Thursday, March 27, 2008

Major upheaval at Republic - changes name and registers as a political committee


In a shocking move, the Arizona Republic has been renamed to the "Goddard Gazette" and has registered as a political committee. In an off the record interview, Republic editor Randy Lovely said the changes were necessary in order to fend off the escalating barrage of blogger complaints that the paper was nothing more than a propaganda wing for the Democrats:
With the increasing number of blog posts targeting us, and the complaints starting to roll in to elections authorities, we had to do something. Since we've been incrementally increasing our coverage of Goddard (we ran two more articles on him just yesterday), it made sense to file as a campaign committee for him. It was either that or file as a campaign committee for Napolitano, or as a generic Democrat organization. We felt that since the Republic now mainly focuses on local issues, and we're a forward thinking newspaper, it made the most sense to go with Goddard. We've had a great six years covering Valley politics with Napolitano as governor, and we'd like to see that continue with Goddard. Napolitano will be in D.C. most of the time as U.S. Senator, so she won't be as advantageous to us anymore. In the end, we settled on "Goddard Gazette" because it was an easy way to get his name in the paper EVERY day!

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