State Headlines

Digital BNC contest  update  

This year entries for the Better Newspaper contest be will be entered and judged by digital submission.   NMPA will be sending out a series of emails on how to upload entries and will give you plenty of time to get familiar with the entry website before contest time.   The site is being finalized and information and rules packet will be sent out in early July.   The contest period will remain the same: July 1, 2011 - June 30, 2012.   Deadline for entries will allow time to enter all submissions on-line and time to answer any questions with the new process.  This year the BNC contest will be judged by the Kentucky Press Association and we will return the favor by judging their contest in the fall.   Look for more details to follow.    Entries will be entered at http://betternewspapercontest.com/   

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The business organization that led the court fight against the federal health insurance law said Thursday it respects the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold the law, but it will continue to work to minimize the law's impact on small businesses.

"We are disappointed with the decision, but we respect it and now we are going to move forward and narrowly focus on influencing the regulatory process," said Minda McGonagle, director of the New Mexico Chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business .

"There are no real answers at this point. In many ways, we're at the beginning."  Read more  

State reactions from decision:  

Here are some of the reactions from New Mexico politicians in the wake of the 5-4 US Supreme Court decision that upholds nearly all of the provisions of President Obama's controversial health care law.

As you'd expect, Democrats hailed the decision while Republicans hated it.

Since this is an election year, we broke down the reactions by matchups voters will see in November:  Read reactions at Capitol Report - New Mexico 

After a week of taking heat following the disclosure that Gov. Susana Martinez and top officials in her administration used personal emails to conduct state business, on Monday she ordered all state employees in agencies under her authority to use official state email for state business.

"Today, I am directing all state employees under the governor's authority to utilize official state email when conducting state business via email," Martinez said in a news release. "This includes discussions preliminary in nature to final decisions or actions that have occasionally been sent via personal email because they are not required to be maintained under state law."  Read more 

New Mexico's largest public employee union is suing for the removal of names and salaries from a state-run online database.

The Albuquerque Journal reports the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 18 filed a lawsuit in state District Court in Albuquerque this week. The group is arguing Gov. Susana Martinez's administration violated state law by adding employee information from the state's Sunshine Portal.  Read more 

As our readers surely know, newspapers across the country are in transition right now. Thankfully, in Santa Fe, we remain an independently owned and operated daily, beholden to no shareholders or corporation and published seven days a week. Even so, The New Mexican is affected by the same forces that are buffeting our industry across the country. There's the transition from print to online, as well as the same recession that has hurt businesses and families everywhere. These are, as that old saying goes, "interesting times." Read more 

Researchers have found a connection between population concentrations around state capitals and public corruption.

"Isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across U.S. states," says a study released last month by Filipe R. Campante of the Harvard Kennedy School in Boston and Quoc-Anh Do of Singapore Management University.

Less concentration of population around a capital means less newspaper coverage of state government and politics, which means less accountability for public officials, Campante and Do write.

"We find that the role of media accountability helps explain the connection between isolated capitals and corruption," the researchers say.  Read more 

CARLSBAD -- A car stolen from a Carlsbad newspaper carrier has been found completely burned to its shell.

The Carlsbad Current-Argus says a car belonging to Carolyn Fry, one of their deliverers, went missing Wednesday around 3:45 a.m. while she was dropping off papers.

Fry says she stepped out of her Ford Taurus long enough to put a newspaper on a porch. When she turned around, she saw someone jump into her car and drive off.

Police located the car nearly an hour later in a canyon.

Fry, who has been a paper carrier for 11 years, says paying for a replacement car will be hard when her job depends on having a vehicle.

A Current-Argus sales manager says this is the first incident he knows of involving a carrier.

Political advertising guidelines

Public Notice promotion 

Thanks to Maria Lopez Garcia and the Rio Grande SUN we have new promotional ads letting the public know they now have several options to find notices: in print, the NMPA website, sunshineportlanm.com and now newmexico.gov.   The state websites do not upload our content, they only provide a link to the existing website.  Please run the ads as space permits.  Not only does it let the public know where to find these notices, it will also be instrumental in the upcoming legislative session to make legislators aware of how the newspaper industry has made these notices accessible and a clear message to any outside interests that have thoughts of creating new public notice websites that newspapers already have that covered.   No other medium can deliver public notices to the public in print and online like newspapers can.     Find the ads online at NMPA Public Notice Ads.  

Webinar Training

There are a series of upcoming webinar training sessions offered through Inland Press.   NMPA members are afforded special member prices through co-sponsorship of these convient training sessions.  Please take a look at the upcoming topics on the left hand side of this newsletter.   Clicking on the title will bring you to the registration page and provide additional information.  

Around the Industry

Impact, reach, and results. Three words marketers crave and three words newspapers deliver more effectively than any other advertising medium. A comprehensive advertising package of all things digital coupled with print. Yes print, that in-your- face broadsheet that offers advertisers a chance for impressive, bona fide visual impact. In fact, a recent NAA study revealed that "print users rate highly the utility of print advertising (44 percent) and that they usually notice it (41 percent)." Yes print, the platform Facebook and Twitter don't offer.

Last month, General Motors stopped advertising on Facebook, concluding that its paid ads don't have a big impact on consumers - 900 million users and Facebook can't deliver; what a pity. GM is no slouch when it comes to marketing research and investing ad dollars. Why pour $10 million into Zuckerberg's pocket when you can capitalize on social media's doctrine of sharing innovative and relevant content for free?  Read more 

Send updates of new hires, promotions, retirements, memorials, etc to  director@nmpress.org.  We will print the news in this section each month.