THINGS THAT ANNOY US #1: Reports of The Zephyr’s Death are Still Exaggerated… by Jim Stiles

This is the first installment of a new series on “Things that Annoy us.” The inaugural submission, written by our founding publisher, will be followed in future issues by other rants from members of the Zephyr Writing Staff and hopefully the Zephyr readership too. Feel free to submit your own annoyances in the comments below, or via email to tonyazephyr@gmail.com. Keep it short (1000 words or less, unless you’re really swinging from the rafters), keep it light-hearted, and please avoid partisan politics (unless you want to be another thing that annoys us). We look forward to your complaints…TS

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a troubled Zephyr reader. He told me he’d just seen a short internet story called “The Death of The Zephyr.” He had found it while searching for references to The Zephyr on the KUER web site, the NPR affiliate in Utah. With growing concern, our faithful reader learned that I was packing up my bags and moving to Australia. The lead said:

“Now, just as a new book and a related documentary about his work are receiving critical acclaim, Stiles has announced the end of the Zephyr and left the country. Jon Kovash reports from Moab”

I knew exactly what he was talking about, but could scarcely believe the link was still there. After all, I’d asked the manager of KUER to correct the misleading headline and text, almost 13 years ago. The story had posted in late September 2008. So I typed ‘Zephyr’ and ‘KUER’ into the search bar, and…son of a gun…it was still there. 

I wrote back to our troubled Zephyr reader and told him he needed to note the small date at the top of the story. And I assured him that we were still alive and kicking, with no plans to go Down Under or anywhere else in the foreseeable future.

But it did raise my hackles a tad and stirred up memories of the beginnings of The Zephyr’s growing alienation from the mainstream Utah media and heavily funded environmental organizations.

In 2007, I’d become increasingly concerned that my friends in the Utah environmental movement were ignoring the growing and devastating impacts from Industrial Tourism/Recreation. I also believed those organizations were depending too heavily on the money and influence of a growing cadre of billionaire bankers, industrialists, and venture capitalists who had decided to use their largesse to fund and indeed control the policies and direction of those groups.

Consequently, many of those organizations that I confronted with these concerns became increasingly hostile to The Zephyr’s points of view, as was reflected in this High Country News article by John Fayhee, in 2006.

A year later, I wrote my first (and so far, only) book, called “Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed,” published by the University of Arizona Press. UAP set up a series of signings and interviews for me to discuss BNW.  But for reasons neither the press people at the University of Arizona nor I could understand, KUER simply was not interested in doing any kind of on-air interview. In fact, according to the UAP publicist, KUER never returned her calls.

I ended up doing an hour long interview with the other NPR affiliate in Utah, KCPW out of Park City, and it went well. But I never heard from KUER again, at least not until over a year and a half later, when an independent radio producer named Jon Kovash contacted me about a possible KUER interview. 

By now word was out that I was about to embark on what turned out to be a poorly conceived plan to move to Australia, an effort that would end disastrously and with me eventually scurrying home to Utah with my tail fixed firmly between my legs. 

But for me, regardless of the Aussie Experiment’s outcome, it was not planned as “the end” of The Zephyr, but rather a new beginning. Kovosh wanted to tell the story of my move, but also to convey the message that The Zephyr intended to live on as a digital publication.

I was skeptical. After my KUER experience of the previous year (or the lack of one) regarding the book, I was wary of KUER’s sudden interest. Kovash assured me I would be treated fairly. And so I sat down with Jon in September 2008 and did a taped interview for later broadcast. 

It was a mostly softball interview. We talked for 30 minutes about the move, the history of The Zephyr, and I also tried to make it clear that this was not the demise of my publication but rather, a major change. If anything, I thought Kovosh missed an opportunity to raise some of the issues and differences that had arisen between The Zephyr and environmental groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). He devoted three sentences to the topic in his narration, but nowhere did I have an opportunity to address those issues in the interview. 

A few weeks later, I was in Australia and just starting to realize I’d made a terrible mistake, when I finally saw and heard the interview. First I saw this…

Then I clicked on the link and saw the headline and lead. It was particularly weird to read that the “new book and a related documentary about his work are receiving critical acclaim,” because as noted, KUER had no interest in the book, and when the documentary aired a year later, its sister PBS affiliate, KUED never, that I am aware of, aired the documentary film either.

I emailed Kovosh to complain about the title of the story. After all, it was his byline. I wrote, “I thought the idea was to let people know the Z would continue to live online?  Maybe the meat of your story did that…I didn’t listen to it…but anyone reading the lead would think otherwise…Jeez…Jon.”

Kovosh replied meekly, “that was promo fluff KUER came up with all on its own – sorry bout that, but the story did have a lot about the online plans.”

But that wasn’t true either. The cyber Zephyr plans occupied just a few seconds of the story, which played out at about five minutes.  So with no offer to change the title of the story, I wrote to Elaine Clark of KUER, and noted, “Kovash assured me that his piece would include my plan to continue the Zephyr online and maybe within the interview it did. But it would have been nice, (not to mention ACCURATE) if you had included that in the synopsis as well.”  

But Clark advised me that the story was “outside the purview of RadioWest” and copied my email to then-KUER News Director Jennifer Napier-Pearce.” Nowadays, after a stint as editor of the defunct Salt Lake City daily, The Salt Lake Tribune, (please note the irony, and also that it survives online somewhere), Napier Pierce is a senior advisor and director of communications to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox.

But back to 2008. Finally Napier-Pearce replied and was not exactly sympathetic to my concerns.  “The headline was ours,” she said, “and I thought accurately depicted the demise of the print edition. The fact that you were getting out of print was the reason I commissioned the piece and, if anything, I thought Jon relied too heavily on your observations alone; he should have sought additional sources for a more balanced perspective.”

In a way I agreed with her. I would have welcomed comments from groups like SUWA, as long as I had an opportunity to reply. But it didn’t happen. Time passed and I finally forgot about the story. Then I received the recent email, found the link and discovered that while the headline, the synopsis, and a very pixelated image of me survive on the KUER site, the audio link to the interview itself is gone. 

So now, in the summer of 2021, almost 13 years after the interview with Jon Kovosh, please, if you know someone at KUER, would you please tell them that The Zephyr is alive and well and even happy and would they PLEASE take down that link? 

Thank you.

Jim Stiles is Founding Publisher and Senior Editor of the Canyon Country Zephyr.

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