Capitol Times Interview

The Capitol Times interviewed me for its "Up Close" profile.  It was a fun interview and reporter Matthew Bunk did a great job.  Unfortunately, the pictures are an accurate reflection of how I actually look. 

Here's the text of the interview.

"Patterson is a law student, a former Republican state legislator, a lobbyist and one of Arizona’s most vehement critics of the newspaper industry. His blog, Espresso Pundit, has attracted a large base of readers by providing biting commentary on everything from newspaper bias to the controversy surrounding Arizona’s 9/11 Memorial.

He has appeared as a guest on “Fox News” and has developed a network of sources to rival any professional journalist at the Capitol. He has critics, too, including several newspaper executives and reporters who maintain that many bloggers lack the necessary training to cover the news and that Patterson’s own political views often show up in his writing.

Last week, Patterson sat down with the Arizona Capitol Times to discuss how he got started blogging, why he believes blogs are more informative than newspapers, and why he seems so gleeful that the newspaper industry is struggling.

Tell me how you got started blogging and where you see Espresso Pundit going in the next few years.

I got started because it was cheaper than therapy. I was frustrated about a lot of issues, a lot of coverage, and instead of e-mailing my friends I’d finally just put it on a Web site. I thought maybe 10 or 15 people would pay attention to it — you know, my mom, my friend Stan Barnes, David Schweikert — and eventually people started e-mailing it to each other and then pretty soon you’ve got 1,000 people a day who take a look at it. It’s been a great experience.

Was there a particular newspaper story (or stories) that riled you up and led to your venture with Espresso Pundit?

If you look at my first post it’s about Mainstream Arizona. That’s an organization that was launched to elect moderates to the Legislature. The Republic gave them a lot of fanfare when they started, but then Mainstream got into a lot of trouble, paid a fine and then folded. And The Republic didn’t cover that issue at all. It would have been a great story. Grant Woods and Jack Jewett were founders and Lattie Coor was active, so it was a who’s who of the establishment. It would have been a great book, but The Republic didn’t even bother with a follow up.

For anyone involved in Arizona politics, you almost have to at least know about the Espresso Pundit — even if they’re not an avid reader. But you also run another Web site, Espresso Straight, which has been down lately. Tell me a little bit about that.

That was an experiment that didn’t make it. Espresso Straight was kind of a tangent of Espresso Pundit and then I just closed it down. The theory behind it was, of course, that I could have newsmakers themselves actually — instead of sending out news releases and hoping to have them covered — I could have them do it. Just post directly to it. But it turns out that a lot of what people really want is my analysis. They don’t necessarily just want to know what Congressman Flake or Congressman Shadegg are doing on their own press releases, they want analysis. Espresso Pundit became much more popular, and Espresso Straight didn’t get very popular.

Newspapers struggle with that as well — getting long press releases and statements. Newspapers open themselves up to criticism when they try to whittle down a statement to get something newsworthy, concise and thoughtful. The accusation I hear most often is that newspapers only provide half the story. I am critical of newspapers that don’t provide the correct context. But there has to be a balance — and it sounds like you’ve seen and experienced the struggle to achieve that.

Reporters are oftentimes new to politics. And politics is exceptionally complex. It has a very rich history. It is complex in how it actually works. So, I’m sympathetic because it’s like me trying to follow cricket. I could follow the rules of cricket and learn about cricket, and do my best to try to write about cricket as well. But a real cricket fan will know immediately that I know nothing about cricket. And the same thing is true when you have somebody who’s been doing the Glendale police beat and they end up at the Capitol. And they say ‘Wow, there’s lobbyists here, and there’s strike-everything amendments here, and there’s bills that don’t get a hearings — oh, this is just terrible.’ It’s because they have no fundamental understanding of the process. And it’s very difficult to fix that other than to just be in the process for 20 years.

You are a former legislator and someone who’s very connected to the politics at the Capitol, and you’re a lobbyist as well …

I represent the Foundation for Blind Children. And I’m the director of the Arizona Competitive Power Alliance. And so I don’t blog, for example, on energy issues. So, it’s very difficult to find out what I do from the blog because I try not to use the blog to promote issues on which I would then go and lobby. For example, I cover the Corporation Commission extensively when I work, but it’s very rare that I write about Corporation Commission coverage.

How does all that inside knowledge that you gather play into the way you’re able to reach readers through the blog, as someone who has this insider’s view.

The irony of the blogosphere’s development nationally is that bloggers are more qualified than journalists. And journalists like to say that they’re much more qualified because they’re professionals and bloggers are amateurs. But the bloggers are professionals in the industry they are covering. So a lot of the national blogs, for example, are written by attorneys, they’re written by economists. The Murphy and Posner blog (Becker and Posner, www.becker-posner-blog.com), for example, is written by a Nobel laureate and a federal appeals court judge. Well, if you’re going to talk about economics and the law, you’re never going to get somebody who knows more than those guys. And so, on my niche — you know, I know nothing about basketball — but on my niche of Arizona politics, I know more than just about any of the professional reporters. And that’s how the blogosphere has worked.

The blogs that I read are exactly as you described, but many of them are not written by experts in their field — they’re just a notebook dump on whatever topic the blogger was thinking about that day. Would you agree that not all blogs are as helpful as the ones you mentioned.

There’s a million blogs out there. And the beauty of the blogosphere is it’s the ultimate democracy. The blogs that are badly written and have poor analysis have 10 readers. And the blogs that are really, really good gradually get a huge following in their area. And some of them are big enough … that they go national. Arizona has been wonderful, the readers have really embraced Espresso Pundit and apparently believe that the analysis is at least worth paying attention to.

Is Espresso Pundit a one-man show, or is there a support staff?

It’s just me. It is 100 percent me.

I see you at all these events, and you clearly have other things that occupy your time. How do you do it?

I’m going to law school, and I work full time. I mainly blog in the evenings. I go to a lot of events, but there are events that I would go to for work anyway. It really is an obsession. I enjoy it. The first thing I do in the morning is read the paper and decide to blog on an issue I saw yesterday or that I saw in the paper. And I get hundreds of e-mails a day, so I tend to blog throughout the day as well. I’ve actually got a network of a lot of sources now. A lot of people, especially in the newspapers, who will e-mail me about what’s going on at The Republic, for example, or the Tribune, for example. So, The Republic and the Tribune become an exclusive beat because they won’t cover each other. There’s a lot of interest in what the newspapers are doing that the newspapers generally won’t disclose themselves. So that’s a beat I have alone. It’s wonderful.

Where are you going to law school, and how will that help you achieve your ultimate career goals?

I'm in my final year at ASU Law School. I'm a CPA as well, so my goal is to litigate rate cases before the Arizona Corporation Commission. I would also like to practice election law; maybe I can grow up to be the Republican version of Chuck Blanchard.

It sounds like you’ve been able to attract plenty of readers by writing about some of the trends in the newspaper industry and, more specifically, writing critically about the way papers in this market conduct business. Do you think that newspapers are misunderstanding the interest among readers in some of these topics, or are they incapable of reporting it the way they should?

They are, for a couple of reasons. One, they used to do a reader advocate … and that person is supposed to be critical of the newspaper’s coverage actually. But that person was a lifer — you know, they worked there. It’s difficult to take the guy who’s in the cubicle next to you and say ‘Oh, you really botched that story.’ But I can do that. I can stand up and say ‘Look this is completely biased, if you call Jon Kyl an ultra-conservative. Or if you talk about so-called school choice. Or if you pick on somebody you say is under investigation and we find out later that they’re not under investigation. Or if you write that Jim Kolbe, for example, was part of a huge investigation, but when it’s dropped, there’s no coverage of that. There’s nobody on the reader advocate side who will stand up and say ‘Look, we botched this. We put it A1 under the fold that he was under investigation, and we put on B17 that the investigation was dropped.’ And I’m the guy who does that, and a lot of people care about that.

You’re often very critical of newspapers, to the point that some people think you believe newspapers do more harm than good. But I’m not sure that’s what you’re saying here. What’s your position on that — should newspapers just go away, or is there a fundamental restructuring that’s needed?

That’s the question I get the most and the question I struggle with the most and usually it’s called ‘Why the glee. Why when you report on the economic downfall of the industry do you seem so happy about it. And I wonder myself, would the world be better off if the regular corporate giant newspaper were gone. And I think it probably would be. It wouldn’t have been necessarily in the 1950s ’60s and ’70s but now there are so many alternatives that corporate media has largely run its course. Journalists oftentimes are sometimes like drivers. You can meet people at church and they’re wonderful, but as soon as they get into their cars they become a monster. And journalists — every journalist I meet is almost without exception a wonderful person. But when you get them in that environment, it changes people.

The way I look at it, newspapers make it their goal to make sure that government doesn’t veer too far from the will of the people. They try to be a watchdog, whether they’re successful at that or not. And you’re viewing bloggers as a check and balance on the check and balance.

Yeah, absolutely. Newspapers have a couple roles, they have a gatekeeper role and they are a monopoly. So newspapers, in addition to letting you see what’s going on — which is how journalists tend to perceive it — they also choose what you don’t see. They choose a lot of stories there that happen at the Capitol and they simply won’t report on. In the old days they could get away with that. If you had a big story and you wanted to get out you had to walk down to the pressroom. And I was the Senate press guy when I was chief of staff for the Senate — I handled press for the Republicans — and you’d walk downstairs and you’d say ‘Hey, here’s a big story’ and (the reporters) would just blow you off, and that was a power, that was a gate-keeping. I’ll give you an example, the 9/11 Memorial that Arizona has is sponsored by The Arizona Republic. And, as we know now, it had all the sayings on it that were critical of the United States government. That story was well known in the Capitol. People saw it, they were at the dedication, you could go to it, etc. But nobody reported it. So I put it in Espresso Pundit. And eventually the Tribune did a little bitty thing saying I had put it in the Espresso Pundit. Drudge linked to the Tribune, and since Drudge has about 10 times the readership of The New York Times, it was immediately national. So, I was on “Fox News” at 4:30 the following morning. That story was national before it was local. And the reason was that The Republic and the Tribune and the (Arizona Daily) Star decided it wasn’t going to be a story, and now we have the ability to bypass them and go national. There are a lot of stories that the corporate papers don’t think should be stories and aren’t and the blogosphere has changed that. So, bloggers are definitely a check and balance on the media.

I have to ask you this: A couple of weeks ago, you wrote on your blog that the local media had written a slew of stories that focused on Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas spending the county’s money on informational material that featured his photo and a letter written by himself, and you said the media totally ignored the fact that Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall had also spent a large amount of money on similar material. Well, we wrote that story and included Barbara LaWall. Did you miss that?

That’s the disadvantage of you having your Web site behind a subscription wall. It doesn’t show up on Google Alerts, and so when I searched Barbara LaWall in Google Alerts to do my research on that, which is about the only way to do it, you guys don’t come up. So, the Capitol Times, which is a niche paper, and I think is a wonderful paper, but what’s your circulation now 2,300 papers? And based on that I went in and subscribed last week, just to see. I had subscribed previously, but now I get most of them online and you’re absolutely right, I just missed it. Based on the fact that you guys hide it, you have to pay to get it, that’s the disadvantage of paid circulation."

Comments

[nick]

Pithy piece.

[Special Agent Johnny Utah]

You're better looking than that picture.

[todd]

One advantage bloggers have over newspapers is that instead of having to retract stories one can simply delete them.

[Joe G.]

Todd,

Is that really such a great difference? Once an article is read, it's read. News organs, whether large or small, that do not actively acknowledge their mistakes put their credibility at stake.

I'd argue that newspapers have acted exactly like bloggers, in that they often don't retract stories, but simply ignore them.

[todd]

Joe,
I am not a fan of MSM and agree that one of the greatest sins of the MSM is the things that simply don't get covered. Bloggers offer a valuable service in critiquing the MSM, but if one wants to hold blogs as being more accurate than the MSM then I believe it is important to demonstrate that in being forthcoming about errors.