Gannett Blog continues First Amendment duty

As I have noted before, there are some bloggers in today's new age of journalism who are doing good First Amendment journalism. Case in point is the former USA Today reporter Jim Hopkins who publishes Gannett Blog. 

Hopkins started Gannett Blog anonymously while still employed at the USA Today, which is owned by Gannett, but has since come out from the shadows after he took a buyout in January of 2008. Since his departure, Hopkins has served as a watchdog over Gannett and provided employees with a place to air concerns, frustrations and sometimes mean-spirited remarks about their company. There is some debate about how much of the old journalistic standards Hopkins has left in the wake with his blog, as he allows people to post defaming remarks about individuals anonymously on his comments section, but there is no doubt that his is one of the best industry blogs online. 

Recently, Hopkins began scrutinizing former Gannett CEO Al Neuharth who founded the Freedom Forum after retiring from the company. By searching more than 9,000 pages of IRS tax returns filed by the Freedom Forum, a non-profit with a mission to serve journalism and the First Amendment, Hopkins reveals many questionable donations including money given to an adoption agency run by Neuharth's wife. 

From Gannett Blog:

Public documents show Freedom Forum in Washington, D.C., made $65,700 in donations to Home At Last between 2000 and 2007. This was when the private foundation should have been reining in its famously undisciplined spending. After all, administrators were about to tap the endowment, an investment fund that helps pay salaries and other expenses, in order to build a new home for the foundation's signature project -- a museum about news called the Newseum.

Freedom Forum disclosed the gifts in public Internal Revenue Service documents that do not explain why a journalism foundation would underwrite an adoption agency. The documents certainly don't disclose one likely reason: Fornes is the wife of Freedom Forum's multimillionaire founder, Al Neuharth (left).

The Home At Last grants are among hundreds of gifts Freedom Forum made in 2000-2007 to non-profits that seem to share little in common with the foundation's mission, a Gannett Blog review of more than 9,000 pages of IRS documents found. In other cases, money went to causes that appeared to benefit foundation officials more than the foundation itself. For example, Freedom Forum has given:

$15,000 to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, a leading political lobby.

$34,500 to the United States Equestrian Team in Gladstone, N.J., to promote competitive horseback riding events.

$23,000 to the 30-year-old Whale Museum, housed in a former Odd Fellows fraternal hall on an island near Seattle.

$35,500 to the Montessori Parent Organization in Indian Harbour Beach, Fla.

$46,500 to Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy in Melbourne, Fla.

$5 million to the University of Mississippi for a journalism center not honoring Gannett or the foundation -- but the foundation’s chairman and CEO, Charles Overby, an Ole Miss grad, and long-time Neuharth aide.

Blogging can include watchdog role

Although I have little hope the new media blogoshpere will produce much watchdog blogging on government and corporations, there are some trained professionals who are doing exactly that. Case in point is former USA Today business reporter Jim Hopkins' Gannett Blog. 

Hopkins has built a steady following by blogging on his former company and has published a number of investigative reports looking into one of the nation's largest newspaper company operations. His most recent report on Gannett CEO Craig Dubow's use of Gannett Foundation dollars  to create a scholarship fund at Western Carolina University in his own name is worthy of mention. Although the amount of money directed to the scholarship fund is mere pennies in the bucket of the Gannett Foundation, the reporting is one example among very few where a blogger has employed original watchdog reporting. 

From Gannett Blog:

Under pressure, Western Carolina University has now acknowledged that the Gannett Foundation quietly helped CEO Craig Dubow and his wife, Denise, establish a scholarship in their name -- with no credit to Gannett, and off-limits to most employees' children.

The university, in Cullowhee, N.C., disclosed the foundation's role in the Craig A. and Denise W. Dubow Endowed Scholarship Fund yesterday, only after I filed an open-records request last week for any public documents that could explain the whereabouts of $40,000 Dubow funneled to WCU in 2007 and 2006.

The gifts were authorized under a benefit available only to Dubow (left) and a handful of other highly-paid current and former executives, several of whom have used foundation money to fund scholarships in their names, too. Dubow, 54, was paid $7.5 million in cash and stock last year. Much of that stock is now worthless; shares have plunged 79% from a year ago.

There's nothing illegal here. But Dubow's actions, combined with the foundation's refusal to fully disclose them, show how brazenly Gannett pampers the top brass -- even as it slashed thousands of jobs, froze the pension plan, and imposed other harsh steps to restore prosperity. Only yesterday, Dubow warned: "Next year will continue to be difficult."