Every once in a while, a news story appears with such an eye-popping news value it seems unbelievable. I think this is one of those stories.
Air Canada flight attendant helped land plane
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) - An Air Canada co-pilot having a mental breakdown had to be forcibly removed from the cockpit, restrained and sedated, and a stewardess with flying skills helped the pilot safely make an emergency landing, an Irish investigation concluded Wednesday.
The report by the Irish Air Accident Investigation Unit into an incident in January applauded the decision-making of the pilot and the cockpit skills of the flight attendant, who stepped into the co-pilot's seat for the emergency diversion to Shannon Airport in western Ireland.
None of the 146 passengers or other nine crew members on board the Boeing 767 bound from Toronto to London was injured after the 58-year-old co-pilot had to be removed by attendants and sedated by two doctors on board.
The report did not identify any of the Air Canada crew by name. Nor did it specify the psychiatric diagnosis for the co-pilot, who was hospitalized for 11 days in Irish mental wards before being flown by air ambulance back to Canada.
It said the co-pilot was a licensed veteran with more than 6,500 hours' flying time, about half on board Boeing 767s, and had recently passed a medical examination.
But it said the pilot noticed immediately that his co-pilot was not in good professional shape on the day of the flight, arriving late to the cockpit after all the safety checks and paperwork had been completed. He reported that the co-pilot's behavior worsened once they were airborne, and the co-pilot advised him to take a lengthy break for naps and a meal.
As the aircraft reached the middle of the Atlantic, the report said, the co-pilot began talking in a ``rambling and disjointed'' manner, took another nap, and then refused to buckle his seat belt or observe other safety procedures when he returned to the cockpit.
The pilot concluded that his colleague was now so ``belligerent and uncooperative'' that he couldn't do his job.
The report said the pilot summoned several flight attendants to remove the co-pilot from the cockpit, and one flight attendant suffered an injured wrist in the struggle. Doctors from Britain and Canada on board determined that the co-pilot was confused and disoriented.
The report did not mention how the co-pilot was restrained. Departing passengers at the time said his arms and legs had been tied up to keep him under control.
The pilot then asked flight attendants to find out if any passenger was a qualified pilot. When none was found, one stewardess admitted she held a current commercial pilot's license but said her license for reading cockpit instruments had expired.
``The flight attendant provided useful assistance to the commander, who remarked in a statement to the investigation that she was `not out of place' while occupying the right-hand seat,'' the report said.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Web Journalists Emerge, Plan to Organize
Here's something very intriguing to think about. The original is at http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/18/business/18voice.php
A new type of journalism outlet is gaining prominence in some cities. Small, non-profit sites run by professional journalists are breaking big stories.
Web journalists' bark grows louder
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
SAN DIEGO: Over the last two years, some of this city's darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, and misleading crime statistics.
Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego's television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown's glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.
As American newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.
Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.
Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.
The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.
"Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat," said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. "I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, 'This is the future of journalism.' "
That is a subject of hot debate among people who closely follow the newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.
And so financially, VoiceofSan Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.
New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks into problems around the world. A similar group, the Center for Investigative Reporting, dates back three decades.
But some experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.
"These are some of the big questions about the future of the business," said Robert Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Nonprofit news online "has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper."
The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many, and they have a complex relationship with traditional media. The say that the deterioration of those media has created an opening for new sources of news, as well as a surplus of unemployed journalists for them to hire.
"No one here welcomes the decline of newspapers," said Andrew Donohue, one of two executive editors at VoiceofSanDiego. "We can't be the main news source for this city, not for the foreseeable future. We only have 11 people."
Those people are almost all young, some of them refugees from older media. The executive editors, Donohue, 30, and Scott Lewis, 32, each had a few years of experience at small papers before abandoning newsprint. So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service.
The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota; and the St. Louis Beacon in Missouri, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.
VoiceofSanDiego's site looks much like any newspaper's, frequently updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics: government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and, through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.
But it is, of necessity, thin — strictly local, selective in what it covers and with none of the wire service articles that plump up most news sites.
VoiceofSanDiego grew out of a string of spectacular municipal scandals. City councilmen took bribes from a strip club owner, a mishandled pension fund drove the city to the brink of bankruptcy and city officials illegally covered up the crisis, to name a few.
A semiretired local businessman, Buzz Woolley, watched the parade of revelations, fraud charges and criminal convictions, seething with frustration. He was particularly incensed that the pension debacle had developed over several years, more or less in plain sight, but had received little news coverage.
"I kept thinking, 'Who's paying attention?' " Woolley recalled. "Why don't we hear about this stuff before it becomes a disaster?' "
In 2004, his conversations with a veteran columnist, Neil Morgan, who had been fired by The Union-Tribune, led to the creation of VoiceofSanDiego, with Woolley as president, chief executive and, at first, chief financial backer.
Most of this new breed of news sites have a whiff of scruffy insurgency, but MinnPost, based in Minneapolis, resembles the middle-age establishment. Its founder and chief executive, Joel Kramer, has been the editor and publisher of The Star Tribune, of Minneapolis, and its top editors are refugees from that paper or its rival, The Pioneer Press in St. Paul.
MinnPost is rich compared with its peers — with a $1.5 million bankroll from Kramer and several others when it started last year, and a $1.3 million annual budget — and it has been more aggressive about selling ads and getting readers to donate.
The full-time editors and reporters earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, Kramer said — a living wage, but less than they would make at the competing papers. MinnPost has just five full-time employees, but it uses more than 40 paid freelance contributors, allowing it to do frequent reporting on areas like the arts and sports.
If MinnPost is the establishment, The New Haven Independent is a guerrilla team. It has no office, and holds its meetings in a coffee shop. The founder and editor, Paul Bass, who spent most of his career at an alternative weekly, works from home or, occasionally, borrows a desk at a local Spanish-language newspaper.
In addition to state and city affairs, The Independent covers small-bore local news, lately doing a series of articles on people who face the loss of their homes to foreclosure.
With a budget of just $200,000, it has a small staff — some are paid less than $30,000 — and a small corps of freelancers and volunteer contributors. It does not sell ads, which Bass says would be impractical.
"There's room for a whole range of approaches, and we're living proof that you can do meaningful journalism very cheaply," Bass said.
Crosscut.com, a local news site in Seattle, does reporting and commentary of its own, but also aggregates articles from other news sources. It began last year as a business, but is changing to nonprofit status.
VoiceofSanDiego took yet another approach, hiring a crew of young, hungry, full-time journalists, paying them salaries comparable to what they would make at large newspapers and relying less on freelancers. Donohue and Lewis earned $60,000 to $70,000 last year, according to the VoiceofSan Diego IRS filings.
On a budget under $800,000 this year — almost $200,000 more than last year — everyone does double duty. Lewis writes a political column, and Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing and Woolley says he has become convinced that the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.
"Information is now a public service as much as it's a commodity," he said. "It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It's one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn't doing it very well."
A new type of journalism outlet is gaining prominence in some cities. Small, non-profit sites run by professional journalists are breaking big stories.
Web journalists' bark grows louder
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
SAN DIEGO: Over the last two years, some of this city's darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, and misleading crime statistics.
Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego's television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown's glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.
As American newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.
Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.
Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.
The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.
"Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat," said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. "I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, 'This is the future of journalism.' "
That is a subject of hot debate among people who closely follow the newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.
And so financially, VoiceofSan Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.
New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks into problems around the world. A similar group, the Center for Investigative Reporting, dates back three decades.
But some experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.
"These are some of the big questions about the future of the business," said Robert Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Nonprofit news online "has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper."
The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many, and they have a complex relationship with traditional media. The say that the deterioration of those media has created an opening for new sources of news, as well as a surplus of unemployed journalists for them to hire.
"No one here welcomes the decline of newspapers," said Andrew Donohue, one of two executive editors at VoiceofSanDiego. "We can't be the main news source for this city, not for the foreseeable future. We only have 11 people."
Those people are almost all young, some of them refugees from older media. The executive editors, Donohue, 30, and Scott Lewis, 32, each had a few years of experience at small papers before abandoning newsprint. So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service.
The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota; and the St. Louis Beacon in Missouri, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.
VoiceofSanDiego's site looks much like any newspaper's, frequently updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics: government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and, through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.
But it is, of necessity, thin — strictly local, selective in what it covers and with none of the wire service articles that plump up most news sites.
VoiceofSanDiego grew out of a string of spectacular municipal scandals. City councilmen took bribes from a strip club owner, a mishandled pension fund drove the city to the brink of bankruptcy and city officials illegally covered up the crisis, to name a few.
A semiretired local businessman, Buzz Woolley, watched the parade of revelations, fraud charges and criminal convictions, seething with frustration. He was particularly incensed that the pension debacle had developed over several years, more or less in plain sight, but had received little news coverage.
"I kept thinking, 'Who's paying attention?' " Woolley recalled. "Why don't we hear about this stuff before it becomes a disaster?' "
In 2004, his conversations with a veteran columnist, Neil Morgan, who had been fired by The Union-Tribune, led to the creation of VoiceofSanDiego, with Woolley as president, chief executive and, at first, chief financial backer.
Most of this new breed of news sites have a whiff of scruffy insurgency, but MinnPost, based in Minneapolis, resembles the middle-age establishment. Its founder and chief executive, Joel Kramer, has been the editor and publisher of The Star Tribune, of Minneapolis, and its top editors are refugees from that paper or its rival, The Pioneer Press in St. Paul.
MinnPost is rich compared with its peers — with a $1.5 million bankroll from Kramer and several others when it started last year, and a $1.3 million annual budget — and it has been more aggressive about selling ads and getting readers to donate.
The full-time editors and reporters earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, Kramer said — a living wage, but less than they would make at the competing papers. MinnPost has just five full-time employees, but it uses more than 40 paid freelance contributors, allowing it to do frequent reporting on areas like the arts and sports.
If MinnPost is the establishment, The New Haven Independent is a guerrilla team. It has no office, and holds its meetings in a coffee shop. The founder and editor, Paul Bass, who spent most of his career at an alternative weekly, works from home or, occasionally, borrows a desk at a local Spanish-language newspaper.
In addition to state and city affairs, The Independent covers small-bore local news, lately doing a series of articles on people who face the loss of their homes to foreclosure.
With a budget of just $200,000, it has a small staff — some are paid less than $30,000 — and a small corps of freelancers and volunteer contributors. It does not sell ads, which Bass says would be impractical.
"There's room for a whole range of approaches, and we're living proof that you can do meaningful journalism very cheaply," Bass said.
Crosscut.com, a local news site in Seattle, does reporting and commentary of its own, but also aggregates articles from other news sources. It began last year as a business, but is changing to nonprofit status.
VoiceofSanDiego took yet another approach, hiring a crew of young, hungry, full-time journalists, paying them salaries comparable to what they would make at large newspapers and relying less on freelancers. Donohue and Lewis earned $60,000 to $70,000 last year, according to the VoiceofSan Diego IRS filings.
On a budget under $800,000 this year — almost $200,000 more than last year — everyone does double duty. Lewis writes a political column, and Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing and Woolley says he has become convinced that the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.
"Information is now a public service as much as it's a commodity," he said. "It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It's one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn't doing it very well."
No Quiz Monday
Because you have two articles due Monday, November 24, there will be no quiz that night.
One from your beat and one sports story.
One from your beat and one sports story.
For Huckabee, a Big 'Oops'
From WorldMagBlog:
How embarrassing
Written by Kristin Chapman
It seems Mike Huckabee needed a better proofreader for his recently released book, Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That’s Bringing Common Sense Back to America.
After TIME published an article earlier this week that included a few excerpts from the book, some observant readers were quick to point out a rather glaring error in one of the passages.
See if you, too, can catch the mistake: “I lamented that so many people of faith had moved from being prophetic voices — like Naaman, confronting King David in his sin and saying, ‘Thou art the man!’ — to being voices of patronage, and saying to those in power, ‘You da’ man!’”
Monday, November 17, 2008
Rupert Murdoch Optimistic on Future of Newspapers
Here is a strong statement on the future of newspapers from one of the publishing world's business geniuses. This is an excerpt. To read the entire article, click here.
Murdoch to 'Cynics': Newspapers Will Survive
SYDNEY Global media magnate Rupert Murdoch (pictured) says doomsayers who are predicting the Internet will kill off newspapers are "misguided cynics" who fail to grasp that the online world is potentially a huge new market of information-hungry consumers.
Newspaper companies in the United States and elsewhere are facing fundamental changes to their businesses as more people get their news from the Internet and other sources, and advertisers follow the market away from the paper-and-ink format.
Murdoch, the Australian-born chairman and chief executive of News Corp., said in a speech broadcast Sunday titled "The Future of Newspapers: Moving Beyond Dead Trees" that the Internet offered opportunities as well as challenges and that newspapers would always be around in some form or other.
"Too many journalists seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise," Murdoch said in a speech, recorded in the United States and relayed nationally by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. It was the latest in an annual ABC series of lectures by a prominent Australian.
"Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights" in the 21st century, Murdoch said.
Post-Election Newspaper Sales Boom
Quite a few missed the quiz question for this past week about the election's effect on newspaper circulation. It was mentioned briefly in an earlier blog post--here is a little more.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Newsstands from Seattle to New York quickly sold out of Wednesday's papers declaring Barack Obama the nation's first black president as some jubilant customers picked up two, three or even 30 copies as keepsakes.
Newspapers detailing Barack Obama's historic presidential win are being gobbled up as keepsakes.
The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune in Obama's hometown were among papers that restarted their printing presses to produce hundreds of thousands of additional copies across the country.
Entrepreneurs were seeking as much as $600 for the Times on eBay Wednesday.
"Own a piece of history," Walter Elliott said as he hawked 90 copies of The Sun from a Baltimore street corner.
Some papers devoted their entire front pages to a single photo of Obama -- in the San Francisco Chronicle's case, overlaid with "OBAMA" in enormous type and a snippet from his acceptance speech: "Change has come to America." USA Today declared, "America makes history."
The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, offered high-quality reprints of the front page for $54.95. Below the headline "Change Has Come," a close-up of Obama covers three-fourths of the page.
John Penley, a white man who recalled drinking out of the "wrong" water fountain as a kid in North Carolina, searched New York's Lower East Side on Wednesday for papers to mark an event he never dreamed possible in his lifetime.
"There was one copy left at the bodega around the corner, and people were actually fighting for it," said Penley, a retired photojournalist. "I can't find a copy of any paper anywhere."
At New York's Port Authority bus terminal, Ralston Montaque grabbed 30 copies of the Times for family and friends.
"Everybody has to read (the news), brother," he said.
Say what you want about the Internet replacing printed newspapers, but saving a copy of a Web page on a disk isn't the same.
"What it really shows is there's a unique value to print," said Steve Hills, The Washington Post's president and general manager. "It's the ability to look at the whole thing and have a piece of history in your hands."
A newsstand in Evanston, Illinois, sold 100 copies of the Times in 10 minutes -- even as the major local papers, the Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, rushed to print hundreds of thousands of extra copies.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Newsstands from Seattle to New York quickly sold out of Wednesday's papers declaring Barack Obama the nation's first black president as some jubilant customers picked up two, three or even 30 copies as keepsakes.
Newspapers detailing Barack Obama's historic presidential win are being gobbled up as keepsakes.
The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune in Obama's hometown were among papers that restarted their printing presses to produce hundreds of thousands of additional copies across the country.
Entrepreneurs were seeking as much as $600 for the Times on eBay Wednesday.
"Own a piece of history," Walter Elliott said as he hawked 90 copies of The Sun from a Baltimore street corner.
Some papers devoted their entire front pages to a single photo of Obama -- in the San Francisco Chronicle's case, overlaid with "OBAMA" in enormous type and a snippet from his acceptance speech: "Change has come to America." USA Today declared, "America makes history."
The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, offered high-quality reprints of the front page for $54.95. Below the headline "Change Has Come," a close-up of Obama covers three-fourths of the page.
John Penley, a white man who recalled drinking out of the "wrong" water fountain as a kid in North Carolina, searched New York's Lower East Side on Wednesday for papers to mark an event he never dreamed possible in his lifetime.
"There was one copy left at the bodega around the corner, and people were actually fighting for it," said Penley, a retired photojournalist. "I can't find a copy of any paper anywhere."
At New York's Port Authority bus terminal, Ralston Montaque grabbed 30 copies of the Times for family and friends.
"Everybody has to read (the news), brother," he said.
Say what you want about the Internet replacing printed newspapers, but saving a copy of a Web page on a disk isn't the same.
"What it really shows is there's a unique value to print," said Steve Hills, The Washington Post's president and general manager. "It's the ability to look at the whole thing and have a piece of history in your hands."
A newsstand in Evanston, Illinois, sold 100 copies of the Times in 10 minutes -- even as the major local papers, the Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, rushed to print hundreds of thousands of extra copies.
Lutheran Publisher to Close Stores, Cut Staff
Augsburg Fortress to close stores, cut staff
Augsburg Fortress—the Minneapolis-based publishing arm of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—is closing stores and shifting its publishing emphasis as part of significant changes to its operations. The move was based on a year of market analysis and business research, the publisher said.
Augsburg Fortress will close nine bookstores by April 30, 2009, company officials said. A store at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn., which is not owned by Augsburg Fortress, will continue to rent space there and Augsburg's Canadian bookstores will remain open.
Additionally, Augsburg Fortress will no longer accept or sell new titles in its consumer-oriented book line, although it will continue to sell stocks on hand. Beth Lewis, president and CEO, said 55 positions will also be eliminated from Augsburg's 242-strong staff.
Unanimously approved by the board of trustees Oct. 24-25, the changes will enable Augsburg Fortress to focus its ministry on its group-use materials for congregations as well as textbooks and monographs for higher education, Lewis said.
"Augsburg Fortress is undergoing important strategic changes to focus our ministry and business—and some are very painful on a personal level as we say goodbye to wonderful colleagues," Lewis said. "We are confident that, while difficult, these changes are necessary and will enable Augsburg Fortress to be a strong and responsive organization for the future."
Augsburg Fortress—the Minneapolis-based publishing arm of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—is closing stores and shifting its publishing emphasis as part of significant changes to its operations. The move was based on a year of market analysis and business research, the publisher said.
Augsburg Fortress will close nine bookstores by April 30, 2009, company officials said. A store at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn., which is not owned by Augsburg Fortress, will continue to rent space there and Augsburg's Canadian bookstores will remain open.
Additionally, Augsburg Fortress will no longer accept or sell new titles in its consumer-oriented book line, although it will continue to sell stocks on hand. Beth Lewis, president and CEO, said 55 positions will also be eliminated from Augsburg's 242-strong staff.
Unanimously approved by the board of trustees Oct. 24-25, the changes will enable Augsburg Fortress to focus its ministry on its group-use materials for congregations as well as textbooks and monographs for higher education, Lewis said.
"Augsburg Fortress is undergoing important strategic changes to focus our ministry and business—and some are very painful on a personal level as we say goodbye to wonderful colleagues," Lewis said. "We are confident that, while difficult, these changes are necessary and will enable Augsburg Fortress to be a strong and responsive organization for the future."
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
