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.