Do you remember the Baptist Foundation Scandal? Check out this Wall Street Journal article from 1999.
Arizona state regulators have launched an investigation into the activities of the foundation, which was created in 1948 by the state's Southern Baptist Convention and manages endowment funds for Southern Baptist charities. Losses on the foundation's $483 million in stated assets could exceed $100 million....
Why am I bringing up a 20-year-old scandal? Because of this sentence.
Regulatory scrutiny intensified last year after articles questioning BFA's finances began appearing in Phoenix New Times, a weekly newspaper.
New Times broke the BFA story. The WSJ used New Times as its source because the Arizona Republic not only did not break the story, but it also missed it completely. The WSJ had to quote New Times because New Times was the ONLY source of this huge national story.
OK, so that was 20 years ago. What about now?
Well, the biggest story last year was Hacienda Health care.
Craig Harris missed that one.
What's the biggest local political story this year? How about the Democratic Staffer who won a million dollar judgment after being discriminated against by the current Secretary of State. That's a huge story.
Too bad that the Republic's Maria Polletta missed it.
Why am I bringing this up now? After all, missed news is old news.
I'm bringing it up now because it happened again. The Republic is providing wall-to-wall coverage of the Petersen adoption scandal, but this is all make-up coverage. The Republic missed the original story. New Times had the story a year ago.
The is a Myth that is sacred to Republic journalists. They believe that they offer a superior product but that people aren't willing to pay for that product. They believe that social media caters to readers' lowest impulses so readers are no longer willing to put in the effort to read high-quality journalism. Republic reporters also believe that they produce a high-quality product and then Facebook and Google steal it.
The myth is wrong.
The reality is that even using traditional journalism standards, the Republic produces a low-quality product. The paper has missed the biggest stories of the last 20 years. Its reporters focus on trivia; its columnists engage in name calling, confirmation bias and fallacies and its Twitter minions spend all day retweeting each other's articles.
Readers for their part have moved on. The Republic is the paper of record in the fastest growing county in the nation and its business model has collapsed. The model has collapsed because the quality of the product is poor.
If you are looking for real journalism....check out New Times.
Post Script: The Republic's Robert Anglen responded to this post by pointing out that the Republic did indeed publish one article in response to the Civil Beat article. I stand corrected on that part. The rest of the post--from Baptist Foundation to the other stories and the final analysis stands. However, I will take back that one example.