Tag Archives: Burlington Free Press

Mikey Pom-Poms has a sad

Boy oh boy, us bloggers and Tweeters must have really gotten under Michael Townsend’s skin. Because normally, he and the other denizens of the Burlington Free Press like to pretend that no other news outlets actually exist. Except when another outlet screws up.

I can explain everything.

I can explain everything.

But today, the Freeploid’s Executive Editor and Chief Gannett Cheerleader sent out a burst of self-pitying defensiveness under the title “Editor explains changes at FreePressMedia.”

Which is a first in itself: Townsend feeling the need to explain things. Collars a bit tight? Knickers in a twist? Not enough oxygen in the Freeploid’s seventh-floor digs?

The first thing I need to do is correct misinformation swirling around on social media as we go through a significant staff reorganization.

Oh, those nasty evil denizens of Social Media!

Hey wait, isn’t the Freeploid — er, sorry, FreePressMedia — in the midst of a headlong dive into social media-driven journalismism? I guess “social media” is a good thing except when it rises up to bite you in the ass.

He then denies “rumors and speculation that we are abandoning coverage in Montpelier.”

I don’t think anybody said you were, Mike. We just pointed out that you were shuttering your Statehouse bureau and lost your two Statehouse reporters when you told them they wouldn’t be covering the Statehouse anymore. See the difference?

I’m sure you will continue to cover the Statehouse. You’ll send a crew down from Burlington whenever you think there’s a sufficiently clickbaity story. But I’m equally sure you won’t have anyone there on a daily basis, and that will affect the quantity and quality of your coverage.

And this is an undeniable fact: the Burlington Free Press has de-emphasized Statehouse news over the past couple of years at least, concentrating more of its resources on its home base of Chittenden County. I’ve been expecting the departure of Terri Hallenbeck and/or Nancy Remsen for quite a while, because it’s obvious that the Free Press is publishing a lot less Statehouse news than it used to.

The Burlington Free Press used to be the number-one source for state political and policy news. It isn’t anymore, and it’s about to get significantly worse.

As Townsend says himself in his little counterattack, Statehouse coverage will come from an “accountability/watchdog” team whose responsiblities will be at “the regional and state levels.” They’ll have a lot of ground to cover, and only part of their effort will go to state-level news.

Indeed, considering the Freeploid’s stated focus on arts, culture and food, and its lack of dedicated Statehouse/political reporters, you could say that its new nickname ought to be “Seven Days Lite.” After all, Seven Days still has a full-time reporter on state politics and policy.

For those keeping score, that’s Plucky Weekly 1, Established Daily 0.

And meanwhile, the Freeploid’s Chief Content Whore — er, I mean, “business reporter” — Dan D’Ambrosio is spending his day reporting on the grand opening of the LL Bean store in Burlington. Five days after my Sunday Freeploid came wrapped in a plastic advertisement for the grand opening of the LL Bean store in Burlington.

Plastic: an ironic medium for a retailer with a green, outdoorsy image.

(Come to think of it, the plastic Bean Bag was an unsightly, almost illegible washed-out gray-and-white. Bean really got its money’s worth there.)

I guess I’m supposed to think the wall-to-wall coverage of a major advertiser is a coincidence. And continue to think so when I get my morning paper tomorrow and find a big fat article on the grand opening of the LL Bean Store in Burlington on the front page.

Much of Townsend’s column is devoted to explaining the changing media environment and the need of newspapers — sorry, media companies — to evolve. I sympathize. I get it. I don’t expect the status quo.

What irks me, though, and makes me critical of the Free Press in a way that I’m not of, say, the equally diminished Times Argus, is the following:

— A big part of the Free Press’ financial trouble arises from the fact that its profits are siphoned off to satiate Gannett investors.

— As I’ve said before, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The Free Press continues to occupy a dominant position in Vermont’s media landscape. As long as it does, there’s a lot less space for other sources to emerge and grow.

— The inhumane process that Free Press workers had to go through. Re-interviewing for their own jobs. Jobs “offered purely based on numerical ratings,” as Townsend himself put it.

In the words of Number Six, “I am not a number — I am a free man!”

— And, worst of all, the clickbait-driven approach to journalism, which extends so far as to require staff to rewrite stories after they’re published to goose the pageviews.

I can tell how much the criticism has gotten to Townsend, because he actually went so far as to name the reporters who’ve departed the Free Press. This is never, ever done in the media: you don’t want to give your audience any reason to miss the people who have gone.

But there, in print, are shout-outs to Sam Hemingway, Terri Hallenbeck and Nancy Remsen.

(He didn’t mention Lynn Monty, who refused to go through the “demeaning and degrading” process of re-interviewing, or Tim Johnson, who simply failed to post a high enough number.)

I can’t really blame Michael Townsend. Part of his job is to take Gannett’s chicken shit and convince us it’s chicken salad. But he is fair game for criticism, and his response fundamentally mischaracterizes the criticism.

She’s spinning so fast, she’s gonna explode

DarcieThis is incredible, even by the standards of Darcie “Hack” Johnston.

She’s gone full Orwell on the election returns, which once again revealed her consistent wrongness. I’ve heard that she’s a nice person who’s always accessible and capable of turning on the charm,  especially with the media. But she’s just plain wrong. All the time.

She managed Randy Brock’s campaign to an embarrassing defeat. And this time, she managed Dan Feliciano to a disastrous 4% finish. Remember, in July and August this guy was widely believed to be a stronger candidate than Scott Milne. Who, lest we forget, outpolled Feliciano by a better than 10-to-1 margin.

But Johnston is desperately spinning the results to make herself look better. Or, should I say, less of a train wreck. From the Freeploid’s (sadly departing) Terri Hallenbeck:

Johnston… said she had no regrets pushing Feliciano as a candidate even though she was surprised at how well Milne did.

“It was never evident to me that Scott Milne had a chance to win,” she said.

This ace political strategist admits she missed the Milne trend. And, in retrospect, who does she credit for Milne’s showing? She and her candidate.

…she said Milne could have done more to prevail over Shumlin. She contended he was late to pick up on the problems with Vermont Health Connect and offered a split message on government-financed health care when he said he would consider it down the road if it worked elsewhere.

Okay, now that’s amazing. She says the candidate who got 45% of the vote should have been more like the guy who got 4%? I guess so. Plus, according to Johnston, Mr. Four Percent was actually the driving force behind Milne’s surge:

She argued that some voters would not have come out at all but for Feliciano. She also contended that Feliciano’s stance on health care helped generate supporters for some Republican legislative candidates who also hammered that issue, including Valerie Mullin, who ousted Democrat Mike Fisher, chairman of the House Health Care Committee.

Uhh, Darcie? (And, I hate to say it, Terri?)

Valerie Mullin lost.

She finished in fourth place, behind Mike Fisher, in spite of the fact that Mullin outspent her opponents. And put out a last-minute mailer falsely accusing the Democrats of plotting a Medicare takeover. The candidate who unseated Fisher, Fred Baser, is a widely-respected moderate Republican who refused to take part in the Johnston/Mullin health care bashing.

I don’t know whether the factual error was Johnston’s or Hallenbeck’s, but it’s a clear example of Johnston’s “black is white, war is peace” analysis of the election.

And if, after all this, Johnston is still taken seriously as a campaign consultant — if any candidate hires her ever again — well, there are no words.

Look, I’ve got nothing personal against Johnston. I just hate to see someone rewarded, over and over again, for brazen incompetence. And taken seriously as a political figure in spite of her repeated cluelessness.

Night of the Long Knives at the Free Press

Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. In fact, I’ve been expecting it for a couple years, since the Burlington Free Press’ news department made a subtle but obvious shift away from Montpelier and toward Chittenden County. But the timing is a shocker:

Before I go on with the thinky stuff, let’s first acknowledge that two people have lost their jobs. Terri Hallenbeck and Nancy Remsen are middle-aged people in a contracting industry that prizes youth. We don’t yet know whether they left on their own or were pushed out, but either way, I feel for them and wish them well. They provided a lot of valuable coverage, and their years of experience are irreplaceable. Well, everybody but Gannett thinks so.

The fact of their departure does not surprise me, but I thought their bosses would have the decency — or sheer expediency — to wait until after the elections were over. You know, have ’em cover election night, get ’em to write up the post-election stuff, and then toss ’em out on Thursday or Friday.

But no. Time, tide, and nervous corporations wait for no man.

On the other hand, maybe the timing was deliberate; it’ll get buried in the election news, and there’s less chance of other media outlets besieging Michael Townsend asking why he’s jettisoning all his experienced talent. And Townsend cravenly refusing to comment. Even though he expects other media outlets to respond to his reporters’ inquiries.

According to one of the other olds left on an ice floe, Tim Johnson, the Freeploid is moving away from the beat system:

“There’s not going to be a city hall beat. There’s not going to be a Statehouse beat. There’s not going to be an education beat.”

Instead, there will be two “teams,” Chittenden and Watchdog. Presumably they won’t have anyone staffing a Montpelier office; they’ll only cover state government when they (a) have a nice juicy story or (b) when there’s a single high-profile event. No more will Free Press reporters roam the halls, gathering tidbits, building relationships, and most importantly, understanding how the place functions.

And that’s important. The State House is a complicated machine; it takes time and attention to figure out what to follow, who to talk to, and where to go.

But the Freeploid and its corporate parent don’t care about that. They just care about having enough “content” to plausibly fill the paper every day. And their top priority isn’t “the public needs to know,” it’s “the public wants to know.” And since the public doesn’t really care that much for the push-and-pull of inside politics, Statehouse news will take a back seat to stuff like local sports and artisanal foods and a women chaining herself to a tree. Oh, and advertiser-friendly “content.”

Since I started actively blogging about three years ago, I’ve maintained a subscription to the Free Press because it frequently had important stories and fairly dependable coverage of state politics and policy. I’m not canceling yet, but I’ll be watching. And I won’t be surprised if, by the first of the year, the Burlington Free Press will have become irrelevant to what I do.

Freeploid Follies: Sunday Funday edition

So, what’s up with Vermont’s Largest (But Rapidly Shrinking) Newspaper? Rather a lot, really. As we await the likely post-Election Night bloodletting at the Freeploid, there are several items worthy of note…

— Today’s front-page article on the race for Governor, which features a passel o’Jes Plain Folks articulating their views on the Milne/Shumlin contest. And I do mean “Milne/Shumlin,” because once again, just like the ‘Loid’s poorly-written endorsement editorial, there was no mention whatsoever of Dan Feliciano. Well, he was mentioned at the end of the article, in a list of all seven candidates for Governor. Yep, Dan the Libertarian Man was lumped in with the Emily Peytons and Cris Ericsons of the world.

Now, I don’t think Feliciano’s getting much more than 5% of the vote, maybe even less. But he’s a credible candidate, and he deserves more consideration than the Freeploid is offering him. The endorsement editorial, which had no room for poor Dan, managed to set aside an entire paragraph for Peter Diamondstone of all people. You’d almost think the Freeploid was trying to give a helping hand to the Republican Party by banishing Feliciano from its pages.

— An editorial in today’s paper touched on a subject near and dear to the Freeploid’s heart: transparency. It slammed South Burlington city government for refusing to release information about filling a vacancy on city council. In the process, editorial writer Aki Soga twice mentioned the name of the interim Councilor.

And spelled it two different ways. “John Simson” and “John Simon.”

In consecutive paragraphs.

From which I conclude that the Freeploid wants the process to be open… but couldn’t care less about who’s actually on the council.

— Today’s Freeploid (for those who get home delivery) came wrapped in a plastic bag, as usual. But it wasn’t the normal transparent bag; it was a shiny plastic advertisement for the new LL Bean store opening next weekend in Burlington. Funny thing: it was only a week or so ago that the Freeploid ran an article about the upcoming opening of the Beanery.

I fully anticipate that we’re going to get an article on Friday or Saturday about the grand opening, with comments from grateful shoppers about the legendary outfitter (whose clothing, like Orvis’, has slipped in quality of late) finally coming to the Queen City. And if such a story does appear, it’ll be the last piece of a nice little News/Sales/News sandwich. Right in line with the Newsroom of the Future’s intentionally blurred line between editorial and advertising.

— What do you do when you plan to cover a protest and nobody comes? Well, if you’re the Freeploid, you run a big fat story anyway. On Wednesday, the ‘Loid ran a piece on one woman’s fight to save a cottonwood tree that’s in the path of a new bikeway on Burlington’s waterfront. She’d chained herself to the tree, and was collaring passersby in a (mostly failed) effort to solicit their support for her cause. On Saturday afternoon there was supposed to be a rally on her behalf…

… and only two people showed up. But the Freeploid had sent a reporter — a rare thing on weekends — and they were bound and determined to get a story out of it. And they did: a two-page opus about the non-protest, containing pretty much the same information that was in the Wednesday story. One woman wants to save the tree, hardly anybody else cares, and it has to come down to make way for the bike path. Sorry; we can’t save every tree.

— Finally, we note with regret the disemployment of veteran Freeploid reporter Tim Johnson, the second to be given the ziggy in the Newsroom of the Future era. As we’ve said before, we fully expect a parade of departures — voluntary and otherwise — as soon as Election Day is safely in the books.

 

Dirty Tricks Time, Part Deux

Gosh. Maybe, just maybe, the VTGOP is a little tiny bit concerned about Lt. Gov. Phil Scott’s electoral prospects. Because party Vice Chair Brady Toensing, he of the mudslinging DC family law firm of DiGenova & Toensing (stepdad and Mom, respectively), is dipping into Mom’s bag of tricks: trying to drum up interest into a 20-year-old controversy about Prog/Dem candidate Dean Corren. And, wouldn’t ya know it, the Burlington Free Press’ Nancy Remsen took the bait.

Brady Toensing circulated 1994 newspaper clips that recounted the questions that had been raised about the housing reimbursements Corren and Terry Bouricius received while they served in the House of Representatives.

The pair had rented an apartment in Montpelier during the legislative session, but didn’t always stay there, commuting back to Burlington instead. Still they collected the full housing allowance, Toensing said, and called it a taxpayer scam.

Corren calls it a “phony accusation,” and says “I reported everything exactly as it was required.”

Professional Nice Guy Phil Scott’s campaign wants nothing to do with Toensing’s charge, at least publicly:

Patti Komline, Scott’s campaign manager, disavowed any knowledge or involvement in the information Toensing distributed.

“Disavowed any knowledge” is fortuitous phrasing on Remsen’s part; it comes from the opening to the old “Mission: Impossible” TV show, where the head of the black-ops team gets his orders via audiotape, which blows up five seconds after the tape says “Should you be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.” Likewise, Ms. Komline.

The Corren stuff has already been aired pretty thoroughly. It happened 20 years ago; Corren continued to serve in the Legislature for six more years, apparently without any more expenses problems. It’s clearly irrelevant to Corren’s fitness to serve in 2014.

Besides, I would think the VTGOP would be a little more forgiving about 20-year-old ethics charges, considering that in 2012, it happily gave its Auditor General nomination to Vince Illuzzi.

As you may recall, at the very moment when Corren had to clear up questions about housing reimbursements, Illuzzi’s license to practice law was under suspension over ethics charges. It had been suspended the previous year, and wasn’t reinstated until 1998. Illuzzi was lucky at that; the state bar’s Professional Conduct Board had recommended that Illuzzi be stripped of his law license for good.

Illuzzi had been charged with: using his public office to influence court proceedings, conduct prejudicial to administration of justice, and conduct displaying a lack of fitness to practice law. In a settlement, he stipulated to his guilt.

So I ask you, in a hypothetical faceoff between 1990s ethical questions, which is worse: having a candidate for Lieutenant Governor who faced questions about housing reimbursements, or having a candidate for Auditor who was officially accused of using his office to influence court cases and “displaying a lack of fitness to practice law”?

I know where my money is on that one.

But it is nice to see the VTGOP treating Dean Corren as enough of a threat that they feel the need to slime his reputation.

Freeploid clickbait FAIL

The Burlington Free Press is allegedly entering the Brave New World of Journalism’s Future: an age with resource-starved newsrooms, reporters scrambling to fill multiple “content streams,” Orwellian job titles like “Content Coach” and “Engagement Editor,” little or no copy editing, and a fixation on “audience analytics,” i.e. clickbait. Stories will be pursued, written, and even rewritten in response to the perceived interests of the audience. And note: we’re not readers anymore. We’re “news consumers” or something.

But if this is indeed the future of the Freeploid, it’s off to a rocky start. Yesterday, we learned the identity of Ebola Guy, the Vermonter who spent most of October in West Africa on a solo mission to fight Ebola.

It’s a big damn sexy story that pushes all the right buttons. It’s got important public policy implications: How did this guy get to Africa and back? How was his return handled by local, state, and federal authorities? What does it say about our Ebola containment efforts?

At the same time, it’s an eyeball grabber. Peter Italia is a full-on nutball who has claimed to use time travel and other “special powers” to cure disease and bring back people from the dead. His Facebook page is chock full of juicy stuff, chronicling his trip to Africa and detailing many of his cherished beliefs.

Also, I’ve heard that there are more dimensions to the story yet to come out — some on the serious policy questions, some in the “WTF” hot zone of audience curiosity.

The Freeploid’s Mike Donoghue managed to get quite a bit of detail yesterday and posted a story online last night.

But did they feature it on the website?

No. The primary slot on the homepage was about a high school soccer game.

Today’s print edition banishes Donoghue’s story to page 3; the front page has a run-of-the-mill piece on Vermont officials preparing to deal with Ebola cases.

And this morning, even after a solid 12 hours of “audience analytics,” the homepage STILL doesn’t feature Italia:

Screen Shot 2014-10-30 at 11.30.31 AM

All I can say is, c’mon, Freeploid. If you’re going to burn your journalistic soul on the altar of “audience analytics,” you could at least do a good job of it.

Postscript. The Freeploid pulls an old favorite trick in Donoghue’s piece: doggedly refusing to give credit to other media outlets. You wouldn’t know it by reading Donoghue, but it was WCAX-TV who first identified Italia and scored a phone interview with him. I’ve said it before, but this is the kind of thing that makes the Free Press disliked by many others in the media world. It’s arrogant, it’s wrong, and in the long run it does nothing to elevate the Freeploid or diminish its rivals.

Endorsement or Recommendation? Seems to be no difference.

A few days ago, Phil Scott and Right to Life raised a bit of a stink about a TV ad from Dean Corren’s campaign, which sought to draw a distinction between Corren’s solid pro-choice record and Scott’s, which is mostly but not entirely pro-choice. And it pointed out that Scott had the backing of RTL.

The issue raised by Scott and his kinda-sorta friends at RTL is that the group has not “endorsed” the Lieutenant Governor, but merely “recommended” him.

“Recommended” does sound a bit less formal than “endorsed,” but is there really a difference?

Well, on Sunday, the Burlington Free Press issued its predictable endorsements of Governor Shumlin and Phil Scott. But it didn’t use the verb “endorse” anywhere on its editorial page.

In fact, the first sentence of the gubernatorial editorial says…

“The Burlington Free Press editorial board recommends Peter Shumlin for governor.”

The Scott editorial begins with…

“Vermonters should return Phil Scott to Montpelier as lieutenant governor.”

By Phil Scott’s standards, neither he nor the governor have been endorsed by Vermont’s Largest Newspaper. I hope he doesn’t claim otherwise.

Also, earlier today, my email inbox was graced by a missive from Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger on behalf of State Sen. Phil Baruth. I’ll have more to say on this later, but for now I’d simply like to note the wording:

“I want to put in a strong recommendation for… Phil Baruth.”

Hm. Guess that’s not an “endorsement” either.

Or, alternatively, Phil Scott has no basis for complaint about Dean Corren’s ad.

And the first one bites the dust

The seasonal slasher flick that is the Burlington Free Press has claimed its first victim. Reporter Lynn Monty has been kicked out the door for refusing to go through the “degrading and demoralizing” experience of “interviewing for a job I already had.”

Last week, Freeploid staffers had to re-interview for newly-defined jobs as part of Gannett’s Newsroom of the Future initiative. Seven Days’ Paul Heintz reports that Monty had an interview scheduled, but at the last minute she couldn’t bring herself to go through with it.

“I opted out of the interview process and they laid me off. …I loved my job, but I don’t love Gannett. I will make a new way for myself that doesn’t compromise my integrity.”

… According to Monty, Gannett plans to pay her the difference between unemployment insurance compensation and her full salary for six weeks — one for each year she spent at the paper.

Ooooh, six whole weeks! That’ll take her right into… mid-December.

Merry Christmas!

One other note that strikes me as extremely convenient:

An internal document obtained two weeks ago by Seven Days indicated that final decisions from Gannett were due this week, though Monty said she expected them next week.

Yeah, we’ll expect you all to work your asses off through Election Night, but no guarantees after that.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A peek into the Freeploid’s grim, dark future

I’ve been a harsh critic of the Burlington Free Press because (1) it occupies such a prominent space in our media market, (2) its performance is spotty at best, and (3) it thinks so highly of itself.

But I read something yesterday that has me feeling nothing but sympathy for the denizens of the Freeploid’s famously picturesque seventh-floor offices. It was a story in Nashville Scene, which appears to be that city’s version of Seven Days. The subject: trouble at the city’s daily newspaper.

Remember the Nashville Tennesseean? It’s one of the Freeploid’s fellows in the Gannett chain, and it was one of the first to adopt Gannett’s “Newsroom of the Future” initiative, complete with smaller news staffs, little to no copy editing, staffers forced to reapply for redefined jobs, and clickbait-oriented journalism.

Well, the initial returns are in, and it’s bad. Really bad. The implementation of the NOTF included a few staff departures; but since then, there’s been a mass exodus of talent that’s left the newsroom so understaffed that Gannett has had to fly in temp help from its other papers.

First went Brian Haas, the cops and courts reporter, who bolted for a spokesman job with the fire department. Then came the shocker: Michael Cass, the longtime Metro reporter, exited for Mayor Karl Dean’s office, even though Dean has only a year left in his administration.

And then there was Metro editor Steve Stroud:

After arriving from San Antonio three years ago, he developed a reputation as a good editor who wrote sharp analysis pieces on politics and state government on occasion. One by one, though, he watched almost his entire team of reporters walk out. A group that had spent the past year winning multiple awards for the company was virtually gone: investigative reporter Walter Roche left in July and political reporter Chas Sisk in August, followed by Haas and Cass.

Now, after passing him over for any of the new leadership positions in the newsroom, management offered Stroud a new role — tourism reporter.

There’s your Newsroom of the Future: a talented, experienced editor busted down to “tourism reporter.” Unsurprisingly, Stroud declined the honor.

Stroud’s bureau was left with a single reporter. That’s when Gannett bussed in some temps — who are being asked to instantly cover a major city they’ve never lived in, with the bureau’s institutional memory almost entirely gone. That’s quality journalism. Not.

But wait, there’s more:

Last week came news that Peter Cooper, the paper’s star music columnist and go-to writer for chronicling country music legends, was leaving too.

In Nashville, as you can imagine, the post of “music columnist” is kind of important. There were other departures as well.

… The firing/rehiring process that got the paper into this situation has created deep distrust of current management. One staffer referred to the entire process as “Kabuki theater.”

“If they were going to go with ‘more’ reporters, why did so many get eliminated in the restructuring?” the staffer said. “It was clear there were favorites and directives. The process was just a fancy way to let go of people.”

The Tennesseean, whose first edition under the NOTF featured a front-page article on price cuts the city’s biggest supermarket chain — a major newspaper advertiser, natch — must now be a mere shadow of its already pathetic self.

Imagine what Seven Days would be like if Paul Heintz, Mark Davis, Kevin Kelley, Alice Levitt, Dan Bolles, and Margot Harrison all left at the same time. Well, we may not have to imagine, because I suspect the Burlington Free Press will be similarly depopulated by Christmastime.

And the NOTF’s journalistic mandate?

“At the daily news meeting, [chief editor Stefanie Murray] begins by asking, ‘What are people talking about today?’ ” one former staffer told the Scene this summer. “Time was editors would be asking, ‘What do we have that people WILL be talking about tomorrow?’ “

Local Girl Makes Good. (Hey, I can do clickbait too, y'know.)

Local Girl Makes Good. (Hey, I can do clickbait too, y’know.)

Coincidentally (or not), today’s Freeploid contains a clickbait-friendly article about a former Barre high schooler (now a college senior in North Carolina) who just did a Playboy photo shoot. Quick, call the Pulitzer committee!

 

Governor Who?

Welp, the “we don’t need no stinkin’ copy editors” era is off to a whiz-bang start at Vermont’s Largest Newspaper.

Yeah, that’s the Burlington Free Press’ official Twitter feed misspelling Governor Shumlin’s name. (And four Freeploid staffers, including Gannett Apologist-in-Chief Michael Townsend, retweeting it without noticing.)

Oopsie.