J-school 101 should teach you not to editorialize like this

In a story about the failure of a revenue-neutral bill to change how the alternative minimum tax falls, AP writer Jim Abrams uncorks this whopper:

Failure to enact AMT legislation before this session of Congress concludes this week would be a political disaster for both parties, but especially for majority Democrats.

No empirical evidence or even political analysis to justify this statement. And, where’s his editor’s blue pencil?

FCC: Big Media can now be Ginormous Media

The Federal Communications Commission, on a party-line 3-2 vote, will let broadcasters in the nation’s biggest cities also own newspapers.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin disingenuously claims that shrinkage in the newspaper biz makes this a safe move.

Of course, that’s exactly the opposite of true. Big Media, by newspapers, is a smaller pie than before; even in the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas, not all have multiple daily newspapers, and, of those that do, some of them have two newspapers in joint operating agreements.

The discussion and debate was rancorous:

The Democrats blasted the chairman for making changes to the proposal "in the dead of night" and just before the meeting that created new ownership loopholes instead of closing them, as he pledged during a recent hearing on Capitol Hill.

“Anybody who thinks our processes are open, thoughtful or deliberative should think twice in light of these nocturnal escapades,” said Democrat Jonathan Adelstein.

The Democrat said Martin's proposal “will allow for waivers for six new newspaper-broadcast combinations and 36 grandfathered stations.”

In places like here in Dallas, where The Dallas Morning News and WFAA-TV, one of the grandfathered stations, use this to lay off more employees, do “package” coverage, and shamelessly market each other while refusing to include each other in media criticism and critiquing pieces, shows just how wrong this is.

Sports-newspapers conflict of interest: the bottom line

How can newspapers truly claim to cover sports impartially, when you have a media-sports team ownership conflict of interest lie this:

(Being a director of the Boston Red Sox) was not the first time (former Senate Majority Leader George) Mitchell would have a financial stake in a baseball team. At the same time he joined the Red Sox, Mitchell was a member of the board of directors of the Walt Disney Co., the parent company of the Anaheim Angels and eventual 2002 World Series champions. He has been on the Disney board since 1994, and was chairman at Disney from 2004-06.

But from the beginning, the Red Sox sale was a particularly sensitive issue for Selig. The commissioner was accused of engineering the $660 million Red Sox transaction to the Henry group, while various other competitors to buy the Red Sox, such as HBO and CableVision founder Charles Dolan, believed the Henry group's bid had not been the highest. Dolan reportedly believed he had outbid Henry by nearly $100 million, and a bid by Miles Prentice was said to be the highest, at $755 million. Selig denied any involvement in managing the sale of the team or that he favored Henry, who had owned the Florida Marlins, or Werner, who endured a turbulent experience as owner of the San Diego Padres during the early 1990s when baseball was embroiled in a rift between large- and small-market franchises. Selig, who was fond of Werner, watched the bitterly divided owners push Werner out of the game in 1993 and told him he would run a team again one day.

In the days following the sale, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly announced an investigation of the transaction on the grounds that the Yawkey Trust, the charitable foundation that held the team following the 1992 death of Jean Yawkey, was entitled to the highest bid. Reilly threatened a lawsuit against the Red Sox and Major League Baseball, depending on his findings. The Boston Globe, which holds a 17-percent stake in the Red Sox through its ownership by the New York Times Company, referred to Henry's purchase as "a bag job." The Boston Herald called the sale, "the fix." Ultimately, Reilly did not take legal action after the Henry ownership group agreed to increase its charitable contribution to the Yawkey Trust.

So, you have Disney, with multiple media ownerships, above all, ESPN, controlling the Angels. You then have the Boston Globe, via the New York Times Company, with an interest in the Red Sox, which not only raises Red Sox conflicts of interest, but, given the Times is in New York, Yankees conflicts of interest as well.

But, it’s not just MLB. The Dallas Morning News at one time owned a share of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks.

If major professional sports leagues, above all MLB, had any guts at all, they would ban media ownership of sports teams, period.

Yes, Ted Rall IS hopeful about print media

In fact, and perhaps surprisingly after the first two parts of his series on print’s status today,, he’s actually kind of bullish:

some types of papers are prospering and growing. I believe that the business of printing news on dead trees will emerge from the current shakeout more profitable than ever. This will be thanks to three emerging trends:
• Big National Newspapers
• More Small Local Papers
• Freebie Dailies

At present, the biggest 50 dailies (“A” papers, in industry jargon) dominate the landscape. Below them is a swath of dailies in midsize cities (Akron, Austin, Albuquerque). Small town, suburban and rural dailies, weeklies and bi-weeklies, whose focus is highly localized (“New Stop Sign Stirs Controversy”) —the “C”s — bring up the rear.

During the 20th century, most newspaper profits were generated by "B" papers. This is the market segment that has been hit hardest by the Web. Free online classifieds has decimated advertising revenues. Neither beast nor fowl, the midsize dailies’ attempt to balance local, national and international coverage pleases no one in an environment where highly customized news consumption is available to readers online--for free. (Publishers were idiots for giving away their content, but that's another column.) MyYahoo feeds me the latest headlines from Itar-Tass and Agence France-Press every morning; how could the Dayton Daily News, the paper of my childhood, do as well for this half-Frenchman with a Central Asia obsession?

Rall expects the future American newspaper market to look a lot more like Europe and Japan — a smaller group of definite “A” or even “Super-A” papers, and then a bunch of “C”, or maybe, in my view “B-lite,” papers. A two-tiered, not a three-tiered, market.
The Wall Street Journal and USA Today already print multiple national issues. In the era of “Super-A” papers, sure, you could see a few others joining them, and perhaps co-opting some of the traditional “B” papers with new versions of old-time joint operating agreements (Detroit News/Free Press, Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle and Salt Lake City papers are among those that have JOAs).

But, will this be a good thing?

Well, there, the answer is No, according to Rall:

None of this will improve the quality of journalism. “Ultimately [free dailies] will breed in people the idea that news shouldn't cost anything, even that news is cheap,” points out media commentator Roy Greenslade. “But in fact, news, done well and properly, requires investment and money. They will no doubt tell us what happened —but news should also tell us how and why things happen. I fear that approach will be lost.”

It will. It’s a trend that began decades ago, when newspapers closed overseas news bureaus and eliminated long-term investigative journalism to cut costs, and started embracing elites rather than exposing them. And it’s terrible for our society, culture and politics. Government and business will face even less accountability than they do today. Democracy will lie in ruins. The print newspaper business, however, will be going gangbusters.

I don’t doubt Rall is right. That said, I found this third part of his series a letdown, in several ways.

First, he’s by no means the only columnist to analyze the shakeout of the news business in a similar way.

Second, after talking about how the Internet would affect privacy issues in the future, and how this might affect media, in parts 1 and 2, we didn’t hear a single thing about that in this third part.

Ted, you can do better than that… that’s not like you to start an idea and let it dangle.

Ted Rall on the future of online news, Part II

Having blogged about Part I of Rall’s three-part series last week, I wanted to tackle Part II now, to see how he would describe more of the problem, and if he saw any answers.

Would you pay for Mapquest? I’d pay a quarter or a dollar for reliable directions from the airport to my hotel in a new city. Sometimes, while researching this column, I encounter a link to an archived newspaper article that I could use, but it charges a $2 or $3 download fee. The cost isn’t the problem — it’s a miniscule, and in my case tax deductible, expense to make my work better. But I don’t bother. I don’t pay for Mapquest, either.

I don’t care about the money. I just can’t stand filling out all those fields.

Each website requires you to enter personal data — your name, address, credit card number, expiration date, that stupid security code next to the signature on your card, and the billing address (as opposed to the shipping address). Frequently, website interfaces are buggy; make a mistake and you have to start all over again. I’ll suffer through the ordeal if it's a site, like Amazon or Expedia, that I’ll use repeatedly. But an archived article? Ain’t worth my time to figure out how to get them my two bucks.

There is a solution to the online payment problem, says Simson Garfinkel, a fellow at the Harvard University Center for Research on Computation and Society and the author of “Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century.” (Disclosure: We’re friends.)

“If content is appropriately priced, of an appropriately high quality, and easy to access, people will pay for it,” asserts Garfinkel. “What is required is a system that is easy to use and licensing terms that are not onerous.”

A universal single-click payment system won't work, he says, because it would be vulnerable to hackers. We could overlay a national ID card or credit card system over the existing Internet. One of several competing micropayment systems may become dominant, creating a market-based solution. You'd register your debit or credit card info at one place. Then, when you wanted to download a song or read an electronic book or order shoes, you’d go to the vendor's website and click one button: “Buy.”

Amazon sort of does this. After you’ve registered, you can buy a book by clicking one button. Just like that, it’s on its way. We need something similar for vendors we’ve never dealt with before.

That said, Rall is still optimistic newspapers will muddle through, if not more. Now, that said, as should be evident by the title of Garfinkel’s book, he thinks notions of online privacy will have to change for that to happen.

Newspaper editors and publishers could reverse their decline by agreeing, en masse, to charge a substantial fee for their online editions — at least as much as for print. But I wouldn't hold my breath. Avoidance of long-term thinking is what’s gotten the news biz where it is today.

In the long run, despite their suicidal tendencies, I suspect newspapers will survive, and even thrive, after the current shakeout. When radio was introduced in the 1930s, many analysts predicted the death of the record industry. Instead, radio promotion increased record sales. When television became popular in the 1950s, people said radio was doomed. The radio business is bigger than ever. The Internet was supposed to kill TV.

The newspaper business will change. Three major trends ensure that. They will also make it bigger than ever.

Next Week: The bright (sic!) future of newspapers.

Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, I'll add a few observations about the industry.

Weeklies and semiweeklies, especially, not being AP members, have suffered less from the Internet. Their news is available from that newspaper, or that newspaper’s website, if it has one, and that’s it. That said, too many weeklies launched websites in the last five years or so without thinking about charging for subscriptions. They believed what the major dailies were already trying to brainwash themselves into believing, that an ad-based model would pay the bills.

For small-town dailies, the situation is somewhat the same.

That said, these papers tend to be even more conservative than the seven-day daily MSM. They are conservative in the Main Street/Chamber of Commerce, good-for-business sense, in one respect of conservativism. And, in much of the South and Midwest, it’s going to be small-town Babbitt-type religious conservativism, too.

There is one option, in larger cities: the alt-weekly. These papers are usually progressive to some, if not a fairly large degree, especially in a libertarian sense on social issues. They’re still weeklies, and especially with their long-form journalism as well, wouldn’t have a big desire to be AP members anyway.

But, they’re being affected by the Internet, too.

Alt-weeklies, like Internet sites, generally run on an ad-only model. And, personal ads of the sort that don’t appear in traditional daily papers make up a fair chunk of both classified and display ads there.

But, Craigslist is gutting alt-weekly classifieds in these areas. Personals websites are doing some of the damage, too.

Anyway, Rall is always thought-provoking to me, even when I disagree with him. I’m interested in what Part III will say.

How today’s Web journalism world still makes no financial sense

Ted Rall sis right as usual. Double of nothing (doubling your online visitors even as Internet ad rates stay near zero) doesn’t make sense.

And, it’s “liberal” blogs as well as “conservative” traditional media that aren’t getting it.

Wanna blog for Huffington Post? As Rall points out, they’ll pay you plenty of prestige, but zero dollars.

And, as long as you the publicity-hungry blogger make that sucker’s bet, Huff Post, including its charming Dragon First Lady, Ms. Arianna herself, will continue to double down on you. As Rall says, also, try using “prestige” to pay the mortgage or rent.

End result, says Rall:

Print media is dragging content providers into the abyss. First comes downsizing. Writers, cartoonists, and photographers are losing their jobs to peers willing to do the work for less or, in the case of readers invited to submit their comments and images for the thrill of appearing in the local rag, nothing. Then they squeeze those who remain for pay cuts. A cartoon that runs today in Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times or The Washington Post — the most prestigious and widely disseminated forums in the United States — brings its creator less than The Village Voice would have paid for it in the 1980s. Some print venues offer no payment at all.

What happens if we don’t do anything?

Unless something changes soon, deprofessionalization will further erode journalistic quality. The resulting dumbing down of our politics and culture will accelerate. We can’t get the toothpaste back into the tube. The Internet is here to stay. Unfortunately, the best way to make it more profitable — to stimulate all e-commerce, not just journalism--will require us to give up something dear to our rugged individualist American hearts: the illusion of Internet privacy.

Yes, it is an eye-opener, if disconcerting in a way, to hear Rall, an ardent civil libertarian, say that. But, between spyware that is logging keystrokes on infected computers to ISP providers being leaky sieves to the government even before 9/11, Net privacy, in many ways, went the way of the dodo long ago. Besides, your financial information went even more the way of the dodo even earlier, every time you zipped a debit card at the grocery store.

This is the first of a three-part series by Rall. I’m interested in hearing what he offers in the way of a solution.

Why do conservative columnists dominate the newspaper op-ed pages in most the country?

Kevn Drum notes that they do, in a “dog bites man” blog post about an in-depth survey of newspaper commentary over at Media Matters.

I offer my observations from someone with a slice of life inside the industry, at least right now.

I’ve worked at one small daily, and a variety of non-dailies, for about 13 years. Aside from the “name” columnists at “name” syndicates, you have a variety of smaller syndicates putting out B-side/AAA minor league columnists.

These, even more than at the Major League level, tend to tilt small town/Chamber of Commerce/down on the farm right; a fair subset of them tilt religious right, also.

In other words, if you think the situation is skewed at your typical seven-day daily, you ain’t seen nothing.

Then, amongst freebie columnists, you have some conservative think tanks, plus state chapters of conservative organizations, floating their columns everywhere.

For instance, I, at a weekly paper of about 4,500-5,000 circulation, get columns every week from folks like the Conservative Values Coalition and Texas chapters of several national coalitions. I’d estimate I get six-seven a week like this.

Then, there are organizations that are officially apolitical, such as the Texas Medical Association, but that may take conservative positions on issues near and dear to their hearts, such as national healthcare, in this case.

Also, Senators and many Representatives send “their” columns out every week; of course, they’re all staff-written, not by the MCs themselves. But, my off-the-cuff guess is that conservative Congressmen reinforced conservative newspapers here in a sort of closed feedback loop.

The solutions? Well, given that liberals are generally more idealistic, and thus interested in editorial positions, speaking up on an op-ed page wherever possible is a start. Liberal public policy groups, etc. churning out more op-eds would also help. And professional groups that have a more liberal take on issues, like state trial lawyers’ groups on tort reform, have done some writing in the past, but need to be joined by others.

Take labor issues; if someone from the AFL-CIO would crank out some well-crafted op-eds on a variety of labor matters, and pitch them with a smaller-town angle, it would be water in the desert.

Given that smaller-town newspaper readership is not declining as much as at seven-day dailies, this is a fertile field.

A rhetorical question about a newspaper company and hiring practices between its left and right hands

Why would anyone want to work at a newspaper company where an employee of the company owner’s ranch is put on the payroll of one of the newspapers? Not only does it punish the bottom line of that newspaper (and any profit-based bonuses to which its publisher might be entitled), it makes a skeptical mind wonder if there might not also be legal or tax reasons for this being done, and then wondering what such reasons might be.

How NOT to do a Progress edition

I’m just a lowly editor, not a publisher or general manager, but I know you never give away a larger editorial hole than the purchased ad space.

Gold Country Media, put a crowbar in your wallet

It's bad enough, when you own seven weeklies, one semiweekly and one six-day daily in the Sacramento area, all in growing, even booming communities, to expect out-of-area finanlists for the ME's position at one of your weeklies to pay full travel costs to interview.

It's even worse when you're already planning on hiring from within.

New Zealand’s top daily outsourcing Sunday production

Things like this show I’m in a dying profession:

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- Newspaper publisher APN News & Media began outsourcing editorial production work on Sunday, a plan that will be extended to five daily and three weekly newspapers by year end, a senior executive said.

The changes mean news editing and layout operations at The New Zealand Herald, the nation’s biggest daily, and a string of regional dailies will be done by an outside contractor, APN deputy chief executive Rick Neville said.

“I’m confident readers won't notice the difference” in the papers’ editing and design, Neville said.

The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union that includes New Zealand journalists, however, said the move will erode the quality of news coverage because stories will be handled by copy editors not familiar with local issues. ...

By year end, Pagemasters will employ about 45 editing staff at their site to edit the seven newspapers - nearly 30 fewer than the newspapers employed.

A goofy production thing about Granite Publishing

Not all its papers are on the same web. Most are 50-inch, but at least one is the old 55-inch.

HUH?

The difficulties of news reporting in Iraq

From San Antonio Express-News veteran Sieg Christenson.

Minimum wage hikes and the future of newspaper employment

With year one of a three-year, 70-cent-an-hour per adjustment minimum wage hike in place, I see three options for newspaper companies:

• At least partially keep pace with editorial staff wage hikes.
• Improve benefit offerings. Since all sorts of companies across industries struggle with health insurance, this means benefit improvements would include more vacation time, profit sharing, 401(k) accounts, flex time, or some combination of all the above.
• Do nothing, let more and more talented people walk, and resort even more to syndication groups, part-timers, stringers, and in the neon lights, fame-hungry “citizen journalists.”

Knowing how capitalistic the business is, my money is on option 3 being the first resort.

Another reason not to like the Houston Chronicle — a short-falling weather page

When I took my semi-forced move to lower East Texas in January, a friend of mine in the biz warmed be that if I thought editorials and columns at The Dallas Morning News were too conservative, I hadn’t seen nothing yet — that the Chron was often not much more than a right-wing whack job.

Well, whether it is that or not, I do, having perused an entire Chron for the first time while visiting a good friend in Houston for a convention, I see something else to bitch about.

How can it’s weather page not have Texas high and low temps from the previous day, let alone be missing national temperature extremes.

The Eagle, out of Bryan-College Station, I’ll give a pass on them for the same omission, but not the Chron.

AP writing gets sloppier all the time

Prime example: I think I am seeing “its” vs. “it’s” misuse an average of once a week in AP stories now.

Journalism is now being outsourced to India

No, this is NOT a joke.

The New York Times It is pretty freaking scary, though.

When is local journalism not really local? When it's about Pasadena and written by someone in India.

James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired two reporters last weekend to cover the Pasadena City Council. One lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year. The other will work in Bangalore for $7,200.

The council broadcasts its meetings on the Web. From nearly 9,000 miles away, the outsourced journalists plan to watch, then write their stories while their boss sleeps — India is 12.5 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.

"A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages," said Macpherson, 51, who used to run a clothing business with manufacturing help from Vietnam and India.

So, on the Indian version of Craigslist, he posted an ad that said in part, “We do not believe that geographic distance between California and India will present unsurmountable problems, and that working together with you will result in your development of a keen working knowledge of this city's affairs.”

Dozens replied. One of the two chosen had attended the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Rob Gunnison, the director of school affairs there, is dismayed. “It just seems so fundamental to journalism to be there,” Gunnison said. “I still can’t quite believe it's not a hoax.”

The only consolation I can take from this at first glance is that this appears to be a Net-only “newspaper.”

Nonetheless, Prof. Gunnison is right. Even with something theoretically as mundane as a city council meeting, you can’t get emotional nuances from a webcast.

How my corporate ownership shakes down its papers

A former publisher from one of its newspapers, but now with another paper, yet having some sort of relationship with our ownership, wrote and laid this two-page (two newspaper pages) "special" on the future of electricity and power plants, etc. (Cameron being near one of the proposed TXU sites, pre-sale.)

Well, then word comes from our HQ that all papers "should" run this.

Today, our publisher finds out we GET BILLED $150 for that "pleasure."

Crazy.

Steve

Texas Senate passes journalism shield law

I give the bill a B/B-minus. Biggest concern is it defines bloggers outside the loop; the story isn’t clear about “independent journalists” or freelancers being covered or not, as well. And, I’m kind of iffy about the bill defining who is or is not a journalist, in general. I think the definition, if any, should be in the act of journalism.

Newspaper future not totally grim

The Web is hitting new marks in ad revenue:

According to a recent survey, for the first time, advertising revenue for local newspaper Web sites last month exceeded local TV advertising. One of the reasons for the improvement in Web ad dollars is the video now being produced for these sites. Video has a big advantage. It can be attached to video commercials.

In other words, the traditional newspaper is becoming more and more video-like.

Now, won’t this also lead to a push to increase broadband speeds in the U.S.? (By the way, average “broadband” speeds in the U.S. are dead last in the industrialized world.) If so, at what price? And, will more cities start offering Wi-Fi as a city amenity, putting more pressure on private providers?

Newspaper cartelization gets well-deserved kick in the teeth

As Editor and Publisher reports, Hearst and MediaNews have gotten a federal smackdown, courtesy of a settled lawsuit, over their attempt to cartelize to monopolize Bay Area newspaper control.

The Oakland Tribune, the Fremont Argus and other smaller San Francisco Bay Area dailies will “stay alive” only because of the settlement reached Wednesday, said the head lawyer for Clint Reilly, whose lawsuit had accused Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group of scheming to monopolize the region’s newspaper market.

“The smaller local papers will be able to survive now,” [lawyer] Alioto told E&P in an interview after the settlement announcement.

“The Oakland Tribune, the Fremont Argus, San Mateo (County Times), (The Daily Review in) Hayward, Novato (Marin Independent Journal) — all of those papers were heading for the graveyard,” Alioto added. “There was pretty strong evidence those papers were going to go out. By reason of our agreement, I think, they’ll stay alive, at least for three years.”

Under the settlement, Hearst, which publishes the San Francisco Chronicle, and MediaNews agreed not to collaborate on national advertising, Internet advertising, sales, distribution or production in the Bay Area, Alioto said.

Of course, three years isn’t a lot. And Hearst is already spinning this deal.

A Hearst statement said the settlement mandates “certain changes” in the complex Bay Area deal between Hearst and MediaNews. Hearst said the two chains “had already decided to make most of these changes during the course of the Hart-Scott-Rodino review by the Department of Justice. The changes have no material effect on Hearst’s investment in the non-Bay Area assets of MediaNews Group.”

Sure. Two newspaper companies this big wouldn’t have settled this lawsuit unless they knew it was highly likely they would lose.

And, it did block further metastasis of Big Media:

The settlement also rescinds Hearst's right to convert its interest in MediaNews properties outside the Bay Area into a direct investment in the Denver-based company.

Unfortunately, it didn’t reverse MediaNews’ purchase of former McClatchey papers in the Bay Area last year, the deal that started this whole MediaNews-Hearst cartel rolling:

The settlement does not give Reilly the thing he was asking the court to do: Unwind MediaNews’ complex $736 million purchase of the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times. MediaNews bought the papers last June from The McClatchy Co., which acquired them as part of its acquisition of Knight Ridder Inc. Hearst also bought two former Knight Ridder papers, one in the Bay Area, the Monterey County Herald, and the other a competitor to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, then owned by McClatchy, the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Hearst also bought a southern California paper, the Daily Breeze in Torrance in a $288 million deal.

Hearst then agreed to turn ownership of the three papers over to MediaNews in exchange for equity in MediaNews' non-Bay Area properties.

So, that three years? It’s probably more a stay of execution than a parole, let alone an actual pardon. And, that’s sad. The Trib, especially, needs to remain alive as an independent seven-day voice for the East Bay.

World’s oldest paper now online-only

American Journalism Review reports:

The world's oldest newspaper — Sweden's Post-och Inrikes Tidningar — had abandoned print to become a Web-only publication. The momentousness of that change is tempered by the fact that the paper had a daily circulation of around 1,000 and mainly publishes legal announcements.

“Hyperlocal” coverage: future or fad?

Hyperlocal newspaper coverage, whether in hardcopy or online, is being touted as the latest Tool to Save Newspapers. An American Journalism Review story suggests it may not be all that. Beyond the article’s noting that, based on experience of papers to date, there’s definite concerns about content and quality of editing/writing, I just don’t see how this works on the advertising side.

If you’re targeting such narrow blocks, like Census blocks, for these sections or pages, well, your circ numbers for the overall paper may be high, but not that section. Ditto for online. I just don’t see this being the “savior.”

A tab a month in a county of 30,000?

The newspaper I am at now is a weekly in a city of 7,500 and county of about 30,000; it’s the only paper in the county and is not part of a local “group.” I don’t know for sure if that’s too much, to do a tab every month, or I just don’t want that much work, but I think that’s probably a bit heavy. A tab every 6-7 weeks, on average, is probably more realistic.

More profit-taking by corporate newspaper ownership on its own

First, at the corporate ownership of my current newspaper, it’s a two-day ad sales managers’ meeting at the owners’ deer hunting lodge, which probably got a decent internal profit off of charges to member newspapers as well as a business tax write-off.

Now, it’s charging more than $80 for ancillary expenses at a free seminar on PDFs. (Don’t know if people from other newspapers, as this was an open seminar, got similar billing as what the person out of our office claims.)

Just remember: you want the most capitalistic business in America, just look at your local newspaper.

Another drawback to small-town papers

Someone with money and/or an “old family name” who thinks they can throw their weight around. If too much dealings with people like that, depending on a town’s collective “DNA,” is too much the price to pay, then I’m ready to move on past the “more healthy” small town papers out of journalism.

School newspaper leaned on over gay support

Another high school principal thinks the student newspaper is his puppet on a string. So he suspends the paper’s journalism teacher for two months for allowing
a gay support op-ed. It was even school-relevant, as the student author wrote about her friend coming out.

Biggest newspapers have a higher profit margin than Exxon!

If this advantage isn’t enough to stop the Big Media boo-hooing, or to lead them to go private or otherwise fight back against Wall Street, what will?

A typical newspaper with a 100,000 circulation makes a 15.6 percent annual pre-tax profit margin, according to Inland Daily Press Association and the International Newspaper Financial Executives. The Tribune Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and other media outlets, for example, operates on an 18.3 percent pre-tax profit margin. Gannett, which owns 90 newspapers in the U.S., including USA Today, operates on a 21.4 percent pre-tax profit margin. By comparison, Walmart Stores Inc. operates on a 5.4 percent pre-tax profit margin, while Exxon Mobil Corporation operates on a 17.9 percent pre-tax profit margin.

So, sorry, we’re not poor. The problem is stockholders still think this is the 1920s, and CEOs won’t fight back. Of course, many of them, if they have performance bonuses, have their bread buttered in a non-editorial way, anyway.

God, is the Chron’s telemarketing persistent, or what?

Thank doorknobs for caller ID, so I can just refuse to answer the phone whenever a 713 area code shows up. Even the Dallas Symphony Orchestra wasn’t this persistently annoying.

I do NOT want you, Houston Chronicle. I get the BCS Eagle for free at work. Besides, from everything I know, you’re even more in the way of conservative whackjobs on the op-ed page than the Snooze is.

Corporate “community” newspapers usually fall short on community financial involvement

Four of the five newspapers where I have worked have been corporately owned. The current one is part of Granite Publications, which owns 20 mostly non-daily newspapers. Skipping the Today group in Dallas, family-owned by the two co-bosses struggling to rub two nickels together at times. I was at Jacksboro, Texas owned by behemoth MediaNews; Hobbs, N.M., owned by a company out of Lake Charles, La., that owned about 20-25 daily and non-daily newspapers, and Bonham, Texas, then owned by Indian Nation Publishing (not an Indian-owned company) which owned about the same number of papers. Both the Hobbs and Bonham owners had fairly significant non-newspaper investments and ownerships as well, i.e., motels, retail, etc.

None of these newspaper companies, at the level of these local newspapers, has invested back into the communities where I work any significant charitable contributions.

And, I know the usual arguments.

“We do that by running your charity’s press releases and pictures for free.”

“We do so by being community-focused.”

And on the business side:

“If we said yes to one charity, we’d have to say yes to all and we can’t afford that.”

On the first two points, while PR is nice, it’s no substitute for cold, hard cash.

On the next, I have several comments.

First, no you don’t. You can pick and choose where to contribute, even if that may involve local feelings.

Second, who says you can’t afford it? You can if you keep the donation small enough. And, the symbolism of donating something can be priceless as far as community marketing, especially if it’s a donation related to, say, Black History Month.

Third, it’s a fricking tax write-off. It partially pays for itself.

The owner of my current newspaper group can have publishers/ad managers meeting every year, PLUS a separate one for managing editors, at his deer lodge/ranch 200 miles away from some of the papers in the group, in part to give himself a nice tax write-off. Don’t tell me he can’t do the same with a budget for charitable contributions.

And, while newspaper owners may argue about shrinking profit margins, they still do a lot better than many other businesses. And the small-town “community” papers are the ones least affected by circulation declines in the industry.

How to make a tidy additional tax write-off for your newspaper group or yourself as owner

1. Own a newspaper company. For “fleshing” out the story, let’s just pretend the headquarters is in central Texas. Let’s also pretend you own 20 papers at this time, mainly weeklies, all except two generally in central Texas.

2. Own a ranch in west-central to southwest-central Texas. Again, to flesh things out, let’s pretend it’s near Junction. (We don’t have enough fleshing-out information to specify whether the anonymous Mr. You personally owns this ranch, or if it officially belongs to your rock-solid newspaper company.)

3. Have mandatory company-wide staff meetings.

4. Have these meetings not only for publishers (a reasonable idea), but also for managing editors, and even for ad sales managers. Again, just fleshing the story out.

5. Have them all at your nice ranch in Junction, since it’s the off-season from your deer lodge leases out here.

6. Since it does have that lodge as part of it, make sure the meetings cover parts of two days, so your guests can stay overnight.

7. Complete your various IRS forms, sit back and feel a bit better.

Small town publishers

To me, this is one of the best examples of “big fish, small pond,” as to why many people want to be small-town publishers.

Along with that, why does a corporate newspaper group have individual publishers over weeklies less than 50 miles apart?

Boy, the Dallas media landscape changes

From the new company, and its publisher for the Collin County newspapers that were formerly the Star Group, it looks like it’ll be raining shoppers in north suburban Dallas. Might not be raining quite so many paid newspapers in the future.

As for the Aussie group buying the Waxahachie Daily Light and its parent company… haven’t heard anything about them. Just remember that Rupert Murdock came from Australia, though.

Wonder what will happen with the People group; continued expansion, or some sort of sale there, too?

More Belo self-serve suck-up, in spades

The top story in the Guide Live section of the Jan. 6 Snooze (I REFUSE to link to it), complete with six-column photo, is all about WFAA’s new studio?

Give me a fucking break. Hell would have to freeze over and Bob Mong find some cojones before we see similar about any other network station.

Ed Bark, be glad you’re out of there.

Once again, the Snooze's website sucks

The Dallas Morning News had a story Jan. 4 about Toyota passing DaimlerChysler in 2006 U.S. sales and joining the “Big Three.”

Went to the Snooze website. To the Biz section. The story, an AP story, ain’t there. Did a search. Didn’t show the story.