Valley PR Blog

Republic Gets Lovely; Buries Lead

By Len Gutman on January 25th, 2008 In Media

The Arizona Republic announced today on AZCentral that it has named Randy Lovely as its new Vice President of News and Editor.

Was I asleep when Ward Bushee announced his departure? Or was this news announced today as well? Reading the story on the Web site it does seem the Bushee news was also part of today’s announcement. It looks like, as they say in the news world, they buried the lead.

The Bushee news begins all the way down in the fifth paragraph and includes the ubiquitous “I’ll miss you” quote:

“Sadly for me, this means leaving my friends and colleagues at The Republic, who I deeply respect and with whom I have had the honor and joy of working along side,” Bushee said.  

Bushee is headed for the San Francisco Chronicle, which had a somewhat different spin on the story. Its headline today is Bushee New Chronicle Editor. The Associated Press also broke the story, with the headline SF Chronicle hires new editor from Arizona to replace Bronstein.

Interesting how the Republic tried to spin this. The news media gets on the PR industry about “spin” and as soon as they have hard news about themselves they spin away. Note too that the Chronicle is not a Gannett paper. I wonder is Bushee is making some kind of statement about how Gannett is ruining the news business or if he just simply wanted to move back to the Bay Area? I’m sure we’ll never know.

For the record, the Republic story was posted on AZCentral at 10:29 a.m. today, the AP story broke at 12:37 Pacific time, and the Chronicle ran its story at 12:59 Pacific time. Well coordinated I imagine.

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