Time vs Time on Sotomayor

Does Time magazine not have a managing editor anymore? Or has the Internet basically castrated the powers of such a person at what is theoretically a weekly newsmagazine?

At Time, Karen Tumulty says Sotomayor WILL get a tough Senate fight: “Indeed, a fight is a political inevitability.”

(Sidebar nutbarrery: Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network calling the current SCOTUS “liberal activist.”)

Anyway, in contradistinction to Tumulty, Time’s Mark Halperin predicts smooth sailing for Sotomayor.

So, which is it?

And, in a broader, more philosophical question, are more magazines of news and opinion going to become more like this – little more than quasi-freelancers under one roof?

Dallas Morning News hiring again?? WTF?

That’s about all I can say after seeing ads for a Dallas city hall reporter and a Dallas ISD reporter at Journalism Jobs, just two months after taking a meat axe to its editorial staff.

Sac Bee goes chickenshit on Cal voters op-ed

In the wake of California voters rejecting five budget-related referenda, the Sacramento Bee originally had a FANTASTIC house editorial spanking the voters’ collective tuchises. But then, top management at the Bee, apparently after a flood of calls and e-mails (interestingly, the Bee announced a few weeks ago its looking for an editorial page editor) got cold feet, pulled the original (the Bee has turned off Google Cache, but the idiots thought the whole world had, I guess), and substituted this limp drivel.

Don’t get me wrong. The California Legislature deserved a spanking too. But NOT at the expense of letting California voters off the hook. The Bee cravenly abdicated its editorial page responsibility and duty.

The original editorial did just that, telling California voters, in more words, they were 20-million plus credit card users now blaming the state for failing to rescue them from their own overcharging without paying for it.

Metered newspaper charges?

Amongst all the different ways to try to get people to pony up for reading newspapers, I hadn’t heard anybody mention the option “the New York Times is considering.

Basically, it’s something similar to your cell phone bill, or the way your ISP bill may have been in the past, or may still be today.

You buy an account with a limit, except in this case the limit will be pageviews or online words rather than minutes. As the story notes, setting the base rate price is key. If you set it right, and get enough people reading, you can charge pretty high “extra” fees.

Of course, the next question is what goes behind the paywall. Times Select flopped with its columnists, which was probably embarrassing to them.

I’d start with the Mag and the Review of Books. Narrowly focused audiences, more dedicated than average readers, even average Times readers.