Not too much on the news front today, but the first half of Caliente is full of local content...just close it when you get to the Cowboys and Aliens feature and you should be fine. The real question is if there will be another giraffe story tomorrow. They're on quite a run with those.

Section A: 6 Star articles; 22 non-Star pieces
Sports: 4 Star articles; 3 non-Star
Caliente: 10 Star articles; 5 non-Star

Today's score (not including briefs, notes, editorials or the other non-bylined pieces):

A: Star bylines, 12; Non-Star bylines, 19
Sports: Star bylines, 4; Non-Star bylines, 1

Section A - 8 Arizona Daily Star bylines; 17 non-Star bylines.
Sports - Star, 3; Not the Star, 6.

Part of a new series, in which we look at the day's Arizona Daily Star and see how many articles are written by Arizona Daily Star staffers following the massive layoffs last week:

Section A: 5, not counting editorials, briefs, notes, an unsigned retrospective piece and a chart, but including a "For the Arizona Daily Star"; zero Star bylines in the second A section from A11 to A16.
Sports Extra: 2 from Bruce Pascoe, one of which is the Arizona at 100 feature.

Performance artist Laura Milkins is walking from her home in Tucson, Arizona to her Mom's home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And she's half-through her journey! What's more, she has a 24-hour live streaming of her walk that you can watch, too. She graciously chatted with me on her Bluetooth headset while she was mid-stride in small-town Kansas.

How are you feeling?

My feet hurt; I'm getting a new blister. That’s fine, but I thought I’d be done with blisters. That's just not true. On a humid day, wearing two pairs of wicking socks, I have a feeling that they’re pretty damp and I'm getting new blisters.

Where are you? How many miles have you walked so far?

I'm on country road, outside Salinas, Kansas. I have traveled over 1,000 miles, and have 900 or so to go. The walk is 2,000 miles total.

What inspired this project?

Other than going home, it’s really about community. I feel like we have a lot of ways of being connected to each other, but people are starting to be afraid of change and are not opening their hearts to the people around them. And yes there are bad people out there, but most people are good. And most of the creeps are not gonna talk to some girl with a webcam on her head. Everyone has a good story. I've been enjoying getting to know people. Our culture is to stay in your home; some of us don’t even get to know our neighbors. We have to reach out to those around us and ask for help. I'm finding that community is out there. There's nothing wrong with electronic social connection; if it can bring you together, good; if you’re on Facebook and not hanging out with friends, then you should probably be talking to your neighbor instead.

Can you elaborate on the equipment you use/wear as you're walking?

I have a MacBook Air laptop suspended, a webcam velcroed to my head, a Novacell battery plugged into the Mac, and a G4 HotSpot from Verizon to give me internet. Most of the time, the livefeed works; it tends to cut out on and off, but it’s worked remarkably well.

Are there some days when you just want to shut the camera off?

I do mute it. Today I was having a personal conversation with a good friend of mine; I mute it, but I don’t turn it off, so you can still see the things I see, but not everything. You don’t want a stranger to know about your friend's personal life, so I end up muting it. I try to have it on 24-hours a day. I don’t care about my privacy, but I do care about other people's privacy. Though I do get tired of being a public spectacle; I look like a Cyborg.

I read that you stay with host families each night. Are those pre-arranged or do you make friends along the way that you stay with?

It's all old-school social networking. My host called around town and found somebody; everybody knows somebody in these small towns. If I arrive into town and don’t have somebody, it just works out. Sometimes my Mom will call a church to find hosts. In exchange, I cook dinner and breakfast for them, and they tell me their stories.

What kinds of stories have you heard so far?

My last host had cancer, and she talked about all the different ways of living and dealing with her sickness. There are themes of ailments, themes of drought. In one town I walked through, they had the worst drought in 100 years, and this guy lost almost all of his cattle. There are also beautiful, happy stories. I stayed with a woman in Moscow, Kansas, and she was saying that her family has just been blessed. Several years ago, her husband started growing cotton, instead of corn, and they've been very successful. This last year, they had to sell their cattle, which was a good idea because of the drought.

Do you intend to enter this project into a festival?

Yes, I'm going to enter it into ArtPrize, which is in Grand Rapids this September. I've timed it out so that I can be there in time for the festival.

At ArtPrize, there’s going to be one large screen that plays the live feed with a banner over it that says, "Live From the Road: Laura Milkins is Walking Home." I'll also have two kiosks with small mounted monitors and keyboards and a headset. So if someone wants to watch the edited tv show on the website, they can watch those. They’re will be 40 beautifully, edited videos that my video guys have done along the way for each week, which includes a Skype interview and edited bits from the feed, video and photographs.

What's your next project?

It will look less like art, but don’t know exactly what it will be. I need to take breaks. I tend to work in a series, like I just did the walking series. This project is the culmination of that series. After this, I'll want to spend time with my family, but the next project will be something quiet.

For more information on Laura Milkins and her project, click here.

Finally, just a tiny bit of good journalism news for Tucson.

The Tucson Weekly won three awards in the 2011 Altweekly Awards. The winners of the awards, sponsored by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), were announced this afternoon at the 2011 AAN Annual Convention in New Orleans.

The Weekly won top honors in the Illustration category (circulation under 50,000) for "The Nine Types of Arizona Politicians," by Lloyd Dangle and Jim Nintzel (June 3, 2010).

Margaret Regan earned her fourth Altweekly Award since 2003, nabbing second place for Arts Criticism (circulation under 50,000), for "The Whole Picture" (Feb. 4, 2010), "Tile Roofs and Borrowed Styles" (July 15, 2010) and "Deposited by Angels" (Oct. 28, 2010).

Finally, the Weekly and the UA School of Journalism earned third place in the Innovation/Format Buster category for the student-journalism project "Beyond the Border," much of which ran in the Dec. 2, 2010 issue online and in print.

Creative Loafing (Atlanta), Miami New Times, Nashville Scene and The Village Voice won the most first-place awards, each taking home three.

The Arizona Daily Star confirmed that 52 people were laid off from the publication Thursday. If its figure of roughly 400 employees cutting paychecks in some capacity at the Compound at Park and Irvington is accurate, yesterday’s gutting would account for about 12 percent of the work force.

Gone: an estimated 15 newsroom employees and workforce reductions in advertising, circulation, finance and IT. The Star didn’t make reference to the massive drawback, by accounts the largest in the paper’s history, until midnight Friday in the business section at azstarnet.com, and of course in the print edition. However, online they were able to provide an update on a house fire that displaced a family of four and a story on Alzheimer’s testing Thursday evening. Would they have ignored a 12 percent workforce cutback until the following day, making no mention on the Web site, for any other large business in town, or even in regards to other media layoffs that occurred at the likes of radio clusters Clear Channel or Citadel, not to mention the numerous layoff cycles and eventual shutdown of the print edition of the Tucson Citizen?

Company financial woes have a way of being a distant issue-that doesn’t affect me just yet—until the salvos are launched. Star employees were broadsided Thursday.

Said Star President and Publisher John Humenik in Thursday’s Star story:

Our leadership team is confident that these steps will enable us to focus our efforts and position us for a bright future.

While these steps we are taking are painful, I hope we can all emerge from this economic downturn stronger.

As the record shows, that was one of many layoff swaths at the Tucson Citizen, until the paper finally shut its doors in May of 2009.

This is what management says when it’s against the ropes. It talks, as Humenik did, about how tough a day it was, and I’m sure it was. As easy as it is to pigeonhole management as the evil ogre behind the fancy closed door, it’s probably not terribly fun to announce the dissolution of much of your workforce, and then watch as an asinine corporate HR decision degrades them further with the assistance of a security escort. Then management desperately tries to put a positive spin on the future as a result of the downsizing, hoping it can somehow appease the remaining employees and right the ship, or buy some time before abandoning it altogether, as long-time Tucson Citizen publisher Michael Chihak (some might argue wisely and with a view on reality—a view he might not have shared directly with others) did.

Now to state the obvious. What Humenik says is not what Humenik knows. Lee Enterprises, the publisher of the Arizona Daily Star, is in deep shit. The reality remains the company is staring at a billion dollar debt payment due in April, and has yet to reach a negotiation on the financial terms it would prefer. But Lee doesn’t have much bargaining power, and if any of the more than 150 investors Lee has met with don’t like the terms, their patience could be the company’s demise. If that happens, Lee goes belly up, because Lee needs to make a deal with someone. There were rumblings from sources quoted in a Bloomberg.com story said to be inside Lee negotiations a week or so ago suggesting bankruptcy was very much on the table.

According to company CEO Mary Junck, Lee has cut debt by more than 700 million dollars since 2005. It actually turned a profit of 46 million dollars in 2010, and says it has a cashflow of 110 million dollars, but those numbers don’t add up very well when a billion dollar bill comes due in eight months. On July 15, Lee reported it expects another third-quarter decline, down 4.2 percent from the same period a year before. Lee received a delisting warning from the New York Stock Exchange July 8 when its stock, which has gone into freefall the last three months, trickled below the one-dollar threshold.

There is no bright future in morning daily print journalism. We’ve known this for most of the last decade, but the public’s transition to online news has moved much faster than the industry’s ability to effectively monetize it. The option as it sees it: cut staff, and therefore almost certainly sacrifice the quality of the overall product, and hope nobody really notices.

That said, unlike the Tucson Citizen, which suffered from the additional technological time deficiency of being an outdated afternoon paper, the Star will be a major part of the media landscape for the foreseeable future. But whether that means it will do so under the Lee banner, or while being operated by another entity such as Gannett, which still has its grubbies on a profit-sharing model and probably loves the prospect of operating the state’s second largest newspaper in addition to its stranglehold in the Valley with the Arizona Republic, that remains to be seen.

But in this industry, and in this community, if this bright future has shown us one thing, Thursday’s 52 layoffs may not be the last.

Be sure to tune into KFMA Wednesday mornings at 8:10 for Fook and me discussing the news you can really use, plus a brief clip of a song by the greatest band ever, Europe.

I missed this yesterday while on the road and hearing off the layoffs at his paper, the Star, just a quick note for Josh Brodesky. If you find yourself writing this sentence:

Is downtown's newest building really its ugliest, or is that just columnist hyperbole?

...you're doing the "columnist" thing wrong.

Maybe the Unisource building isn't exactly an architectural marvel, but it's there, and that might be good enough for awhile. Personally, as someone who has lived in Tucson for a long time, I'm just happy something is happening down there. It looks like an office building. Why that's a surprise or worth writing nearly 700 words about, I have no idea, but that's apparently the Brodesky way.

Previously in Josh Brodesky news:

"New Tucson Weekly Feature: The Star's Correction Section"

"Drinking Beer With Jonathan Rothschild"

"I Have No Idea What I'm Supposed to Be Mad About, Josh Brodesky"

The long-standing financial woes of Lee Enterprises trickled down to the Arizona Daily Star, and in a big way. The Star laid off about 20 people Thursday morning, in the process gutting its marketing department and taking a major swath to the news department.

The Weekly has learned the list of layoffs includes Shelley Shelton, Sarah Trotto, Fred Araiza, Angela Pittenger, Dave Skog, Dan Sorenson, Scot Skinner, Jeff Jackson and John Ames.

Lee, based in Davenport, Iowa, has been in the midst of major money woes for the last few years. It is in the process of attempting to realign a massive debt payment due in April of 2012, but has refused numerous options involving junk bond proposals in hopes of a better deal. If the company can’t come to terms, bankruptcy looms as a very real option. Sources involved in Lee negotiations suggested that possibility was on the table as a result of meetings with creditors
that have occurred over the course of the last two weeks.

Lee stock has tumbled from near three dollars in March to under a dollar in July. On July 8, the New York Stock Exchange warned Lee that delisting looms if it can’t consistently get its stock price above one dollar in the next six months.