After roaming the halls of the Montana legislature for more than 20 years as a professional lobbyist, George Ochenski leaves it all behind to focus on his career as a political analyst for Missoula's alt-weekly. Ochenski announced the decision in his latest column, in which he admits that his dual role created problems. "As a writer, the obvious conflicts between what I wanted to be able to convey and the sometimes not-so-good reactions those stories elicited from one party or another within the Capitol, certainly had the potential to create problems for a lobbyist trying to get legislation passed or funded," he writes. NOTE TO READERS: Last week, based on an inaccurate report in The Billings Outpost (see second item), AAN News briefly reported that Ochenski had decided to quit writing.
This morning, the bloggers at Gawker.com turned their focus away from New York long enough to post a calendar item from The Missoula Independent. This is the sentence that Gawker found "disturbing": "Bowling and karaoke go together like Israeli bombing and U.S. bombs during Solid Sound karaoke at Westside Lanes."
responds that Gawker missed the point: "that bowling and karaoke don't go particularly well together at all."Spurred by the lobbying effort of Missoula Independent publisher Matt Gibson, a bill extending legal-notice advertising to free-circulation newspapers passed the Montana state legislature yesterday. The bill must now be signed by Governor Brian Schweitzer to become law. Ironically, Gibson's primary opposition was the Montana Newspaper Association, for which he serves as a member of the board of directors. According to Gibson, a former member of the AAN Board, "AAN publishers need to be alerted to the practical reality that a periodical mailing permit, as commonly required in legal notice statutes, accomplishes very little to protect the people’s right to know. It does not ensure minimum reach or distribution, nor does it require independent verification of circulation. It's superfluous, and legislators can be convinced to change to law."
The Missoula Independent has hired alt-weekly veteran Brad Tyer as its new editor. Tyer, a native of Houston, takes over from Interim Editor David Madison, who will become the paper’s Flathead Bureau Chief in Kalispell, Mont. Tyer was previously editor of the Texas Observer and before that a staff reporter at the Houston Press.
A couple of weeks ago Lee Enterprise's daily paper in Missoula changed the publication day of its weekend section and started to distribute it as a free, stand-alone paper. In a publisher's note, Missoula Independent's Matt Gibson says the move is "a transparent attempt by the Missoulian to impede the growth" of his paper, and calls it unethical, anti-competitive and "probably illegal". He promises that Lee is "going to find themselves in a fight so fierce and unrelenting, they’ll wish they’d picked on somebody their own size."
