newspapers
As recently as the mid-1980s, the newspapers that ostensibly own the
Associated Press constituted 50 percent of its revenue. Over the past decade, with the explosion of syndicated news on wesbites and the proliferation of cable news channel, cashflows have come increasingly from new media customers, who tend to favor more soft news coverage on topics like entertainment and lifestyle. Smell like a recipe for disastrous internal strife? Funny, because that's exactly how it's turning out! It was one thing when the editor of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
likened AP's CEO to a Soviet apparatchik this past April. But now even the
insane revolutionaries at Sam Zell's
Tribune Company are
staging a mutiny, moving to cancel the wire and saying AP is charging higher prices for less hard-news (
think state and local) content:
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journalismism
As errors continue to mount at Bloomberg News, the question isn't just whose heads will roll, but from how high up on the org chart. The financial newswire avoided cratering Apple Inc stock with its premature Steve Jobs obituary last month because markets had been closed for half an hour by the time
the false item was published. Bloomberg's
incorrect report stating Sarah Palin had been arrested for drunk driving 22 years ago garnered little notice before it was corrected. But now Bloomberg has done some real damage. It
incorrectly flashed a headline to terminals Monday stating
United Airlines had filed for a second bankruptcy, sending shares to $3 from $12 and wiping out close to $1 billion in stock market valuation. After a halt in trading, the stock recovered to $11 by the end of the day. But the damage to both investors and to Bloomberg's reputation has been done. It hardly helps that the incorrect news bubbled up through a bizarre series of events:
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ha ha your medium is dying
Could the editors at the
Los Angeles Times be any more useless? Their newspaper is going down in flames, with
cash flow declines ranked worst among the deeply troubled
Tribune Company newspapers. Their best hope for salvation is the Web, where the paper is desperately behind upstart competitors like Nikki Finke's
Deadline Hollywood and the
Huffington Post. Just last year the paper installed new publishing software that
couldn't even handle hyperlinks. And yet newsroom "leaders" just spent 18 months in a fucking (ahem) committee debating what swears LATimes.com bloggers should be allowed to use, and when. The byzantine machinations involved some sort of appeal to a "ruling" of a special committee about some formal guidelines, and of course resulted in
a tedious and useless memo that should make anyone who ever cared about the once-great newspaper want to slit his wrists. Its insufferable, self-indulgent stupidity lies after the jump. Oh, and it basically says no one can use "pissed off" because it's crude and might tarnish the
LA Times's sterling image in the remaining months before the paper's now-all-but-inevitable collapse.
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pic of the day
There are supposed to be 15,000 journalists covering the Democratic Convention in Denver, a good proportion at newspapers. But the time-pressed and laptop-lugging reporters have largely abandoned their own medium, print: the
New York Observer's John Koblin
snapped this neglected pile of newspapers yesterday afternoon at the stand of Sam Zell's beleaguered
Tribune Company.
synergy
Look! Those
Gossip Girl ads the whole world is talking about (or at least the part of the world that lives in New York and probably "curates" a "linklog" or something) made the front page of
am New York, a free tabloid daily owned by Tribune Co. You know what's funny?
Gossip Girl airs on the CW, the network most people still mistake for the one that failed after canceling
Homeboys in Outer Space. Also the CW has something called a "ten-year affiliation agreement" with—wait for it!—Tribune Co! Which also owns the CW affiliate WPIX, right here in (am) New York. SYNERGY. [
Maura]
(Related: watch Mad Men! It's a show about men in suits who smoke or something.)
evil corporations in action
To pimp its sugary,
200-calorie iced coffees, fast food giant McDonald's offered to pay some local TV newscasts for
product placement. And of course
the newscasts went for it, since local TV journalism is where ethical standards go to die.
Meredith Corporation is putting the drinks in front of anchors at the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas (pictured) and at two CBS affiliates elsewhere.
Tribune Company has the coffee at its Fox affiliate in Seattle. Even national Fox News is playing ball, placing McDonald's product at the
News Corporation-owned station in Chicago. Station operators offered the
Times any number of excuses, but the best has to be from the news director at the Las Vegas affiliate: He argues the placement is ethically OK because it is restricted to the "lighter, news-and-lifestyle" portion of his morning news show. Sounds like the portion of the program that might normally be given over to, say, segments on weight loss, fitness or preventing kids from becoming obese. But these days, if the station wants to do any reports that might upset McDonald's, it is supposed to yank the lucrative cups:
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newspapers
There was much consternation in the media world earlier this week when it emerged that Tribune's
Los Angeles Times would take its Sunday magazine out of the hands of trained journalists and
hand control over to the newspaper's sales staff. Editor Russ Stanton even insisted that the magazine's name be changed so readers didn't get the idea that it still had, you know, integrity. But journalists are as much to blame as the business side for the fact that their work increasingly sounds like catalog copy. Here's ink-stained wretch Rob Walker in his
most recent "Consumed" column for
New York Times Magazine:
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journalismism
"Scott C. Smith is stepping down as publisher of
The Chicago Tribune and president of Tribune Publishing as part of changes being made by Samuel Zell." [
Times]
journalismism
Tribune CEO
Sam Zell famously
cursed one of his journalists earlier this year when asked whether refocusing the company would undermine serious journalism. He called such thinking "classic... journalistic arrogance." But now Zell is struggling to service $12.8 billion in debt amid a weak economy, and he's planning what sounds like
mass layoffs and newsprint reductions to meet the challenge. The cuts would fall hardest on the journalists who produce the least output — just the sort of emphasis on quantity over quality once-supportive reporters and editors at the
Los Angeles Times,
Chicago Tribune and
Orlando Sentinel are likely to abhor:
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