly had no value. They told their paying customers that they were suckers. Why would anyone pay 50 cents for something he or she can get for free? This poorly conceived and obviously flawed strategy has helped put the newspaper industry into its current financial condition and hastened the demise of many publications.”

I’ve been asking that same thing for years now about the Peoria Journal Star. Why should someone pay $247 per year for the paper’s content (which is continually shrinking, by the way) when they can get the same content for free online? What kind of a business plan is that?

Storch gives his prescription for the newspaper industry: “[E]xcept for the ‘Big Four’ national players, newspapers will not survive unless they 1) convert out of print and totally into the Internet, 2) confine themselves to local news and, most importantly, 3) charge for it.” Overall, I agree with this assessment. However, I don’t think they need to get out of print totally. The market for the printed newspaper will continue to shrink, but will remain at least a niche market forever.

But Storch is correct that a focus on local news — and charging for it — is a must. No one is going to buy the Journal Star for its reprinted Associated Press content. But people will buy the Journal Star for local news. You don’t get local news from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or even the Chicago Tribune. That’s the local paper’s competitive advantage, and they need to capitalize on it.

That’s the only way I can see for online newspapers to succeed in the long run. The only future for the free model is dwindling content and bankruptcy.