{"id":6893,"date":"2015-06-04T14:55:13","date_gmt":"2015-06-04T20:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=6893"},"modified":"2015-06-04T14:55:13","modified_gmt":"2015-06-04T20:55:13","slug":"media-magazine-takes-a-look-at-bureau-closure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2015\/06\/media-magazine-takes-a-look-at-bureau-closure\/","title":{"rendered":"Media magazine takes a look at bureau closure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CJR\"<\/a>The Columbia Journalism Review, the premier publication covering American media, posted a story today<\/a>\u00a0about what lies ahead, now that Lee Enterprises has closed its Capitol bureau.<\/p>\n

I spoke twice with\u00a0the reporter, Corey Hutchins, who told me, as he says in the article: “In discussions about statewide alternatives, the name I heard most often was another former Lee reporter: Ed Kemmick. After a quarter century as a reporter and editor for the Billings Gazette<\/i>, Kemmick started a website, Last Best News,\u00a0in early 2014.”<\/p>\n

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. As I used to like telling people when I worked at the Gazette: “I’m the Sunday columnist for the biggest paper in the fourth-largest state in the most powerful country in the world.”<\/p>\n

It sounded impressive until you unpacked it, as does my current claim to fame, that I run virtually the only successful, ad-supported, online-only news site in Montana. It is successful, but it is still basically a one-man operation and my readership hovers somewhere in the range of 1,200 to 1,500 visitors a day.<\/p>\n

Even so, I did tell Hutchins, as he says in the article, that as soon as I heard about the state bureau closure, I couldn’t help but start to think of trying something larger, something like a statewide online newspaper. How could I not? When the Lee Newspapers go out of their way, seemingly, to create gaps that cry out to be filled, one reacts accordingly.<\/p>\n

I didn’t mind sharing this information with Hutchins and I don’t mind sharing it here. I want to be an open book, just like President Obama said he wanted his administration to be transparent. The only difference is that I mean it.<\/p>\n

Not that anything is going to happen soon. It’s hard enough to run this modest operation. To think of expanding, to take on partners and go statewide\u2014that’s more than a little daunting.\u00a0Some things are meant to be, though, and the time has never seemed riper in Montana. We’ll all just have to wait and see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Columbia Journalism Review, the premier publication covering American media, posted a story today\u00a0about what lies ahead, now that Lee Enterprises has closed its Capitol bureau. I spoke twice with\u00a0the reporter, Corey Hutchins, who told me, as he says in the article: “In discussions about statewide alternatives, the name I heard most often was another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6894,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[2586,305,2587],"class_list":["post-6893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-columbia-journalism-review","tag-lee-enterprises","tag-state-bureau","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}